Medieval Schools: Roman Britain to Renaissance England

by Nicholas Orme

A sequel to Nicholas Orme’s widely praised study, Medieval Children

Children have gone to school in England since Roman times. By the end of the middle ages there were hundreds of schools, supporting a highly literate society. This book traces their history from the Romans to the Renaissance, showing how they developed, what they taught, how they were run, and who attended them.

Every kind of school is covered, from reading schools in churches and town grammar schools to schools in monasteries and nunneries, business schools, and theological schools. The author also shows how they fitted into a constantly changing world, ending with the impacts of the Renaissance and the Reformation.

Medieval schools anticipated nearly all the ideas, practices, and institutions of schooling today. Their remarkable successes in linguistic and literary work, organizational development, teaching large numbers of people shaped the societies that they served. Only by understanding what schools achieved can we fathom the nature of the middle ages.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, British Literature, Medieval History, Education, Medieval

430 pages, Hardcover

First published August 24, 2006

About the author

A specialist in the Middle Ages and Tudor period, Nicholas Orme is an Emeritus Professor of History at Exeter University. He studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, and has worked as a visiting scholar at, among others, Merton College, Oxford, St John's College, Oxford, and the University of Arizona.

Reviews

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't quite read this book from cover to cover, but it isn't necessarily the type of book intended for cover-to-cover reading. It is the consummation of a scholarly career dedicated to the titular subject, and every page reveals how exhaustive and exacting Orme's work is. He has combed historical records for every shred of evidence about education in medieval England, and he has brought that information together into a united work, lapsing neither into over-generalizations nor constant hedging. Orme consistently maintains the scholarly boundaries that keep his work clear and factual. If it is in spots a bit dry or unsatisfying, his subject is more to blame than his writing. Medieval Schools is a compendium of its topic rather than a book built on a particular premise. This is both its strength and its weakness: It is an invaluable encyclopedia of information on medieval schooling, free from strong authorial bias; however, the information it contains tends to remain just information, never aspiring to be a story or to pointedly prick the reader's mind with theories that could present an overarching view of education in the Middle Ages.

[Diane · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book provides an overview of schooling in Britain from the late Roman Empire until the end of the Tudor Dynasty. It looks at how religious communities began providing schooling (first for them members, but also for local children), and how the Reformation upended many of the traditional arrangements. The author makes use of all the material he can find, although in many cases (particularly during the early years) records are scarce. It is a good introduction, but overall, I thought the topic was too broad, so the author was not able to give much in-depth information about any one period. It might have been better if he had written two volumes, one looking at the period before the Norman Conquest, and one looking at the later period. Still, it is a good introduction, and is well-researched/written.

[jesse]

dropped: 07 may 2013