Ruling by Schooling Quebec provides a rich and detailed account of colonial politics from 1760 to 1841 by following repeated attempts to school the people. This first book since the 1950s to investigate an unusually complex period in Quebec’s educational history extends the sophisticated method used in author Bruce Curtis’s double-award-winning Politics of Population. Drawing on a mass of archival material, the study shows that although attempts to govern Quebec by educating its population consumed huge amounts of public money, they had little impact on rural ignorance: while near-universal literacy reigned in New England by the 1820s, at best one in three French-speaking peasant men in Quebec could sign his name in the insurrectionary decade of the 1830s. Curtis documents educational conditions on the ground, but also shows how imperial attempts to govern a tumultuous colony propelled the early development of Canadian social science. He provides a revisionist account of the pioneering investigations of Lord Gosford and Lord Durham.

This book describes the life and work of John Medley, the first member of the Oxford Movement to be consecrated bishop. As an experiment, W. E. Gladstone, future Prime Minister of England and keen churchman, arranged in 1844 to have a member of this controversial group appointed to the Episcopal bench. Because those associated with this movement were suspected of Roman Catholic theological leanings and perhaps even disloyalty to the English Establishment, such a move was politically and ecclesiastically dangerous in England. So Medley was sent to the colonies. Intended to establish High Churchmanship and the British Empire in the soil of the new world, Medley became convinced, over this forty-seven-year episcopate, that the American model of the church was more practical than the British. He eventually forged an identity for his diocese that was, in many ways, to be the pattern for the modern worldwide Anglican Church. Barry Craig is an Assistant Professor in the department of philosophy at St. Thomas University.

A crusty yet diffident Scot, his private reflections on the tensions and growing pains experienced by the colonial church and his reaction to events on the wider political scene, offer valuable insights into Reid's life and the times."--BOOK JACKET.

A fundamental and well-illustrated reference collection for anyone interested in the role of women in North American religious life.