The history of medieval English education is grounded in the contributions of its nineteenth-century pioneers, particularly H. Rashdall (1858-1924), who wrote the first scholarly survey of European medieval higher education, and A. F. Leach (1851-1915), a lesser-known, more controversial scholar, whose documentary explorations began the modern study of English grammar education. It has advanced through the cumulative efforts of twentieth-century scholars who have moved from an institutional towards an integrative approach, incorporating analyses of literacy and social change, with greater attention to the interaction of Latin and vernacular languages, cultural concerns, informal modes of learning, readership, social mobility and the history of texts.
Within this developing field, despite some differences of understanding, the enterprise has been cooperative rather than conflictive. In the past there have been disagreements between medievalists and early modernists over the extent and nature of medieval education.1 To the degree that early modernists have posited an educational revolution they have tended to devalue earlier educational investments. Among medievalists there have been differences of opinion over patronage patterns, the evolutions of Cambridge and Oxford, the extent to which education was laicized or the laity educated, the analytic framework relating literacy and orality, and relations between the educative uses of French, Latin and English. Except with regard to university education, there has been little in the way of comparative analysis, either with the continent or within the British Isles.
World History
