ecclesiastical revival of the eleventh and twelfth centuries."[1]
In another passage of his great work the same author says of education before the Reformation: "It may be stated with some confidence that, at least in the later middle age, the smallest towns and even the larger villages possessed schools where a boy might learn to read and to acquire the first rudiments of ecclesiastical Latin, while, except in very remote and thinly populated regions, he would never have to go far to find a regular grammar school. That the means of reading, writing and the elements of Latin were far more widely diffused than has sometimes been supposed, is coming to be generally recognized by students of medieval life."[2]
It is now not only acknowledged that much was done for the education of the people, but also that all education during the Middle Ages proceeded from the Church.[3] Nothing but prejudice or ignorance of the
- ↑ Rashdall, Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, vol. I, p. 27.
- ↑ Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, vol. II, p. 602.
- ↑ Paulsen, Geschichte des gelehrten Unterrichts, p. 11. – Professor Harnack of the University of Berlin, speaking of the achievements of the Roman Church, says: "In the first place it educated the Romano-Germanic nations, and educated them in a sense other than that in which the Eastern Church educated the Greeks, Slavs, and Orientals. ... It brought Christian civilization to young nations, and brought it, not once only, so as to keep them at its first stage – no! it gave them something which was capable of exercising a progressive educational influence, and for a period of almost a thousand years it itself led the advance. Up to the fourteenth century it was a leader and a mother; it supplied the ideas, set the aims, and disengaged the forces." The same
