Richard Mulcaster's Positions Concerning the Training up of Children 9781487578336

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RICHARD MULCASTER

Positions Concerning the Training Up of Children

RICHARD MULCASTER

Positions Concerning the Training Up of Children

~ edited by William Barker

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 1994 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada Reprinted in 2018 ISBN

Cr8o20-2987-6

ISBN 978-1-4875-7906-7 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Mulcaster,Richard,1530?-1611 Positions concerning the training up of children Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN

Cr8o2er2987-6

1. Education - Early works to 18oo. Barker, William (William Watson), 194611. Title.

1.

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

~Contents

Preface

I vii

Introduction / xi 1

Positions / xiii

2

The Style of Positions / xlv

3 Richard Mulcaster / lix 4 Date and Text/ lxxix

Positions Concerning the Training Up of Children I 1 Textual Notes and Variants/ 295 Commentary / 305 Bibliography / 457 Index/ 493

ea,Preface

Positions Concerning the Training Up of Children - to use Richard Mulcaster's own short title - is a thoughtful book that argues for changes in the education of Elizabethan England. It was written to its own historical moment, and in the introduction to this edition I have sketched out some of the main issues in Renaissance education as we perceive them today. Some readers have found the style of Positions obscure or inelegant; I have also in the introduction tried to explain how the stylistic method expresses a politics of education. And I have given a short life of the author, concentrating on his work as a teacher and writer at the time he wrote this book. There is a dimension to Positions other than its purely 'historical' importance. Many working teachers have been drawn to this book for the way it addresses a perennial classroom problem. Like most books on education, Positions is utopian in impulse. Yet Mulcaster struggles with this utopianism. He argues throughout for 'certaintie' or 'one right waye' in education. Yet at the same time he argues for a careful attention to the specific 'circumstances' of the conditions of schooling. Of course, these 'circumstances' - the details and compromises of daily life always conflict with 'certaintie.' So there is an unresolved tension in Positions. On the one hand, there is a striving towards an ideal system and, on the other, there is a recognition of the messiness of the everyday. Though Mulcaster is alert to the problems of his own ideological situation and speaks repeatedly of the kind of learning and teaching required of the subject in a monarchy, his emphasis on 'circumstances' leads him away from the absolute uniformity he espouses from the very first pages onwards. Ultimately, what seems so interesting in Positions is this struggle to balance the claims of uniformity and order with the conditions of the moment. Mulcaster's book is ambitious-far more, in its way, than the better-known Scholemaster of Roger Ascham.

viii Preface

This _is the first edition of Positions based on a full consideration of the textual evidence. This is more than a straightforward reprint of the 1581 edition. Such a reprint already exists. In 1887 a teacher and historian of education named Robert Hebert Quick sent a copy of the 1581 Positions to a printer and simply had the book typeset; to this he added a short afterword. This widely distributed text became the standard edition for modem readers who wished to read the book and had no access to the old text in a scholarly library. But Quick's edition did not take into account something that scholars have long known about early printed books: namely that printers then regularly sold all the printed sheets together, so that an old book is a mix of corrected and uncorrected gatherings. My work has been to consult as many copies of the book as possible and to compare them in detail, looking for changes. Thus, on page 69, line 23, of this edition you will find the phrase 'natural heat.' In all but one of the twenty-seven copies of the book that I consulted, the passage reads 'natural health.' In Mulcaster's vocabulary of medicine, the phrase makes no sense. But 'natural heat' does make sense and that was how the phrase was corrected by the printer, probably quite late in production. Quick's edition does not show this correction. This is a small point, of course, but it is representative. For this edition I have tried to take into account a broader range of evidence than have editors in the past. At the end of my introduction, I explain the editorial procedures in greater detail. I have retained the old spelling of the original, despite an increasing tendency among present-day editors to modernize. Although the spelling for non-specialist readers may seem to be very eccentric and at times initially confusing (where 'to' can also mean 'too' or 'two,' or 'too' can be spelled 'two'), old spelling often reveals meaning through puns and other devices of rhetoric (in one of Mukaster's favourite wordplays, 'travell' means 'travel' and 'travail' at the same time). Rather than erase this playfulness of language, I have instead tried to explain how it works in my introduction and commentary, where I provide a literary and historical context to the work. For a work that is so concerned with 'circumstances' this context is especially important. Of course no reader will be entirely satisfied with the commentary. In one of his essays (3.13), Montaigne describes how he always stumbles over the passages that the commentator never annotated, that were supposed to be obvious. A modern edition is in many ways unlike the artefact of the past. It serves - one hopes - not to entomb the older text within a fixed and final form, but to mediate between the textual practice of the past and the needs of readers of the present. For readers of the future, a digital version of the Mulcaster text (but not my introduction and commentary)

ix Preface

is available at the Oxford University Text Archive. During the preparation of this published form of my work, I received assistance from many individuals. My most grateful thanks go to William Blissett, James Butrica, David Carlson, Patricia Cavanagh, Jacqueline Cousin, J.M. Davie, Richard DeMolen, Nancy Earle, Jean Guthrie, AC. Hamilton, John Henderson, Natalie Johnson, James McConica, Randall (M)(c)L(e)(o/ou)d, Frank Mantello, the late Peter Marinelli, Craig Monk, Jeff Monk, Peggy Ann Parsons, Mark Philpott, Kurt Pritzl, Erika Rummel, Andrew Skinner, William Stoneman, George Story, Sr Geraldine Thompson, Frank Tompa, Fred Unwalla, Sharon Wall, John Warden, Germaine Warkentin, Peter Wegemer, and two anonymous readers for University of Toronto Press. Yet I wish above all to thank Desmond Neill, who, as an advisor and reader, helped me in many ways during a difficult time. Mulcaster has already dedicated Positions to Elizabeth 1. I dedicate my work on this edition to Mr Neill; word for word, he comes out about even with the first recipient of the book, though he will note his share is generally set in smaller type. I am grateful to scores of librarians at dozens of libraries, chiefly the Bodleian Library, the British Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Robarts Library of the University of Toronto (especially Mr Albert Masters and the Count). The Vice-President's Research Fund of Memorial University of Newfoundland gave assistance for the revision of the work, and at an earlier time I received support from American Associates of the University of Toronto, from A.G.S. Griffin, and from Mrs W.J. Veitch. At University of Toronto Press, the late Prudence Tracy encouraged me to submit the book and I am thankful for her support; Suzanne Rancourt helped the book along; Beverly Johnston provided invaluable support; and Judy Williams corrected a number of inconsistencies, for which I am especially grateful. In an unusual arrangement with University of Toronto Press, Matthew Church and I typeset this book (following the specifications of the publisher), and I am grateful for Matthew's informed enthusiasm. Babs and Evan Church provided a pleasant home for our cottage industry. For always encouraging me, while engaged herself in work of greater magnitude, I thank my wife, Elizabeth Church. Anthony, Madeleine, Lucy, and Elinor have each, in his or her own way, been amused or bored with their father, and old Mulcaster in his various manifestations. William Barker St John's, Newfoundland

INTRODUCTION

1

Positions

Richard Mulcaster's Positions Concerning the Training Up of Children is one of the best-known English treatises on education from the latter half of the sixteenth century. At the time of publication (1581), Mulcaster was headmaster of Merchant Taylors' School, the largest school in London. Positions expresses some of the frustration he felt with the condition of schools and schooling at the time. Because of its deeply political orientation, the book serves also, and more importantly, as an introduction to the ideological debates over pedagogy in the English Renaissance. From early in the century, under the new order of Tudor education, many schools were founded or refounded under secular patronage. A stricter classical curriculum, brought to England by humanist reformers, was now available to a cross-section of the population that increasingly included the gentry or well born as well as those of poorer background. Of course, most people in England worked in agriculture and manual trades and in absolute numbers few young men ever went to school. Nevertheless, the educational opportunity was considerable. There was informal instruction by local clerics, educated relatives, village dames, and c:>thers who taught reading and writing to youngsters in their community. And there was a wide, and expanding, network of local grammar schools for older boys to begin their training in Latin, under masters who were often graduates of Oxford and Cambridge. This grammar school education had by the 158os become stable, though not yet what we today would call a system, for the schools were all locally run and the curricula subject to the interests of their founders, supporters, and teachers. Yet despite its many restrictions (especially for women), formal education was surprisingly open: proportionally more boys were then in school than in the eighteenth or even nineteenth centuries.I The educational resources of the country expanded because of a range of social pressures. For the religious community, guided in the early years of Elizabeth's reign by a small number of enthusiastic Protes-

xiv Introduction

tant reformers, widespread education and literacy were means for a direct encounter with God's Holy Word - and a way of ensuring uniformity of doctrine. For those in secular power, state control could be enforced by education if it could to a certain extent be regularized and directed centrally; that this control was to be increased through the religious hierarchy through the licensing of schools and schoolmasters reflected the intimate relations between politics and religion. And for the commoners who founded many of the schools, who sent their children to them, who themselves (by the end of the reign) may have been taught in them, the schools provided access to a social order which placed a new premium on classical learning for prestige or for practical affairs of government or church. Behind the changes in the schools and their expansion lies a whole cluster of historical changes in the English economy, status, and organization of government, as well as in cultural fashion. · Mukaster writes to this shifting and conflicted moment in English social history. His work is a struggle to make sense of what is taking place, a series of proposals that argue for a more systematic development of the institutional and curricular structure. Around him, Muicaster sees a lack of order in the way schools are organized locally and the way the young proceed through them at the whim or self-interest of the parents. The 'positions' (posited statements for discussion or argument) are intended to introduce a much longer work of many volumes outlining a formal institutional education from the child's beginning at the elementary school possibly up to his completion of grammar school.2 This longer work was to have included detailed analyses of curriculum and pedagogical technique. Mukaster completed only one subsequent volume, The First Part of the Elementarie (1582), and how many more parts he had in mind is never made explicit. From what we do have, however, we can see the completed edifice would have been vast, even grander than the Institutes of the great Roman teacher Quintilian, whose work seems to have inspired him. In Positions Mukaster presents a general outline of his principles, gives a close discussion of physical education, and discusses aspects of institutional structure. In the Elementarie he begins with an outline of his 'elementary' program and proceeds directly to a highly detailed analysis of 'right writing' (or orthography). Thus, in these two books, he takes us from a preliminary discussion of schooling in the broadest terms to a detailed outline of English spelling, and in nearly six hundred pages presents matter Quintilian handles in only fifty. Positions is above all a book of advice. Though these 'postulates or preliminary maxims' (as C.S. Lewis has defined the title)3 arise out of

xv Positions contemporary practice, they are an introduction to what the author would like to see happen in the schools, presented in the particular style of a deliberative orator. Mukaster touches on an extraordinary range of specific topics in the midst of his more general reflections on society and education. He comments on the age of the pupil's entry to school, the parents' role in teaching manners and morals, the location of school buildings, the use of the left and right hands in the young, the advantage of anthologies of the classics in the classroom, the personal qualities needed of the teacher, and so on. Indeed, for readers interested in Elizabethan education, these asides on the details of curriculum and behaviour may be the most attractive parts of the book. Yet ultimately, all of the wide range of comments on many aspects of schooling bear down on a single proposition, the most significant of his positions, which is that uniformity and the pre-eminence of the state lie at the heart of any educational theory. As he says to Elizabeth at the beginning, 'the very ende of my whole labour ... is to helpe bring the generall teaching in your Majesties dominions to some one good and profitable uniformitie' (4.37-5.2). UNIFORMITY

For Mukaster, education is a branch of politics, and all learning is directed ultimately to the public good: 'Education is the bringing up of one, not to live alone, but amongst others, (bycause companie is our naturall cognisaunce) whereby he shall be best able to execute those doings in life, which the state of his calling shall employ him unto, whether publike abrode, or private at home, according unto the direction of his countrie whereunto he is borne and oweth his whole service' (186.13-19). In Elementarie he reminds the reader that 'publik use ... is the naturall use of all learning' (sig B2v). The state should have the power to control all learning, direct the individual into particular callings, even indeed control the private desires of the citizen (145.3off). 4 In his emphasis on the political nature of education, Mukaster follows Plato (Republic and Laws 7), Aristotle (Politics 7 and 8), and Xenophon (Cyropaedia), each of whom sees education as subordinate to the interests of the state, no matter if democracy, oligarchy, or monarchy. Acquiescence to central authority is, of course, especially necessary in a monarchy. Thus, for Mulcaster, one of the chief signs of a child's aptness to learn is his capacity to submit to commands and punishment: 'That child therefore is like to prove in further yeares, the fittest subject for learning in a monarchie, which in his tender age sheweth himselfe

xvi Introduction

obedient to scholeorders, and eitheir will not lightly offend, or if he do, will take his punishment gently: without either much repyning, or great stomaking' (154.21-5). The classroom is a monarchy in parvo, as is emphasized a number of times: 'is not his maister his monarche? and the scholelawes his country lawes?' (155.2er-1). Indeed, 'the rod may no more be spared in schooles, then the sworde may in the princes hand' (270.2-3). Mulcaster emphatically argues for the importance of the state. In his consistently secular view, he is unlike other Elizabethan pedagogical writers, who present themselves as concerned principally with the Christian faith. Of the 'three speciall pointes' to which Ascham writes his Scholemaster, 'trothe of Religion' precedes 'honestie in Living' and 'right order in learning.' Likewise, Gnomasticus, the schoolmaster in Gascoigne's Glasse of Governement, teaches his boys that their 'first chapter and lesson shall then be, that in all your actions you have an especiall eye and regard to almighty God.' In his Education of Children William Kempe divides educational history into three eras, calling his own the 'Schoole of Christianitie' which 'was not onely instituted by the authoritie of our gratious God, but also the first Doctor therein was his only deere Sonne our Saviour Jesus Christ.'s Such beliefs are echoed by almost every other English writer of the period except Mulcaster, who strictly separates the orders of nature and grace, and chooses nature as the proper sphere of education. At one point he declares that 'the end of our being here is to serve God and our country' (132.5--6) but elsewhere he modifies the claim. For Mulcaster, God is 'the Lorde of nature, which created that motion to continue the consequence of all living creatures' (173.24-5). Yet God's ways are mysterious and unknowable: 'probabilities be our guides' (145.20). The secular quality of his approach is best seen in his definition in the peroration of Elementarie of the 'end of everie particular mans doings.' Here, following Aristotle, he claims that 'everie privat man traveleth in this world to win rest after toil, to have ease after labor' (sig 2F4v). For Mulcaster, the end of doing and hence of learning is 'rest.' We may contrast this view with Milton's famous declaration in his tract Of Education: 'The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him.'6 Milton attempts to bring learning and faith together; Mulcaster appears content to keep them apart. Of course Mulcaster cannot remain entirely secular in his views; in Elementarie, for instance, he explains that 'Christianism maie furnish the matter, tho prophanism yeild the form' of learning in school (sig B1v)

xvii Positions

and in a short passage speaks of bringing the child 'unto Christ' (sig C4r). His two later textbooks, the Catechismus Paulinus (1599?) and the Cato Christianus (1600), promised in Elementarie (sig G4r), are both oriented toward the state religion and suggest that the secularity of Positions and Elementarie is part of a theoretical stance. Perhaps we may account for the lack of direct emphasis on religion as Mulcaster's attempt to remove religious factionalism from the arena of educational debate. Religious life in England was an unsettled mixture of radical Puritanism, barely suppressed Catholicism, and a state religion which we now call Anglicanism. For each faith a different form of education was appropriate. By separating education and religion, Mulcaster neatly avoided aloaded issue, while still promoting the central authority of the state. Of course, to a Puritan or Roman Catholic, strong endorsement of uniform state control of education would be seen as an acceptance of the Elizabethan settlement in religion. THE SOUL

Though Mulcaster favours the public over the private in education, he does not limit his discussion solely to problems of administration and curriculum, but here and there attempts to acquaint his reader with some explanation of the working of the learner's mind. His psychology follows the conventional Aristotelian theories, although certain of the terms to describe the process of learning (such as 'nature' and 'art') may have come to him through the standard educational or, more strictly speaking, rhetorical works of Cicero, Quintilian, and their humanist inheritors.7 Mulcaster's psychology begins with the division of body and soul, in which the soul is 'the fountaine of life, and the quickner of the bodie' (51.25) and 'in nature more absolute, and in value more precious' than the body (38.22-3). He does not explore the nature of the soul in its relation to God (except at one point where he recommends the 'Divine' as the best doctor for the soul [129.22ff]) or as it exists prior and subsequent to the body. Such theological issues were of great importance to Renaissance theorists such as Vives and Melanchthon who had provided relatively recent syntheses of classical psychology with Christian doctrine.s Instead, he holds closely to the more strictly Aristotelian notion of the 'natural' soul as it is known in relation to the body. In Aristotle's treatise On the Soul, the soul is the informing principle of the body, 'the first actuality of a natural body possessed of organs,' and although the soul is not actual substance, 'it is substance in the sense of formula,'9 in other

xviii Introduction

words substance as idea. Aristotle shows at length how the soul may receive information through the senses, so that it is capable of being influenced by physical events, just as it in tum influences the body. Mulcaster agrees with this principle of reciprocity: 'The soule and bodie ... having generally a common sympathie, and a mutuall feeling in all passions: how can they be, or rather why should they be severed in traine?' (51.8-11).1° Education should instruct the entire being, body and soul, though like his predecessors Elyot and Ascham, Mulcaster gives greater emphasis to the training of the soul (ie, the intellect). Despite his unwillingness to linger over the definition of the soul and its divisions ('meane I not to make any anatomie, or resolution of the soule his partes and properties' 38.2~30), the whole of Mulcaster's pedagogical theory rests on a single assumption, that the soul may indeed be taught. According to Aristotle, the transmission of knowledge is through the senses via the imagination (phantasia) to the mind, which receives the information into memory where it is examined and acted upon by the senses of opinion and intellect.n In his Elementarie Mulcaster follows this analysis closely: 'we have also a perceiving by outward sense to fele, to hear, to se, to smell, to tast all sensible things, which qualities of the outward, being received in by the common sense, and examined by fantsie, ar delivered to remembrance and afterward prove our great and onelie grounds unto further knowledge' (sig D4v). The soul, then, is not a passive receptacle of knowledge, but has the innate capacity to perform tasks of 'understanding beyond sense, of judging by reason' (sig Etr). The act of learning is both the receipt of the information and the exercise of the understanding and reason upon it. And education is the training of the mental functions: 'those abilities in their first naturall kinde concern but the being of a rude man, but when theie ar fashioned to their best by good education, theie procure the being of a perfit and an excellent man' (sig Etr). Now what is needed for 'good education'? According to Mulcaster, two things: 'naturall abilities' and 'artificiall principles.' The former are those qualities 'which natur planteth in our mindes and bodies' (sig D3r). 'Artificiall principles' are the rules of art, the ordering principles, which act to 'take sure hold of all naturall inclinations and abilities, and bring them to perfection' (sig D3v). The pupil brings to his education his 'natural abilities,' which are acted upon by 'artificiall principles'; art makes manifest the universals inherent in the learner's nature. If the nature of the child is not apt, or if the art of the master is wanting (that is, it does not match the nature of the child), then there will be no improvement of mind. Finally, to secure the fruitful combination of nature and

xix Positions

art, a third quality - 'practice' or 'habit' - is needed. Education must be 'confirmed by use, perfited with continewance, which crouneth the hole work' (sig E1v). 'Nature,' 'art,' and 'habit' or 'use' are terms conventionally mentioned together in the educational doctrine of classical and Renaissance writers. Plato is perhaps the earliest to give expression to this tripartite theory of learning. In the Phaedrus, Socrates claims that 'to become a perfect orator ... is probably, perhaps must be dependent on conditions, like everything else. If you are naturally rhetorical, you will become a notable orator when to your natural endowments [physis] you have added knowledge [episteme] and practice [melete]; at whatever point you are deficient in these you will be incomplete.' Aristotle in his analysis of education in book 7 of the Politics likewise stresses the need for 'nature, habit and reason [physis, ethos, logos].' These same terms appear in Cicero, Quintilian, the pseudo-Plutarchan essay 'On the Education of Children,' Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, Mapheus Vegius, Johann Sturm, and Peter Ramus. They are the cornerstone of Erasmus' pedagogical psychology in the De pueris instituendis, where natura, ratio, and usus must be in perfect harmony: 'Nature is realized only through method, and practice, unless it is guided by the principles of method, is open to numerous errors and pitfalls.' These three terms are found in English writers too, either as a brief commonplace in More, Cheke, and Sidney, or more elaborately, as in Ascham's Toxophilus, where 'aptness,' 'knowledge,' and 'use' are developed into a full theory of education.12 Mulcaster is making use of an important commonplace when he says: 'the end of education, and train is to help natur unto hir perfection, which is, when all hir abilities be pirfited in their habit, whereunto right Elements [ie, the parts of the elementary program that comprise the 'art'] be right great helps' (sig D2v). Most often, though, he omits 'habit,' and in Positions especially we note that for him education is primarily bipolar, consisting of 'nature' and 'nurture' (or 'art'). These two aspects of learning are proverbial, English Renaissance proverbs (coming from the Latin) declaring that 'nature surpasses nurture' or 'nurture surpasses nature';13 as is common with many proverbs, the meaning is found more in the opposition of the two terms than in the actual precedence of one over the other. If education consists of nature and art, then the nature of the learner must be closely examined in the same way as the art of the curriculum, so that the two may fit together well. Mulcaster offers his readers few specific signs by which a child's academic aptness could be noted. His contemporaries were perfectly aware that great differences existed

xx Introduction among children; Montaigne put the problem most wittily when he recommended for the unresponsive pupil, 'qu'on le mette patissier dans quelque bonne ville, fust-il fils d'un due, suivant le precepte de Platon qu'il faut colloquer les enfans non selon les facultez de leur pere, mais selon les facultez de leur ame.' 14 A bold attempt was made by Juan Huarte de Navarro, Spanish author of The Examination of Mens Wittes (1575; translated 1594), to sort out the particular qualities of mind needed for different intellectual tasks. Although Mulcaster is sensitive to the differences among pupils ('some be hastinges and will on, some be hardinges, and draw backe' 31.24-5), his method of differentiating abilities is presented in general terms. In Elementarie (sig B4r) he lists the character traits necessary for learning: intelligence ('sharpnesse of wit to perceive soon'); perseverance ('an invincible and laborious courage to go thorough with al paines'); curiosity ('a desire to be asking, and demanding of others'); capacity for work ('Never to be idle, but ever well occupied, tho it be in plaie'); memory ('a fast memorie to kepe well, and a good foresight to continew it well'). He especially dwells on the student's sense of shame and 'vertew' (sig Cir), effectively moving from intellectual abilities to moral (and political) malleability and docility. Chapter 37 of Positions especially stresses the suitability and circumstances of the individual child to continue on in school. Nor does he forget the physical strength of the child: in Positions he classifies the types of pupils in four categories, weak body with weak mind, weak body with strong mind, strong body with weak mind, and (inevitably most 'worthy the wishing') 'a strong witte, in as strong a bodie' (33.11). Such attempts to define the qualities of the student recall Ascham's 'seven plaine notes to choise a good witte in a childe for leaminge,' borrowed in large part from Plato, that offer a similar reading of the learner's psychology.15 There is, however, an important point in Mulcaster not made so emphatically by Ascham: that a child not be rushed into school at the earliest possible age and that more of the child than his intellectual capacity be considered. Yet Mulcaster may be less interested in the individual psychology of the child than he is in the politics of that psychology. He has set out to tell the Queen and his other readers which children shall be allowed to move on in schools, and which ones shall be refused the benefits of formal schooling. Those who are not 'apt' or receptive to learning are not to continue on. As a practising schoolmaster, Mulcaster is aware that individual difference and the practical politics of their situation must be acknowledged by parents and teachers. Certain types are just not cut out for schooling. In both Positions and Elementarie he argues that all must

xxi Positions

accede to the central authority of the monarchical state, and his rudimentary psychology is a means for achieving a harmony between the private and the public. In both works he articulates a public 'art' that is to take precedence over the private 'nature' of the pupil. THE ELEMENT ARY

Thus, though he acknowledges the importance of 'nature,' Mulcaster's two books are principally about 'art,' the methodical program of teaching. Positions is the analysis of the social and political framework of this program; Elementarie is the beginning of a long and closely detailed description of the program that he would like to see uniformly established in the schools. Because Positions looks ahead to this program and refers to it repeatedly, we should consider it here. The elementary curriculum (described in chapters 5 of Positions and 11 of Elementarie) is meant for children up to about the age of twelve, and is in five parts - reading, writing, drawing, music for voice, and music for instrument. Reading is the 'first and fairest principle' (41.25). It is to precede grammar and begins with English, not Latin, for English reading 'is most naturall to our soile, and most proper to our faith' (42.4-5) and has the added .benefit of being more difficult than Latin reading and therefore a better training.16 Writing comes riext, when the child is physically capable of holding the pen; again, is is better 'to write English before Latin, as a thing of more hardnesse' (45.2er1); by this Mulcaster means the child is to learn English secretary before an Italic script. 'Writing' has a secondary sense as well; it is orthography as well as penmanship. The Elementarie treats of 'right writing' or standardized orthography as a preliminary to reading; in the work Mulcaster sets down certain basic principles followed by a list of some eight thousand spellings. As elsewhere in his educational theory, he attempts in his orthography to mediate between a systematic ideal and the haphazard practice; following Quintilian, 'reason' and 'custom' are the two poles between which his theory is situated. The remaining three subjects, drawing and the two kinds of music, are barely touched on in the two treatises. If he had continued his work, however, he would have written extensively about them. In regard to drawing, for instance, we have a letter to the Dutch geographer Abraham Ortelius in which Mulcaster, perhaps showing off a bit, mentions that he owns what he calls Diirer's De humani corporis fabrica libri quatuor and a Vitruvius edited by Daniele Barbaro, and that he has consulted Pliny the Elder, Polydore Vergil, Caelius Rhodiginus, Aelian, Quintilian,

xxii Introduction

'et eius generis autores omnes' (and all other authors of the kind). He now desires of Ortelius information of other books not yet known to him 'in qua voles lingua' (in whatever language you wish). 17 This is an impressive enough list for a subject normally considered to be a manual art. Mulcaster sees drawing less as a vocational skill, however, than as a part of a child's general education in 'the proportion and seemelines of all aspectable thinges' (46.2-3), though (and this is where he and a writer for gentlemen like Elyot part company), 'if any dexterity that waye do draw the child on, it is an honest ~ans living' (46.34~). 18 Music, likewise, is a 'double principle both for the soule, by the name of learning, and for the body, by the waye of exercise' (48.14-15). The form of this 'elementary' is, as Mulcaster acknowledges, drawn mainly from books 7 and 8 of Aristotle's Politics and from the first two books of Quintilian's Institutes. Even so, the program he proposes would not have been foreign to the contemporary education of England. Reading, writing, and music were traditional subjects of the medieval and Tudor schools.19 This is the standard curriculum too of Elyot's young governor. Mulcaster's unusual approach comes in his desire to see the program institutionalized for all children, independent of status and sex, and brought under the control of the state. This 'elementary' will become established through laws, more thorough regulation of teachers, standardized texts and curricula, and, most important, the universal obedience of all citizens in education to the authority of the state. THE BODY

Many English writers before Mulcaster had included physical education in their curricula. Elyot enthusiastically recommended a full range of sports for the governor. Ascham's scholarly Toxophilus argued that archery is good for both body and soul of the archer. In the interpenetrating worlds of fiction and actual practice, the 'shepherd-knight' Astrophel (Sir Philip Sidney) was accounted to be expert in field sports: 'wrestling nimble ... renning swift ... shooting steddie,' and above all hunting.20 By the early Stuart period there were many books about fencing, swim.ming, hunting, hawking, riding, and so on, all directed to the young gentleman, or would-be gentleman.21 Standard schoolbooks took notice of sports for children; the dialogues of Erasmus, Cordier, and Vives all have sections on sports. 22 Unlike most earlier and contemporary writers, who consider sports to be extra-curricular in that they are normally unconnected with the formal academic curriculum, Mulcaster wishes them to be brought within

xxiii Positions

the school. In his long section on physical education, Mulcaster looks at what he calls sports for 'within