This book provides a concise and engaging history of classical education in English schools, beginning in 1500 with massive educational developments in England as humanist studies reached this country from abroad; it ends with the headmastership of Thomas Arnold of Rugby School, who died in 1842, and whose influence on schools helped secure Latin and Greek as the staple of an English education. By examining the pedagogical origins of Latin and Greek in the school curriculum, the book provides historical perspective to the modern study of Classics, revealing how and why the school curriculum developed as it did. The book also shows how schools responded and adapted to societal needs, and charts social change through the prism of classical education in English schools over a period of 350 years. Teaching Classics in English Schools, 1500–1840 provides an overview and insight into the world of classical education from the Renaissance to the Victorians without becoming entrenched in the analytical in-depth interpretative questions which can often detract from a book’s readability. The survey of classical education within the pages of this book will prove useful for anyone wishing to place the teaching of Classics in its cultural and educational context. It includes previously unpublished material, and a new synthesis and analysis of the teaching of Classics in English schools. This will be the perfect reference book for those who teach classical subjects, in both schools and universities, and also for university students who are studying Classical Reception as part of their taught or research degree. It will also be of interest to many schools of older foundation mentioned in this book and to anyone with leanings towards the history of education or English social history.

Originally published in 1959, this book examines the history of classical education in Britain, beginning in the sixteenth century with the rise of humanism, which emphasized the importance of reading only the best Latin authors and re-introduced Roman structures of education in the form of grammar schools. Clarke also uses Scotland to compare and contrast with the educational history of England, particularly the ways in which the teaching of classics changed and developed over time. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the history of education in general, and the history of classical education in particular.

Greece and Asia Minor proved an irresistible lure to English visitors in the seventeenth century. These lands were criss-crossed by adventurers, merchants, diplomats and men of the cloth. In particular, John Covel (1638-1722) - chaplain to the Levant Company in the 1670s, later Master of Christ's College, Cambridge - was representative of a thoroughly eccentric band of Englishmen who saw Greece and the Ottoman world through the lens of classical history. Using a variety of sources, including Covel's largely unpublished diaries, Lucy Pollard shows that these curious travellers imported, alongside their copies of Pausanias and Strabo, a package of assumptions about the societies they discovered. Disparaging contemporary Greeks as unworthy successors to their classical ancestors allowed Englishmen to view themselves as the true inheritors of classical culture, even as - when opportunity arose - they removed antiquities from the sites they described. At the same time, they often admired the Turks, about whom they had fewer preconceptions. This is a major contribution to reception and post-Restoration ideas about antiquity.