Any attempt to understand the roles that textbooks played for early modern teachers and
pupils must begin with the sobering realization that the field includes many books that the
German word Lehrbuch and its English counterpart do not call to mind. The early modern
classroom was shaken by the same knowledge explosion that took place in individual scholars’
libraries and museums, and transformed by the same printers, patrons and vast cultural
movements that altered the larger world it served. In the fifteenth through seventeenth
centuries, the urban grammar school, the German Protestant Gymnasium and the Jesuit
College, all of which did so much to form the elites of early modern Europe, took shape; the
curricula of old and new universities fused humanistic with scholastic methods in radically
novel ways. By doing so, they claimed a new status for both the overt and the tacit knowledge
that made their work possible. This collected volume presents case studies by renowned
experts, among them Ann Blair, Jill Kraye, Jürgen Leonhardt, Barbara Mahlmann-Bauer
and Nancy Siraisi.