Scholarly Knowledge : Textbooks in Early Modern Europe

Any attempt to understand the roles that textbooks played for early modern
teachers and
pupils must begin with the sobering realization that the field includes many
books that the
German word Lehrbuch and its English counterpart do not call to mind. The
early modern
classroom was shaken by the same knowledge explosion that took place in
individual scholars’
libraries and museums, and transformed by the same printers, patrons and vast
cultural
movements that altered the larger world it served. In the fifteenth through
seventeenth
centuries, the urban grammar school, the German Protestant Gymnasium and the
Jesuit
College, all of which did so much to form the elites of early modern Europe,
took shape; the
curricula of old and new universities fused humanistic with scholastic methods
in radically
novel ways. By doing so, they claimed a new status for both the overt and the
tacit knowledge
that made their work possible. This collected volume presents case studies by
renowned
experts, among them Ann Blair, Jill Kraye, Jürgen Leonhardt, Barbara Mahlmann-
Bauer
and Nancy Siraisi.