Paradigm, Vol 2, Issue3 (July, 2001)

Spring Meeting at Reading

The meeting of the Colloquium at Reading on 28th March was well attended and various people joined us during the day. Unfortunately, I missed the first paper given by Natalie Hole on textbooks and the teaching of English literature under the Revised Code. The winter rain storms were still with us and my train was greatly delayed by a landslip between Basingstoke and Reading! An abstract of Natalieís paper is printed above. I arrived in time to hear Gillian Riley's entertaining talk on the changes in the presentation of recipe books over the last half-century and the recent phenomenon of the recipe-based novel. After lunch we had another interesting update on the research at Reading into the typography of children's readers by Sue Walker and Caroline Archer. This was followed by Chris Stray's ongoing attempts to trace the history of rhymes in Latin textbooks -- or, rather, those not found in the textbooks, in particular: 'Malo -- I had rather be, malo -- in an apple tree . . .'. Michael Twyman brought the day's proceedings to a close with an illustrated paper on the teaching of handwriting in France, using lithographic techniques to print actual scripts. It was a worthwhile day, in spite of the fact that having rushed back to the station for my connecting train, I found that trains to Basingstoke had by then been cancelled altogether! I did eventually reach my Dorset outpost and attendance at the Colloquium is worth all such travel hazards.

Frances Austin

May Meeting at Dr. Williamsís Library

Dr Williamsís library is one of the greatest repositories of works by or about dissenters and its shelves contain many works that can be described as textbooks. The idea of a Colloquium meeting based on the theme of textbooks and dissent had occurred to me back in the mid-1990s and I was very pleased to be able to organise the day. The speakers were:

David Wykes, 'Few books, and them chiefly of one sort': nonconformist academies and their textbooks

David Knight, High Church Science: William Kirby and William Swainson, a parson & a layman

John Issitt, Jeremiah Joyce: political radical, religious dissenter and science textbook writer

William Brock, The Lamp of Learning: Richard Taylor and the textbook

Alison Kennedy, John Kenrick: history and myth

Geoffrey Cantor, Quaker science texts

Abstracts and some complete papers will appear in Paradigm in due course. The day went well. All the speakers came and spoke to an audience of twenty. I opened the meeting with some remarks, which I reproduce, in an abbreviated version, here.

Dissenters in the most general sense were members of Protestant religious sects notably Presbyterians, Baptists, Congregationalists, Quakers, Unitarians and after 1795 Methodists, who refused to conform to the rites and liturgy of the Church of England. Their unpopularity with Anglicans stemmed from their radical ideas and a continuing fear that, once empowered, they might disestablish the church. They rejected the church's Thirty-nine articles of Faith, rejected the Act of Uniformity and for most of the Hanoverian period suffered under the sanctions of the Test and Corporation Acts which limited their civil and political rights.

Textbooks can be variously described and a satisfactory definition of a textbook still remains a considerable challenge. But what we do know is that textbooks are a rich source for the exploration of the history and presentation of ideas. We do know that textbooks provide us with a way to probe the knowledge available in particular time periods. They provide us with insights into how publishers, educationalists and authors constructed knowledge, what they thought appropriate to include, what pedagogy they used, what commercial factors they played to and what tacit values they used to in the shaping of their products. Their close study allied to the histories of publishing, education and particular subject disciplines, also yield some insight into how they were used. Furthermore, textbooks reflect an effort to stabilise knowledge which is very often in a dynamic state. They attempt to provide certain knowledge in an uncertain world. They proved rich pickings for historians working in many disciplinary areas and even richer pickings for researchers prepared to cross academic borders.

So why textbooks and dissent? One obvious reason is that so many textbook authors were dissenters. Another is that so much of the history of publishing reflects the interests and agendas of dissenters. Dissenters were great educators. In a sense their position outside of the mainstream of society and their aspiration to equal rights drove them to educate not just their own children but the rest of society in the interests of exposing the injustices they faced and promoting their social and political vision. Textbooks figure in this project -- not least in the design of new educational products and in the appeal to new constituencies of readers.

But there is also a cognitive level at which textbooks operate. They reflect the organisation of knowledge, they reflect types and hierarchies of knowledge and they teach their readers both forms of reasoning and what constitutes certain knowledge. At a cognitive level therefore they reflect knowledge structures through the pedagogy they use. But knowledge organisation, reason and certainty at a cognitive level, are some of the very things that dissenters contest at social, political and theological levels. One of the things that interests me is the way knowledge is engaged with at these different levels and the way pedagogy, social and political vision, and theologies, subtly mingle through the medium of the textbook. The study of dissenters and their textbooks therefore offer us an extraordinary rich in insight into these processes.

John Issitt

Partly because of low attendance at meetings outside London (the same few people usually travel to wherever the meeting is held), the Board has decided to hold only two meetings a year for a trial period, one in May, in London, and one, probably sometime in the autumn, at another venue. We hope members who live near will make every effort to attend these local meetings, which are laid on mainly for their benefit.

September 2001. Unfortunately the meeting in Dublin has had to be postponed.

May 22^nd 2002 at the Institute of Education, a joint meeting with the British Society for the History of Mathematics speakers will include:

 June Barrow-Green on Isaac Todhunter.

John Denniss on John Sharpe -- Country Schoolmaster and Textbook Writer.

Fenny Smith on Pacioli's Summa.

Jackie Stedall on Oughtred's Clavis Mathematicae. 

May 2003 provisionally at the Science Museum Library.

Other meetings are planned for Oxford and York; dates and details will be given in the next issue of Paradigm.

Frances Austin,
Meetings Convener

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Paradigm Catalogue Textbook Colloquium