Edifying Youths: The Chambers of Rhetoric in Seventeenth-Century Holland

• Autores: Arjan van Dixhoorn, Benjamin Roberts
• Localización: Paedagogica Historica: International journal of the history of education, ISSN 0030-9230, Vol. 39, Nº. 3, 2003, págs. 325-337
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • For the early modern period, historians have primarily looked at institutional forms of education when investigating the intellectual molding of youths. With the exception of the wealthy, their conclusions have often been one-sided. However, youths of the middling sort in the Dutch Republic were more resourceful. Youths that could not afford a formal education at a Latin school or a university resorted to alternative resources such as chambers of rhetoric. For historians of education, chambers of rhetoric are not an obvious terrain to excavate. Traditionally, the chambers have been studied for their public literary and theatrical activities. However, those incidental public performances were only a fraction of what took place in private. In this essay we will probe into the literary activities of the chambers' private weekly meetings and illustrate how the Dutch chambers of rhetoric in the seventeenth century played an important role in edifying youths from the middling sort into a cultural elite