[3] The requirements for entrance to university have varied from place to place, century to century, but in the western world since the Middle Ages, two have been exceptionally long-lived. One, still operative, is literacy in the vernacular. The other, lingering in some countries but rapidly passing out of fashion, is proficiency in the Latin language. To enter the universities of early modern Europe, both were essential, and together linguistic instruction in Latin and the vernacular constituted the bulk of primary and secondary education. Training in literacy, the main purpose of the elementary school, involved then a small but significant minority of the population and nowhere did it begin to become universal before the nineteenth century. ⁽¹⁾ Latin, on the other hand, taught primarily at the secondary school, was fundamentally the privilege of an elite destined for careers in the liberal professions, the church, and the upper echelons of secular government. Furthermore, Latin, at least after the beginning of the sixteenth century, was the mark of an educated, cultured man and essential for membership in the ruling elite.

Unlike European societies of today, schooling in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was organized primarily on a local or independent basis and only began to be centrally administered and directed toward the end of the eighteenth century. Previously, central governments served only as loose licensing agencies and an occasional source of funds, allowing private individuals, municipalities, and ecclesiastical officials to provide for nearly all of the institutions of learning below the university level. Schools, consequently, developed haphazardly, and this created a confused educational patchwork, uneven in quality, character, and geographical distribution. The best schools were clustered in prosperous regions and those pockets of wealth and privilege -- the cities and towns. Conversely, small villages and impoverished regions were undereducated and backward; often without regular, organized instruction. And since so many schools depended upon the charity of the rich, they tended to reflect the interests of this class. In practice, this meant that Latin schools were better [4] organized and financed than those which taught only literacy. And though it is true that most schools, primary as well as secondary, offered a number of scholarships to poor children while a few, notably those operated by religious orders, were free to all comers, the vast majority were semi-private institutions, charging tuition fees which were beyond most families' means. As a result, the bulk of Europe's population was left ignorant and illiterate.

In this regard, Habsburg Spain was no exception. Here early education was performed by four distinct but overlapping and often complementary agencies: the family, the private tutor, the "school of primary letters," and the grammar or Latin school. A wealthy male child might benefit from all four, a pauper or a girl only from the first, but the exact usage of these institutions for particular social groups is not known. Schools have left behind few records concerning their history, let alone their students, while family records which provide insights into educational practices exist only for a few important families. Furthermore, surprisingly few Spaniards of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries wrote diaries or journals recalling their early lives and education, one consequence, perhaps, of a strongly confessional society in which personal details are confided to priests rather than paper and ink. In spite of such problems, a brief sketch of early education in early modern Spain is still possible, and this can serve as an introduction to the universities of the same period.

1. The best introduction to the subject of literacy in history is Lawrence Stone, "Literacy and Society in England, 1640-1900," Past & Present 42 (1969): 69-139. Also useful is Carlo Cipolla, Literacy and Development in the West (London, 1969).