English School Exercises, 1420-1530

This compilation of school exercises will be a valuable primary source for professional historians interested in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Europe, especially in England. It will also be useful to scholars of the history of Latin. Until the modern era in Europe, teachers of boys taught all academic subjects, as well as the manners, knowledge, and moral values expected of educated people, through the short writing exercises that taught Latin. They made up assignments to write Latin sentences based on the seasonal round, current events, history, social customs, laws, and morals. As a result, surviving school exercises offer as direct a picture of daily life and common values of the time as we are likely to get. Some sentences reveal an alien world: a fragment of a long-lost ghost story, or capturing a white eagle with a silken snare to send to the King of England for his New Year's gift. Other things never change: students hate grammar and want money for junk food, the material gets funnier near the holiday break. Experienced medieval scholar Nicholas Orme (history, emeritus, U. of Exeter, UK) has gathered English school exercises from 1420-1530 from seventeen different archival sources, printed here in the original Latin and English, with modern English translations of the medieval English glosses. Footnotes give information on changes from medieval to Renaissance Latin, as well as notes on culture, student errors, jokes, puns, etc. An introduction puts the material in context. Annotation c2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Nicholas Orme read history at Oxford University, where he has been awarded the degrees of DLitt and DD, and spent his academic career at the University of Exeter, retiring as professor of history in 2007. His research and publications have centered on English religious and cultural history in the medieval and early modern periods, including Medieval Schools (2006), and Fleas, Flies, and Friars: Children's Poetry from the Middle Ages (2012).