Elementary and Grammar Education in Late Medieval France

Books in English on the history of education in continental Europe are not common, so we should welcome Sarah Lynch’s study of schools in one of France’s major cities. After a useful introduction in which she surveys the historiography of medieval school education in England, France, Germany and Italy, her book falls into three parts. The first considers the organisation of schooling in Lyon and the various authorities (chiefly the cathedral, collegiate churches and the municipality) which sought to regulate it. As in England, an original attempt by religious bodies to control schools gradually broke down in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when demand for schooling grew. The municipality began to take a role in encouraging schools and it is likely that some teachers operated privately without permission or endorsement. Encouragement included grants of exemption from paying municipal taxes, but there seem to be no parallels to the foundation of endowed schools so typical of fifteenth-century England, apart from the maintenance of schools by the cathedral and two ancient collegiate churches

Fifteenth · Grammar school · Historiography · Parallels · Pedagogy · Political science · Sociology · Classics · Engineering · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · History · Law · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Religious Education and Schools