Boys Learning Latin

Some time in the late seventeenth century, Foster Watson observed, Latin grammar learning ‘came to be regarded as a subject in itself, and classical authors to be relegated to the position of store-house of examples for use in the illustration of grammatical rules.’ Possibly because of the assumption that there was one ‘proper’ method for learning the rudiments of the Latin tongue: ‘the memorising of the accidence and syntax, of vocabularies and phrases’, research on the elementary stages of language learning has been sparse, scholars’ focus being rather on the literature. As Locke's epigraph implies, and author-practitioner George Chapman makes clear, there was in fact a variety of methods to teach Latin. For Chapman, this was a problem to be corrected.

This chapter has three sections. The first discusses the pedagogical thinking and practices four eighteenth-century author-practitioners described and justified in the treatises they wrote and used to teach Latin to boys. The second examines corporal punishment as an integral part of Latin pedagogy. The third focuses on females’ learning of Latin in the same period. Because the authors I am discussing also ran a school, it is plausible to assume that because their treatises also served as advertisements for their school, they presented the methods which in their view promised success.