Francia­Recensio 2016/2
Frühe Neuzeit – Revolution – Empire (1500–1815)
Aysha Pollnitz, Princely Education in Early Modern Britain, Cambridge (Cambridge University Press) 2015, XVI–445 p. (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History), ISBN 978­1­107­03952­0, GBP 79,99.
rezensiert von/compte rendu rédigé par
Angela Schattner, Bremen
Aysha Pollnitz’ first book explores how humanist liberal education shaped (inadvertently) the way male and female royal children in Britain approached kingship and ruling from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. By gaining access to the schoolroom of Henry VIII, his successors and later James VI and I in Scotland, northern humanists transformed princely education in Britain fundamentally with an emphasis on rhetorical rather than military or administrative skills. One of Pollnitz main arguments developed throughout the book is that Erasmus, Buchanan and members of the Scottish parliament attempted to initiate political and religious reform through northern humanist education. The guided study of examples of good rule from antiquity and Christian behaviour from scripture was supposed to put a break on over­mighty monarchy by forming princes into morally superior Christian rulers who would abstain from vainglorious warfare. However, humanist liberal education did not exactly produce the results religious and political reformers had hoped for. Instead of producing docile students following their teachers’ ideologies 1, Pollnitz argues that their humanist education provided royal children with the knowledge and analytical skills to independently form their political and religious agendas and with the language and rhetorical skills to fight their case with the pen. Humanist liberal education gave princes the intellectual confidence and tools to extend their royal authority not only over their subjects’ bodies but also their souls and to formulate this authority in absolute terms.
With these arguments, Pollnitz places her research on princely education right in the middle of ongoing academic debates concerning the role of humanist education and rhetoric in early modern political thought and culture, the rulers’ roles in political and religious reforms and in the outbreak of the civil war as well as the nature of the Reformation and absolutism in Britain. Considering the breadth of research and the diversity of opinions regarding these matters, Pollnitz quite understandably does not attempt to engage in­depth with all these debates. Instead she focusses firmly on the persons of the royal heirs, their parents and educators, engaging in historic debate mainly where it concerns concrete evaluations of the personal education, piety, perception of kingship or character of her subjects of study. She nevertheless demonstrates a wide­ranging grasp of the secondary literature and new developments in research. Following recent studies on the impact of Anthony Grafton, Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities. Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth and Sixteenth­Century Europe, London 1986, p. XIV, 24, 155.
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humanist education on contemporary political thought and culture 2, she employs their close analysis of educational practice and emphasis on rhetoric although she only marginally discusses monarchs’ interactions with this political culture.
Pollnitz develops her argument in seven chapters organised chronologically based on the line of succession to the throne. In chapters 1 to 4 and 6 to 7, she develops four main case studies: Henry VIII, Edward VI, James VI and I and Charles I. All case studies are based on rich source materials and discuss in detail the biographies of the royal tutors, the rationale of their appointments, their religious and political ideas, their teaching curricula and methods and interrelate these with the skills and attitudes the royal students gained from their studies by analysing their school exercises and youthful writings and (where applicable) comparing them with their later political and religious writings. The case of Henry VIII is the most comprehensive with the first three chapters dedicated to his education (1), his idea of kingship (2) and religious thought (3) in relation to Erasmus’s writings of the Christian kingship and religiosity dedicated to his royal student. This pattern is repeated albeit more condensed in the following case studies. Through her close reading and comparing of curricula, writings, letters, exercises and annotations, she shows how the princes did or in Charles I case did not develop the literary and rhetorical skills to engage in the contemporary political culture. She also shows in how far the royal students absorbed, altered or in James’s case even reversed their teachers’ ideologies. By including the education provided to Henry VIII’s illegitimate first­born son Henry Fitzroy and Charles I’s elder brother Henry Stuart in chapters 2 and 7, Pollnitz adds another layer of comparison to evaluate the princes’ education. Chapter 5 provides another such case of comparison by discussing the different approach of humanist education provided to Tudor and Stuart female heirs to the throne. Comparing the education of Mary Stuart with her granddaughter Elizabeth’s and the education of Mary I, Elizabeth I and Jane Grey, Pollnitz argues that apart from Jane Grey none of the women were brought up to rule. Rather the princesses received a feminised version of humanist education with an emphasis on pious translation, omitting the training in (religious) disputation their brothers and Mary Stuart’s fiancé received. The different education was meant to form learnt princesses who would be assets in the marriage market but who would not be serious threats to the male line of succession. It also left them, so Pollnitz, ill­prepared to debate religious doctrine as sovereigns; leading, for example, to Elizabeth I’s strategy to mute and diffuse such debates during her reign. The similar structure of the case studies makes them easy to compare but makes the reading seemingly repetitive at times.
Some of Pollnitz’s conclusions offer only minor re­evaluations of already existing interpretations: For 2
To name just a few: Quentin Skinner, Reason and rhetoric in the philosophy of Hobbes, Cambridge, New York 1996; David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic. Poetry, Rhetoric, and Politics, 1627–1660, Cambridge, New York 1999; Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric. Theory and Practice, Cambridge, New York 2002 (Ideas in Context, 63); Markku Peltonen, Rhetoric, Politics, and Popularity in Pre­Revolutionary England, Cambridge, New York 2013.
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example, her interpretation of Henry VIII’s use of Erasmus’s writings as rhetorical hi­jacking rather than real Erasmian transformation, the more active role she grants the king in developing the rhetorical strategies used by his propagandists, her conclusion that James’s account of divine kingship was a rebellion against George Buchanan’s ideas of republican kingship and right of resistance to tyrants, or the incomplete humanist education of Elizabeth I and Charles I as explanations for her muting of religious issues with parliament and his communicative short­comings might add new details to well­
discussed subjects but do not really alter existing interpretations. Historians of the reformation and the war of the three kingdoms might also miss some broader conclusions on and contextualisation in reformation and pre­civil war political culture. The real value of Pollnitz’s well written study rather lies in her careful analysis of methods and practises in male and female elite education and the transfer of knowledge and skills it allowed. Her contextualised, comparative reading of humanist teachers’ and royal students’ writings, based on rich manuscript materials, shows convincingly the transfer, re­use or opposing of ideas. Even though her often exclusive focus on teacher­student relations does at times not convincingly explain extreme variances in ideas such as in James I’s case. This study will appeal to scholars of political and humanist thought, court studies, childhood and education alike. It adds a rich account to the surprisingly understudied topic of aristocratic and home­based education in early modern Britain and a dense longue durée perspective on changing ideas of kingship to the history of political thought.
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