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TY - ELEC
A1 - Patterson, Serina
ED - Jenstad, Janelle
T1 - Hornbooks
T2 - The Map of Early Modern London
ET - 7.0
PY - 2022
DA - 2022/05/05
CY - Victoria
PB - University of Victoria
LA - English
UR - https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/HORN10.htm
UR - https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/xml/standalone/HORN10.xml
ER -
Hornbooks were tools for teaching young boys and girls (age four to eight) how to read. Hornbooks consisted of a leaf of paper containing the alphabet, the Lord’s Prayer, syllables, and sometimes the Ten Commandments. In early modern London, the teacher, often a scrivener, cobbler, tailor, or fishmonger who taught part-time in hopes of making some extra money (Jewell 96), would mount the paper or parchment onto a wooden paddle (a square piece of wood with a handle) and cover it with a thin sheet of horn for protection. Alternatively, as Helen Jewell points out in her analysis of hornbooks, the alphabet could be incised directly into the wood (Jewell 98).
Research Assistant, 2020-present. Amogha Lakshmi Halepuram Sridhar is a fourth year student at University of Victoria, studying English and History. Her research interests include Early Modern Theatre and adaptations, decolonialist writing, and Modernist poetry.
Project Manager, 2020-2021. Assistant Project Manager, 2019-2020. Research Assistant, 2018-2020. Kate LeBere completed her BA (Hons.) in History and English at the University of Victoria in 2020. She published papers in
Janelle Jenstad is Associate Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director of
Serina Patterson was an MA student in English at the University of Victoria and PhD student at the University of British Columbia with research interests in late medieval literature, game studies, and digital humanities. She was also the recipient of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada CGS Joseph-Bombardier Scholarship and a four-year fellowship at UBC for her work in Middle English and Middle French game poems. She has published articles in
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Playwright, poet, and author.
German humanist, theologian, and bookseller.
Printer.
Patron saint of vulgar and coarse people.
The city of London, not to be confused with the allegorical character (
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Hornbooks were tools for teaching young boys and girls (age four to eight) how to read. Hornbooks consisted of a leaf of paper containing the alphabet, the Lord’s Prayer, syllables, and sometimes the Ten Commandments. In early modern London, the teacher, often a scrivener, cobbler, tailor, or fishmonger who taught part-time in hopes of making some extra money (Jewell 96), would mount the paper or parchment onto a wooden paddle (a square piece of wood with a handle) and cover it with a thin sheet of horn for protection. Alternatively, as Helen Jewell points out in her analysis of hornbooks, the alphabet could be incised directly into the wood (Jewell 98). Mermaids, birds, and other images were sometimes engraved on the back of the wood for aesthetic effect. Historian Andrew W. Tuer notes that teachers taught students how to read by a pointer, which might be a straw, pin, pen, piece of wire, quill, feather, or pointed piece of wood or bone, [which] was used to direct children
(Tuer 24).
When the Normans conquered England in A
and Amen
appeared after Z
(Orme 56). In short, the hornbook’s visual structure dictated how the alphabet was taught. By the
Although hornbooks constituted the second-largest market for early modern printers, few copies survive today; overuse and dirty fingers caused hornbooks to deteriorate quickly. The hornbook’s development in sixteenth-century England reflected a desire to instill a fixed set of ideas and facts into the pupil
that would reaffirm values of order and conformity (Houston 56). Since English society was becoming sharply stratified, schools for the poor were created in order to curb the turbulence of lower-class youth and turn them into useful members of an ordered society
(Houston 14). Consequently, a progressive educational system emerged that consisted of elementary school, grammar school, and university. However, this system of education did not grant complete social mobility. Helen Jewell points out that guild regulations in the sixteenth century required literate apprentices, but only male children of yeomanry or higher could further their education past elementary school after reaching the age of employability (Jewell 93-94). Like lower-class men, women could attend only elementary school (Jewell 17). Thus, elementary schools reserved Latin for advanced scholars in grammar school. Instead, elementary schoolmasters used hornbooks to teach the English alphabet. Children learned how to read through memorization, a convention that stressed knowledge as an ordered system. After children had learned their letters, they would progress to primers (small books of prayers) and classical texts. Hornbooks remained a popular teaching tool until the late nineteenth century, when they were replaced by ABC storybooks and textbooks.
First published as a quarto in
In