Schooling in the English Renaissance
Comparing humanist pedagogical theory with grammar school archives, this article assesses the impact of Latin training on literary production, subjectivity, and gender in the Tudor period. The combined effect of theatricals as well as school training in impersonation and the rhetorical discipline ofactioinstilled a crucial, embodied connection between the Latin past and the social performance of gender. Yet several literary texts by former schoolboys reveal that the identifications unleashed by school training were not always as normatively “masculine” as teachers expected or modern critics assume. The article traces the dynamic interplay among Latinate verbal skill, embodied social performance, and struggles over social distinction. It demonstrates that when the authors of the period draw on the cultural capital of a Latin education, they reveal deep ambivalence about the very language training their schoolmasters claimed would work directly for the benefit of “the commonwealth.”