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Prescription and Practice: Protestantism and the Upbringing of Children, 1560-1700

How children should be brought up is an everlasting question that vexed our forefathers just as much as ourselves. The most obvious difference between most of the thinking and writing that goes on about it today and that of the early modern period is that a largely secular approach has replaced a fundamentally and deeply religious one. So it is natural that the historian of this period should ask how and in what ways Protestantism changed things in this respect. What emerges in facing this issue, in a peculiarly acute form, is the common historical problem of relating prescription to practice. Patrick Collinson has remarked upon the ‘stark contradiction’ between ‘the austere severity of the conduct books and what little can be glimpsed of the real world outside these texts’. It is this contradiction that my paper addresses. I shall approach it as follows. First I will explore the conduct-book advice about parental duty and practice and about children’s obligations to their parents. This provides what we may call the Puritan way of upbringing. I shall relate this to some material from personal sources, like diaries and autobiographies, about what may actually have happened in the home. I will then turn to schooling, which, in its new scale and intensity, can be seen as a crucial social development in Elizabethan and Stuart England, fired in large part by the Protestant evangelizing impulse and its concomitant propaganda of social order. The burgeoning grammar schools, it will be argued, were the principal public instrument of a new and purposeful construction of masculinity.