Education

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Education

Schools. Before the Reformation, other than the informal schools run by older women in their own homes, opportunities for basic schooling came primarily through religious institutions such as convents and monasteries, or schools attached to cathedrals. Convent and monastery schools primarily served boys and girls who were intending to become monks or nuns, but they occasionally also had pupils who were not planning on taking religious vows. Cathedral schools were reserved for boys and young men, often those intending on a church career or further study for a professional vocation in law or medicine at a university. Women were prohibited from studying at universities, which developed in Europe in the twelfth century.

A LADY'S EDUCATION PONDERED

A letter from Florentine humanist Leonardo Bruni to Italian noblewomen Lady Baptista Malatesta in 1405, advising her on the proper subjects for women to study.

Thus there are certain subjects in which, whilst a modest proficiency is on all counts to be desired, a minute knowledge and excessive devotion seem to vain display. For instance, subtleties of Arithmetic and Geometry are not worthy to absorb a cultivated mind, and the same must be said of Astrology, You will be surprised to find me suggesting (though with much more hesitation) that the great and complex art of Rhetoric should be placed in the same category. My chief reason is the obvious one, that I have in view the cultivation most fitting to a woman. To her neither the intricacies of debate nor the oratorical artifices of action and delivery are of the least practical use, if indeed they are not positively unbecoming. Rhetoric in all its forms,—public discussion, forensic argument, logical fence, and the like—lies absolutely outside the province of women.

What Disciplines then are properly open to her? In the first place she has before her, as a subject peculiarly her own, the whole field of religion and morals. The literature of the Church will thus claim her earnest study. Such a writer, for instance, as St. Augustine affords her the fullest scope for reverent yet learned inquiry. . . .

Moreover, the cultivated Christian lady has no need in the study of this weighty subject to confine herself to ecclesiastical writers. Morals, indeed have been treated of by the noblest intellects of Greece and Rome. . . .

But we must not forget that true distinction is to be gained by a wide and varied range of such studies as conduce to the profitable enjoyment of life, in which, however, we must observe due proportion in the attention and time we devote to them.

First amongst such studies I place History: a subject which must not on any account be neglected by one who aspires to true cultivation. For it is our duty to understand the origins of our own history and its development; and the achievements of Peoples and of Kings....

The great Orators of antiquity must by all means be included. Nowhere do we find the virtues more warmly extolled, the vices so fiercely decried. From them we may learn, also, how to express consolation, encouragement, dissuasion or advice....

I come now to Poetry and the Poets—a subject with which every educated lady must shew herself thoroughly familiar. For we cannot point to any great mind of the past for whom the Poets had not a powerful attraction. . . . Hence my view that familiarity with the great poets of antiquity is essential to any claim to true education. For in their writings we find deep speculations upon Nature, and upon the Causes and Origins of things, which must carry weight with us both from their antiquity and from their authorship. Besides these, many important truths upon matters of daily life are suggested or illustrated. All this is expressed with such grace and dignity as demands our admiration....

But I am ready to admit that there are two types of poet: the aristocracy, so to call them, of their craft, and the vulgar, and that the latter may be put aside in ordering a woman's reading, A comic dramatist may season his wit too highly: a satirist describe too bluntly the moral corruption which he scourges: let her pass them by.

Source: William Harrison Woodward, ed. and trans., Vittorino da Feltre and Other Humanist Educators: Essays and Versions (London; Cambridge University Press, 1897), pp. 126-129,132.

Elementary Schools. After the Reformation, first in Protestant areas and then in Catholic, learning to read came to be viewed as a part of religious instruction, and political and religious authorities encouraged the opening of elementary schools to teach boys and girls who could not learn at home. The number of schools that actually opened was always smaller than reformers desired, and more schools were established for boys than for girls; by 1580 in central Germany, for example, 50 percent of the parishes had licensed German-language schools for boys and 10 percent for girls. The education such schools offered was not extensive. Children attended for an hour or so a day, for one to two years, and were to learn, in the words of one school ordinance, “reading and writing, and if both of these can't be mastered, at least some writing, the catechism learned by heart, a little figuring, a few psalms to sing.”

Gender Bias. The schools set up in rural areas often offered an identical curriculum for boys and girls, though the students were usually taught separately, as school authorities thought that having both sexes in one room would be distracting. There were greater gender distinctions in education in cities. In the small German town of Memmingen, for example, boys were engaged in competitions in Latin rhetoric with an eye toward their future university careers, whereas the best student in the girls’ school in 1587 was chosen on the basis of her “great diligence and application in learning her catechism, modesty, obedience, and excellent penmanship.” Along with reading, writing, and religion, sewing and other domestic skills were frequently part of the curriculum at girls’ schools, which worked to the advantage of female teachers, who were hired in preference to male instructors, because they could be paid less; scholarships set up for poor girls read: “To be sent to school, and especially to learn to sew.”

Catholic Schools. During the sixteenth century, schooling in Catholic areas was even more gender-specific, other than what was offered girls in convents, which were largely limited to the nobility and wealthy. A survey of schools in Venice in 1587-1588 found about 4,600 male pupils, or one-fourth of the school-age boys in the city, and only thirty girls. There were some informal catechism schools in Italy and Spain (those for boys taught by men and for girls by women) where pupils learned to read, but classes only met for about two hours on Sundays and religious holidays so that the level of literacy achieved was not high. Opportunities for girls increased in the seventeenth century in some parts of Catholic Europe with the spread of the female teaching orders such as the Ursulines, but a survey of school-age children in southern France in the late eighteenth century found about two-thirds of boys receiving some schooling, compared to only one girl in fifty.

Writing. Where girls’ schools existed, girls attended for a much briefer period than their male counterparts, which often meant they learned to read but not to write because the two were not taught simultaneously. Writing was also more expensive to learn, as pupils had to have some special materials, which parents were often unwilling to provide for their daughters. Parish registers, marriage contracts, and wills throughout the Renaissance and Reformation generally reveal that about twice as many men as women from similar social classes could sign their names, and that the women's signatures are more poorly written than the men's, so that their name might have been the only thing these women ever wrote.

Notions of Womanhood. Teaching women to read but not to write was the result not only of an economic decision on the part of parents, but also of contemporary notions about the ideal woman. Learning to read would allow a woman to discover classical and Christian examples of proper female behavior and to absorb the ideas of great (male) authors. Learning to write, on the other hand, would enable her to express her own ideas, an ability that few thinkers regarded as important and some saw as threatening. Many well-educated men also considered certain types of reading materials or subjects as improper for women, as the advice of the Florentine humanist Leonardo Bruni to the noblewoman Lady Baptista Malatesta shows.