This book provides a concise and engaging history of classical education in English schools, beginning in 1500 with massive educational developments in England as humanist studies reached this country from abroad; it ends with the headmastership of Thomas Arnold of Rugby School, who died in 1842, and whose influence on schools helped secure Latin and Greek as the staple of an English education. By examining the pedagogical origins of Latin and Greek in the school curriculum, the book provides historical perspective to the modern study of Classics, revealing how and why the school curriculum developed as it did. The book also shows how schools responded and adapted to societal needs, and charts social change through the prism of classical education in English schools over a period of 350 years. Teaching Classics in English Schools, 1500–1840 provides an overview and insight into the world of classical education from the Renaissance to the Victorians without becoming entrenched in the analytical in-depth interpretative questions which can often detract from a book’s readability. The survey of classical education within the pages of this book will prove useful for anyone wishing to place the teaching of Classics in its cultural and educational context. It includes previously unpublished material, and a new synthesis and analysis of the teaching of Classics in English schools. This will be the perfect reference book for those who teach classical subjects, in both schools and universities, and also for university students who are studying Classical Reception as part of their taught or research degree. It will also be of interest to many schools of older foundation mentioned in this book and to anyone with leanings towards the history of education or English social history.

This volume explores various perceptions, adaptations, and appropriations of Horace in the Early Modern age across textual, visual and musical media. It thus intends to advocate an interdisciplinary and multi-medial approach to the exceptionally rich and variegated afterlife of Horace.

Educating the Romantic Poets: Life and Learning in the Anglo-Classical Academy, 1770-1850 explores how the public and endowed grammar schools and the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge trained some of the most important writers, critics, and public figures of the Romantic period. These institutions are recognized here as intentional partners and are discussed collectively as the “Anglo-classical academy”. The book shows how they not only schooled students in “classics, maths, and divinity” but also in accepted social behaviours, cultural values, political beliefs, and literary tastes. In so doing, this academy gave shape to the literature and spirit of the age. By discussing the schools and the universities together and by focusing upon pedagogies and daily life as well as the texts and topics studied, this book shows as no other has done how writers and readers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries became such fluent linguists, skilled prosodists, and perceptive critics. As each chapter explores and comments upon the relational, intellectual, and cultural aspects of the Anglo-classical educational experience, it directs readers’ attention to the ways in which this information can be used to reread texts, reassess certain Romantics’ literary careers, and launch new lines of research.

"Published in association with BSECS, British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies"

Compiled by a team of experts in the field, this volume brings to view an array of Latin texts produced in British universities from c.1500 to 1700. It includes a comprehensive introduction to the production of Neo-Latin and Neo-Greek in the early modern university, the precise circumstances and broader environments that gave rise to it, plus an associated bibliography. 12 high-quality sections, each prefaced by its own short introduction, set forth the Latin (and occasionally Greek) texts and accompanying English translations and notes. Each section provides focused orientation and is arranged in such a way as to ensure the volume's accessibility to scholars and students at all levels of familiarity with Neo-Latin. Passages are taken from documents that were composed in seats of learning across the British Isles, in Oxford, Cambridge, Dublin, Edinburgh and St Andrews, and adduce a wide range of material from orations and disputational theses to collections of occasional verse, correspondence, notebooks and university drama. This anthology as a whole conveys a sense of the extent of Latin's role in the academy and the span of remits in which it was deployed. Far from simply offering a snapshot of discrete projects, the contributions collectively offer insights into the broader culture of the early modern university over an extended period. They engage with the administrative operations of institutions, pedagogical processes and academic approaches, but also high-level disputes and the universities' relationship with the worlds of politics, new science and intellectual developments elsewhere in Europe.

The story of King Lear seems to fill in the blank space separating the end of Oedipus Tyrannus and the beginning of Oedipus at Colonus. In both Oedipus at Colonus and the latter part of King Lear we are presented with an old man who was once a King and, following his expulsion from his kingdom on account of a crime or of an error, is turned into a ‘no-thing’. This happens in the time of the division of the kingdom, which is also the time of the genesis of intraspecific conflict and, consequently, of the end of the dynasty. This collection of essays offers a range of perspectives on the many common concerns of these two plays, from the relation between fathers and sons/daughters to madness and wisdom, from sinning and suffering to ‘being’ and ‘non-being’ in human and divine time. It also offers an overarching critical frame that interrogates questions of ‘source’ and ‘reception’, probing into the possible exchangeability of perspectives in a game of mirrors that challenges ideas of origin.