Thomas Robertson and the Pedagogical Uses of Erasmus in Early Tudor Grammar Schools

Abstract

Erasmus’ educational theories were popularized during the first half of the sixteenth century by a group of Tudor educators, who used the medium of elementary Latin grammars and introductory phrasebooks to offer practical tools for a multilingual literary culture that would come to full fruition in the second half of the sixteenth century. Their teaching notes and school commentaries that survive in their annotated textbooks provide a valuable source with which to trace how Erasmian methods of teaching were actually put into practise. Among these early educators is an obscure figure of English educational history, Thomas Robertson (fl. c. 1520–1561), headmaster of Magdalen College School in Oxford from 1526 to 1531, who devised the most thorough and comprehensive Erasmian program in his annotated edition of William Lily’s elementary grammar De Latinorum nominum generibus (Basel: Johann Bebel, 1532). In many ways, Robertson’s edition of Lily’s grammar epitomizes Erasmus’ grammatical encyclopedism expounded in De ratione studii and De duplici copia verborum ac rerum commentarii duo, which inadvertently resulted in a fundamental reinterpretation of textual studies in the Tudor classroom. It furthermore testifies to Robertson’s efforts to promote Erasmus’ trilingual ideal: a parallel Latin and Greek instruction, which was extended even to basic Hebrew from an early age.