There was a lot of money to be made out of publishing Latin texts and textbooks during the early modern period. As Ian Green reports, the lucky individual who secured the royal patent to print and distribute copies of ‘Lily’s Grammar’ (very much the default primer throughout Tudor and Stuart England) could look forward to an income comparable to that of a small bishopric. Not surprisingly, there was fierce competition to secure the rights to other texts. Some — grammars and dictionaries, for instance — were often within the royal gift but many others were up for grabs. Here, the Stationers’ Company in London led the field, securing monopolies on books that sold in their tens of thousands of copies. There was an avid readership, especially among the unlettered middling sort. Consequently, the era saw something of an explosion of classical works in translation: as Green reveals, Ovid and Cicero routinely outsold Calvin. The staple market for all publishers of classical wares, however, was the schoolroom, most notably, the grammar schools where, for six or seven years, the children (always just the boys) of the gentry, the yeomanry and the buoyant mercantile elite struggled with their declensions and conjugations.

Green’s book takes us inside this world. He explores the habits of teachers and the texts that students pored over, and (with an eye to broader interpretation) he explores the impact of the era’s two great cultural arrivals (Humanism and Protestantism) on English educational practice. So far as the nuts and bolts are concerned there are some interesting conclusions. The number of copies that flooded from the presses was extraordinary but the catalogues were remarkably static. From the late-sixteenth to the early-eighteenth century there was hardly any alteration in the range of set texts. This was not necessarily a sign of stagnation, however: more an indication that early modern schools (while relatively independent of royal and ecclesiastical influence) had a habit of emulating each other. Also, one of the aims of such schools was to send boys up to Oxford and Cambridge and the entrance requirements of these institutions (levels of proficiency, etc) were more or less constant over the entire period. If the system was not broken there was little sense in trying to fix it.

As for the role of religion in these schools, here we enter more contentious territory. Until quite recently there was an assumption that ‘the Godly’ were in the vanguard of educational experiment and expansion. Green challenges this notion and suggests that the vast majority of schoolmasters were unexceptional, conformist folk. Moreover, the undoubted growth in the grammar school enterprise was often funded and supported by those of conservative religious sensibilities. This did not mean, however, that religion played anything less than a pivotal role in such schools. Green provides ample evidence that religious and devotional practices (Bible-reading, catechizing, daily prayers, and quizzes on the latest sermon in the local church) were of the utmost importance.

Green’s book will reinvigorate the study of early modern English grammar schools (a subject that has become rather unfashionable in recent years). It combines close research with telling comparisons between the English and continental educational milieus and, on the English side of the channel, it spends most of its time exploring the less well-studied but no less interesting provincial schools. The future of educational history undoubtedly lies with detailed studies such as this and Green’s book is comparable in its importance to Peter Mack’s Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge, 2002). It also reminds us that both the Humanism and the Protestantism of the book’s title were multifaceted, constantly shifting phenomena. Studying the coal faces of their cultural impact is a fine idea and the grammar school is an excellent place to start digging.