Ian Green's Humanism and Protestantism in Early Modern English Education, based on his Waynflete Lectures given at Oxford in 2006, is an ambitious supplement to his three-part series on the teaching of Protestantism in Early Modern England, which includes The Christian's ABC: Catechisms and Catechizing in England c. 1530–1740 (Oxford, 1996), Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2001), and the forthcoming third volume, Word, Image, and Ritual in Early Modern English Protestantism. In this volume Green again employs his signature method of painstakingly combing the Short Title Catalog and Stationers’ Company records to survey publications intended for the education of youth at grammar schools from the early sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, including Latin and Greek textbooks, handbooks and guides for rhetoric and composition, and handbooks for teachers themselves, in order to gauge the influence of “humanism” as an educational program on the form of Protestantism that emerged in England. Chapters explore the use of Latin and the extent of religious content in the lower and upper forms of grammar school education, as well as the early years of undergraduate study, in comparison to the curricula and methods employed in both Protestant and Catholic schools and academies on the Continent. As in the two previous works, Green examines “best sellers” and “steady sellers” in the textbook market, attempting to understand why some texts sold better than others of a similar genre. Green's description of the market forces surrounding the book trade—the complex interaction between consumer demand, authorial innovation, and publishing monopolies—is exceptionally detailed and exhaustively researched, and the depth of his analysis of the individual texts is impressive.

While Green's revision of the received history of grammar school education is long overdue and very welcome, the conclusions, while persuasive, are somewhat frustrating: in comparison to their Continental counterparts, both Catholic and Protestant, English schoolboys received an “almost undiluted” classical education that saw few differences between “godly” and “conformist” or “Episcopalian” schools or schoolteachers; relied on classical texts far more than Christian sources; exhibited very little contradiction between classical pagan belief systems and Christianity; and promoted a general, moral Protestant Christianity that changed very little across nearly two hundred years of social, religious, and political change. This general continuity makes the impact of humanist educational practices on English Protestantism, Green's central question, difficult to measure conclusively. Green argues that humanist educational practices tended to reinforce a semi-Pelagian, moralistic version of Protestantism and an Erasmian attachment to conformity and toleration. But he also states that in the end, men who shared the same education still came out with vastly different beliefs about church and state.

The more perplexing question posed here is why the English educational system was so addicted to the classics to the exclusion of newer methods and subjects of learning more fit for a scientific, mercantile age. Green's answer to this question is multivalent. First, he concludes that the essential conservatism of the landed classes tended to reinforce the status quo, especially in times of social change. Schools, therefore, bought and demanded the same, mostly unaltered textbooks generation after generation in order to continue to send ideally prepared students to Oxford and Cambridge. Second, the humanist agenda in classical education provided a noncontroversial, nonconfessional moral philosophy for the landed elite of English society that reinforced social distinctions and political conservatism. The overwhelming message of the classical texts most often taught in grammar schools (Cicero's De Officiis preeminent among them) is of civic virtue, honor, loyalty to God and country, and general morality, not the “darker” aspects of doctrine. Third, the popularity of classical texts both in grammar school education and among the wider public increased in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, indicating that knowledge of the classics became clearly synonymous with sensibility and taste. Through a “trickling down” of printed English translations of Aesop, Virgil, and Cicero, as well as through neoclassical architecture, drama, and imagery, the wider public could participate in the quintessential “politeness” of classical learning.

Though the central focus is on the textbooks themselves, Green also surveys teachers across the spectrum from “godly” to “conformist,” the variety of environments in which they taught, and the methods they used to teach the difficult subjects of Latin and Greek. Green argues that there seems to be little connection between a teacher's “godliness” and the degree to which he accepted or rejected particular classical texts. He notes a trend among the more zealous godly teachers to reject the more sordid bits of Ovid, for example, but argues that few conclusions about curricula can be drawn from a teacher's religious allegiances. He finds that the vast majority of English schoolteachers were conformist and conservative in educational and religious practice. Yet, the conclusions regarding the teachers’ backgrounds and methods are incomplete. Green acknowledges that he has insufficient evidence of how the content of these textbooks was actually taught in schools except for prescriptive statements in some of the popular schoolteaching handbooks, such as (the “conformist”) Charles Hoole's New Discovery or (the “godly”) John Brinsley's Ludus Literarius. More work clearly needs to be done on the teachers themselves. And finally, though Green is forthright in his statements that his subject is English secondary school education, from which girls were excluded, and acknowledges that work needs to be done on the education of girls, there are places in the text in which inclusion of the education of girls and women would provide essential context, for example, in a brief reference to the popularity of Aphra Behn (who does not even appear in the index), some mention could be made of her educational opportunities, as well as those of the women of the landed classes whose influence, especially in the salons of the eighteenth century, was not insignificant.