The ideals for education elaborated in rather piecemeal fashion in Italy during the course of the fifteenth century were promoted with astonishing efficiency throughout northern Europe in the early years of the sixteenth century, changing established habits of thought and transforming the language of nearly every discipline. Throughout the sixteenth century Latin literature (and, to a lesser extent, Greek literature) provided cultural, moral, and intellectual norms and, perhaps most important of all, a linguistic model, outside of which it became problematic, or at least eccentric, to operate. But it was no smooth takeover, nor yet complete. The humanists' programme was based on a dichotomy, insisting as it did that all education had to be transmitted in a foreign language. Moreover, it depended not only on the acquisition of Latin (that had always been true), but of a Latin, the ‘good’ classical Latin of the humanists, which had been the product of a historically distinct period in antiquity and could only be re-created by rigorous application of rules and the imitation of ‘correct’ authors. As the authors deemed correct were pagan authors, the bilingual situation of the educated élite was doubled by a bicultural situation in which Christian and pagan elements existed in an often uneasy symbiosis.

The century abounds in programmes for education, real or imagined, culminating in the rigorous organization of the Jesuits. But whether one looks at the rules of the Academy at Geneva (1559), the Lutheran programme of David Chytraeus (1564), the syllabus in force at the municipal school at Bordeaux (first published in 1583, well after its foundation), or the various states of the Jesuit Ratio studiorum, one is less struck by local or even confessional differences than by the overall homogeneity.