The Literary Culture of the Reformation examines the place of literature in the Reformation, considering both how arguments about biblical meaning and literary interpretation influenced the new theology, and how developments in theology in turn influenced literary practices. Part One focuses on Northern Europe, reconsidering the relationship between Renaissance humanism (especially Erasmus) and religious ideas (especially Luther). Parts Two and Three examine Tudor and early Stuart England. Part Two describes the rise of vernacular theology and protestant culture in relation to fundamental changes in the understanding of the English language. Part Three studies English religious poetry (including Donne, Herbert, and in an Epilogue, Milton) in the wake of these changes. Bringing together genres and styles of writing which are normally kept apart (poems, sermons, treatises, commentaries) Brian Cummings offers a major re-evaluation of the literary production of this intensely verbal and controversial period.

First published in 1908, this important work on the history of education traces the development of teaching in English Grammar Schools from the invention of printing up to 1660. It is not a history of the theories of educational reformers as to what should or should not be taught, but a history of the actual practices of the schools, of their curricula and of the differentiated subjects of instruction. The author relies heavily on the textbooks used in schools in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in particular the ‘Ludus Literarius’ of John Brinsley and the ‘New Discovery of the Old Art of Teaching School’ of Charles Hoole, and makes free use of the School Statutes which state the express intention of the Founder as to what was to be taught. The period covered is one of great significance in which the Encyclopaedia of the medieval curriculum was abandoned for the modern practice of the differentiation of school subjects. The new knowledge of the Renaissance and the introduction of critical methods and of close analysis gave students a detailed knowledge which could not be fitted into the rigid confines of the medieval Encyclopaedia, while the invention of printing enormously facilitated the increase and spreading of text books for both teachers and pupils.