The Universities in Early Modern England The Universities in Early Modern England Author Courtney Follet Author Kate McPherson Supervising Editor Kate McPherson Editor Kate McPherson Copy Editor Leah Hamby Senior Encoder Leah Hamby Encoding and Metadata LEMDO Team Copyright Holder (Content) Kate McPherson Copyright Holder (XML and interface) University of Victoria Early Modern England Encyclopedia EMEE

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.

 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globalink Research Internship Utah Valley University

Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a

 University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform

Unless otherwise noted, intellectual copyright in EMEE Anthology pages is held by Kate McPherson on behalf of the contributors. Copyright on the TEI-XML markup is held by the University of Victoria on behalf of the LEMDO Team. The content and TEI-XML markup in this file are licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. This file is freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and /or data; (2) this availability statement must remain in the file; (3) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (4) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO. Neither the content nor the code in this file is licensed for training large language models (LLMs), ingestion into an LLM, or any use in any artificial intelligence applications; such uses are considered to be commercial uses and are strictly prohibited.

Early Modern England Encyclopedia

By Courtney Follet and Kate McPherson, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions

Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines

This document uses Canadian English spelling

 Document Types All documents in LEMDO are either born-digital documents or primary documents. Within those two general categories, LEMDO offers additional ways to categorize a file. Born-digital Born-digital documents are anything other than primary texts Critical Critical material, such as a general introduction or a textual introduction. Responsibilities Responsibilities Author A person, family, or organization responsible for creating a work that is primarily textual in content, regardless of media type (e.g., printed text, spoken word, electronic text, tactile text) or genre (e.g., poems, novels, screenplays, blogs). Use also for persons, etc., creating a new work by paraphrasing, rewriting, or adapting works by another creator such that the modification has substantially changed the nature and content of the original or changed the medium of expression. LEMDO uses the term author in two contexts: (1) to indicate the author of a primary work or document (such as Hamlet), and (2) to indicate the author of a secondary text (such as the Critical Introduction to <title level="m">Hamlet, by David Bevington). Editor A person, family, or organization contributing to a resource by revising or elucidating the content, e.g., adding an introduction, notes, or other critical matter. An editor may also prepare a resource for production, publication, or distribution. For major revisions, adaptations, etc., that substantially change the nature and content of the original work, resulting in a new work, see author. LEMDO uses the general term editor only in edition metadata and only to indicate when a person is responsible for editing all parts of an edition. Otherwise, use the more granular terms to describe the precise nature of the editorial role. Supervising Editor An editor who supervises the work of a student editor. Copy Editor LEMDO uses the term owner for the person who checks facts, quotations, and citations; may make formatting changes; may convert from one citation style to another; may suggest wording changes; and enforces conformity with the project style guide. Markup Editor A person or organization performing the coding of SGML, HTML, or XML markup of metadata, text, etc. Gloss needed. Copyright Holder A person or organization to whom copy and legal rights have been granted or transferred for the intellectual content of a work. The copyright holder, although not necessarily the creator of the work, usually has the exclusive right to benefit financially from the sale and use of the work to which the associated copyright protection applies. Normally the editor is the copyright holder for an LEMDO edition. EMEE Keywords Culture Learn about the customs, beliefs, and daily lives of people in early modern England. Gender Men Education Gentry Education Greek Humanism Latin Literacy Published file. Updated metadata proofed updated author respStmt. Created File. Michael Best Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

 Courtney Follett Courtney Follett

Courtney Follett was a student at Utah Valley University.

 Leah Hamby Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

 Navarra Houldin Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

 Kate McPherson Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

 LEMDO Team The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors. University of Victoria https://www.uvic.ca/
Who Attended University in England

University education was offered to a select number of young men in early modern England. Around the age of 14, schoolboys who had completed grammar school had the option, if their families could afford it and their intellectual gifts were sufficient, to continue their education at the university level. The University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge were the only two universities in England and were also two of the most sought-after universities in Europe at the time. During the reign of Elizabeth I and James I, the middle class began to prosper, causing university attendance to increase significantly as more families coud afford to send bright young men to earn university degrees. Young women were not permitted to receive a university education.

The Curriculum

Universities taught a wide variety of subjects, although not the most modern ones. Young men read and discussed Greek and Latin philosophy, classical history, classical rhetoric, Greek and Latin poetry, Greek and Latin grammar, music, astronomy, arithmetic, theology, and medicine, which included the study of Hippocrates and Galen, along with Arabic and Jewish medical texts. The subjects studied were categorized by a tradition from the medieval period into two disciplines: the first, called the trivium which included grammar, rhetoric, and logic; and the second, called the quadrivium, which primarily focused on subjects such as astronomy, geometry and arithmetic. All subject areas were taught using ancient Greek and Roman texts, with minimal use of more modern texts in European languages.

Since their founding in the Middle Ages, universities remained very conservative in nature; therefore, the new interest in Plato and Aristotle, Greek ideals, and new approaches to medicine, which historians now call the Renaissance, were often ignored. Traditional studies that centered on the early theologians of the Church and the Bible were favored in university.

Playwrights in the University

William Shakespeare did not attend university, although some other playwrights such as Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson did. There was a group of playwrights and writers in the late 16th century known as the university wits, who congregated in London in the last quarter of the 16th century. Thomas Lodge, Christopher Marlowe, John Lyly, Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, and George Peele were among these educated men who transformed the literary genres of the period with energetic new kinds of writing, including the widespread use of iambic pentameter, secular and historical subject matter, and richly comic works that featured both bawdy and satiric humor.

University courses did not study Shakespeare’s or these other writers works until the 20th century, although educated people began to read Shakespeare’s works widely in the early years of the 19th century. The general attitude of academics toward Shakespeare was hostility and contempt, even as his popularity grew among the literate public.

Key Print Sources Jewell, Helen M. Education in Early Modern England. Red Globe Press, 1999. Preiss, Richard and Deanne Williams. Childhood, Education and the Stage in Early Modern England. Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Key Online Sources Best, Michael. The universities. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/ideas/education/universities.html. Accessed 18 Oct. 2018. Best, Michael. The <term>University Wits</term>. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/drama/contemporaries/greene.html. Accessed 21 Mar. 2023. Gillard, Derek. Education in England: A History. May 2018. https://education-uk.org/history/. Accessed 27 Feb. 2023. Wrightson, Keith. Education: Cultural Influences Underlying an Increase in Schooling. Lecture at Yale University. 29 Oct. 2009. Brewminate.com, edited by Matthew MacIntosh. https://brewminate.com/education-and-literacy-in-early-modern-england/. Accessed 24 Feb. 2023.