[5] The Family and the Home

Among the educational institutions that existed before the modern era, the family is the one about which the least is known. The intimacy of home life rarely produces written documents and when these do exist they come from the exceptional family which kept an archive of its own, whose activities led to a notary, or whose problems wound up in the courts. In some cases, a correspondence revealing the details of home life survives when a parent happened to be away from his family, but this too is the exception. Recent works by French, English, and American historians have begun to explore domestic life in the past, but nothing comparable exists for Spain. ⁽¹⁾ For these reasons the following discussion of the educational activities of the Spanish family in the early modern period is meant only to be a suggestive interpretation based upon very scanty information, largely literary in character, and upon findings for families in countries other than Spain. A second qualification is that the family to be discussed can only be considered representative of the elite: the noble and the rich. The family life of the popular classes, urban and rural, remains unexplored. ⁽²⁾

In the first place it appears that families in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain were decidedly patriarchal, the father making all important decisions about the organization of the home, the upbringing and schooling of the children, and their eventual marriages and careers. ⁽³⁾ The mother, whose influence was perhaps more strongly felt with regard to her daughters, [6] was clearly out of the picture so far as her sons were concerned. In the event of the father's death, paternal authority and responsibility would usually go to the closest male relative on the father's side, although in exceptional circumstances the mother would take command. And if the mother remarried, the step-father would still look to the original father's family for advice when making important decisions about his newly adopted children. ⁽⁴⁾

Second, paternal authority was exerted most forcefully in the case of the eldest son -- symbol of the family's lineage, the object of family hopes and aspirations, and the one to whom the bulk of the family's wealth would go through Spain's strong laws of primogeniture and entail -- the mayorazgo system. He was carefully watched over, disciplined, and controlled until a successful marriage could be arranged; the family's fortune, prestige, and good name were too valuable to allow him to run free. The eldest son was therefore often a homebody, allowed outside the father's watchful eye only in special circumstances, usually educated in or near the home, and rarely allowed on his own to attend university -- proverbial hotbeds of sin and corruption. ⁽⁵⁾

For the first-born and even for the younger offspring, submission to the family lasted well beyond childhood. Although Spanish youths were often endowed early with independent rents and clerical benefices, granting them a measure of financial independence which may have clashed with paternal claims to absolute authority, fathers continued to assert their control over their sons long after puberty. ⁽⁶⁾ Younger sons were undoubtedly the most successful at achieving early independence, and they were often free to determine their own careers, select the university of their choice and follow the subject matter they wished. Eventual preferment, however rested in large part upon family prestige and the good services and influence of the father. Few sons would willingly break from the family and place their future careers in jeopardy. Independence of action, therefore, was carefully circumscribed even as the sons matured.

[7] In contrast, the years up to the age of five or six were ones of relative freedom and indulgence for children of either sex, first-born or otherwise. ⁽⁷⁾ Tended first by a wet-nurse, later pampered by the servants, and treated with special care in order to guard against disease, the child's early years were, especially in comparison with the years after seven or eight, characterized by a rather lax discipline. Harsh punishments were not unknown, but they do not appear to have been used methodically to break the child's will or to dampen his independence. On the contrary, there are indications that some families purposely allowed young children to cultivate their own interests, although not without some encouragement and guidance by the father. An example of such casual control was the suggestion made by the royal secretary of Philip II, Mateo Vázquez, that in the home of his nephew, Agustinillo, aged five, there be a room of "arms" and another of "letters" to see to which the boy was most inclined. Agustinillo's step-father, Jerónimo Gasol, another royal secretary to Philip II, soon noted that the child "would be more inclined to the profession of arms than to study." ⁽⁸⁾ Such early educational encouragement on the part of parents may only have been indicative of highly ambitious, "careerist" families, but it appears likely that children of the upper classes were allowed to develop independently though not impudently. Subject to a relatively carefree routine implemented primarily by household servants, the young child's major obligations involved toilet-training, respect for parent authority, and adherence to the rituals of the Catholic faith.

Childhood independence and freedom, however, halted abruptly after the age of six when a new stage in life began and the child had reached what French ecclesiastical law termed the "age of discretion." ⁽⁹⁾ This change was heralded symbolically by the exchange of childhood robes for clothes modeled upon those of adults and by the taking of first communion which brought the child into the adult congregation of the church. Formal, rigorous instruction in literacy and religion now began, and apprenticeship contracts were arranged. ⁽¹⁰⁾ Meanwhile, strict obedience and discipline [8] became a fundamental rule of thumb. Contemporaries warned that "the worst pestilence that can befall a town is the liberty and disorder of youth, ⁽¹¹⁾ and to forestall this eventuality, children of seven and eight were subject to stern controls." The whip was no longer an instrument of intermittent discipline, but a tool used regularly to force the child to submit to the family's as well as the schoolmaster's will. ⁽¹²⁾

The years between six and eight therefore represented a turning point for the child, one that in the modern family is at least partially delayed until adolescence. At that juncture the father made decisions that determined much of his child's adult life. Tutors and schools were selected and the type of education chosen often dictated to the child his later vocation and career. A decision regarding holy orders was frequently determined before the age of nine as well, this being the youngest age at which a youth could take religious vows and become eligible for ecclesiastical rents. ⁽¹³⁾ In other words, the child, prodded by the whip, entered a training period -- the latency period in the parlance of modern psycho-analytic theory -- in which he would be equipped to enter the adult world in terms of education, religion, vocation, and dress ⁽¹⁴⁾. It is clear that sixteenth-century Spaniards, particularly those connected with schools, foundling homes, orphanages, and the like, regarded the years after six as a stage in life during which children had to be moulded in order to prepare them for adult responsibilities. ⁽¹⁵⁾ This transitional stage ended only with the coming of puberty, which contemporaries officially pegged at twelve for girls and fourteen for boys. ⁽¹⁶⁾

[9] It was during these years that the child might also be removed from the parental home and placed under the care and authority of others. In the eighteenth century there is some evidence that boys and girls as young as three or four years of age were placed in the care of women known as amigas, who directed the equivalent of a modern nursery school, but it is not known whether this was a widespread practice or even when it first began. ⁽¹⁷⁾ In general, children remained at home until the "age of discretion." At that point sons of the aristocracy, in accordance with the medieval tradition of wardship, might be sent to become pages at the royal court, while others were placed in the residence of a friend or relation to be trained in the arts of chivalry and war. Other children were boarded at a variety of monasteries and schools, and youths who were destined for the church might enter the household of a prelate. Children of humble origin were commonly sent out of the house to find work as servants and domestics, and other families, seeking a particular craft for their offspring, would apprentice them to a master artisan, allowing the latter to educate and train the children as he saw fit. ⁽¹⁸⁾ The extent of these "putting-out" practices is difficult to discover, but they were certainly practiced on a regular basis, varying from family to family and class to class, even though such customs had their liabilities, as bans upon carnal relations between masters and servants suggest. ⁽¹⁹⁾

Primary Education: The Teaching of Literacy

The art of learning how to read and to write in the vernacular, to perform simple arithmetic calculations, and to recite parts of the Catechism and a few simple prayers were the first responsibilities which many new six- and seven-year-olds had to face. For this task ABC-primers, Spanish grammars, and reading notebooks were available by the opening of the sixteenth century, to be published thereafter in growing numbers. ⁽²⁰⁾ Thus anyone wishing to undertake the instruction of the young had the necessary tools if not the [10] necessary skills, wisdom, and patience. Pedagogical techniques were those common to centuries of school teaching: memorization, endless repetition and review, constant practice and copying, always aided by the free use of the cane upon the bored, inattentive, lazy, and mischievous.

The least common medium of instruction but that with the greatest prestige was the private tutor, living in the home, serving as teacher, companion, and social director for the child. Comfort and privacy, direct, personal communication, constant attention and supervision, a routine especially suited to fit the child's particular interests, and the ability of parents to keep a close tab on both tutor and pupil alike were strong arguments in favor of such instruction, and by the middle of the sixteenth century Spain's aristocracy were already well-accustomed to the presence of these teachers in their homes. Class bias and prejudice, as well as the reputation of schoolmasters for brutishness and cruelty, also prompted the use of the tutor among this class; the young grandee who was taught at home would not have to mingle with children of lesser rank nor suffer the public indignity of the whip.

Whatever the potential merits of private tutors, drawbacks existed as well. Incompetent, poorly trained, corrupt, and immoral tutors were as common as good ones, making careful selection by the parents essential. But according to Ambrosio de Morales, chronicler to Philip II, "parents selected tutors as if they were buying a velvet chair," ⁽²¹⁾ a comparison which suggests that Spain's aristocracy gave little thought to something so commonplace. And if the selection of tutors was indeed so casual, one can imagine that mistakes were many and the tenure of many tutors relatively short, thus prolonging the child's education or leaving it to household servants or to the parents themselves.

Competent or incompetent, private tutors were rarely found outside the households of the aristocracy. Though other families may have sought their services, private tuition at home was expensive. In addition to a regular stipend, tutors required a room and frequently a servant of their own, and the number of Spaniards who could afford their services was always at a minimum. Even then, private tutors were not always in demand. Mateo Vázquez, Philip II's secretary, elected to have his nephews learn their lessons in small, private schools. ⁽²²⁾ And for men of similar circumstances -- high government officials, leading lawyers, wealthy merchants -- tuition at home was probably an exception, perhaps a privilege accorded only to the oldest son. These ambitious, forward-looking families paid considerable attention to the proper education of their sons; rather than shield their children from [11] the realities of the wider world, they placed them into the competitive and disciplined atmosphere of the school which rewarded drive, obedience, and hard work. Not surprisingly, these same families provided most of the financial support for primary and secondary schools during the Habsburg era. But it is important to recognize that wealthy mercantile and office-holding families in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were continuously acquiring titles of nobility, landed estates, and larger, more spacious homes, adopting for themselves, in short, the external trappings of aristocratic life. Simultaneously, their educational habits turned inward, aping the private, hearth-centered instruction typical of the old grandee class.

One alternative to the private tutor was private tuition outside of the home. "Masters of primary letters," embodying the continuation of medieval craft traditions in which scribes and notaries taught writing to their sons and a few apprentices, could be found in most Spanish towns. As early as 1370 these instructors were sufficiently numerous and their services sufficiently popular to warrant Henry II (1369-79) of Castile to establish licensing procedures to guard against unskilled and incompetent masters. ⁽²³⁾ The monarchy's weakness at this time ensured that this decree would have little effect, although it did set an important precedent by subjecting the writing masters to royal as opposed to ecclesiastical control.

In practice, Spain's masters of primary letters remained free of most external regulation and control until the early sixteenth century, when new interest in learning the art of literacy and new religious concerns prompted intervention into their affairs. At issue was the fear that the cheap editions and translations of the sacred texts which followed the introduction of printing into Spain in 1473 would encourage the populace to interpret scripture on their own. There was also concern that the masses might be tempted by heresies imported from abroad in the form of pamphlets and printed books. Accordingly, the Spanish church took steps to place the instruction of primary letters under its thumb. One of these was a 1512 ruling by the diocese of Seville ordering all parish priests and sacristans to teach the three Rs. ⁽²⁴⁾ Other dioceses appointed "visitors" to examine the "masters of the children's schools" for their religious orthodoxy. ⁽²⁵⁾ Such measures met only with limited success, but similar concerns led to a royal decree in 1573 that excluded from the teaching profession conversos as well as individuals whose forefathers had been brought before the inquisition. Furthermore, municipally appointed inspectors were asked to see "what books they [the writing masters] are using, if they are [doctrinally] correct or not, if the books are apt for the said Art, and if they have been [previously] examined by the Royal Council." ⁽²⁶⁾

[12] Implicit in such rulings was the notion that children were particularly susceptible to religious propaganda, and as a corollary to this, the belief that ideas implanted early in life were indelible. Contemporaries believed that if instruction in morals and religion was initiated after a certain age, it would be nothing but a waste of time, since by then the child would have already formulated the ideas and principles he would keep for life. The statutes of the Colegio de los Niños de la Doctrina, an orphanage in Toledo, stated expressly that its incoming wards "have to be between the ages of seven and ten since the latter is the latest at which good doctrines and customs can be imprinted." ⁽²⁷⁾ It follows that sixteenth-century rulers placed great stock in the value and efficacy of early education; it moulded the Christian and the citizen for life. Diego de Simancas, a noted jurist of the era, put it this way: "...one of the most important functions of the State must be that children and youths are correctly educated and perfectly taught since subjects who are poorly trained as children grow up to be the worst enemies of the homeland." ⁽²⁸⁾ And for a society as preoccupied with the maintenance of orthodoxy as sixteenth-century Castile, the proper regulation of elementary education was indispensable. Subsequently, a continuous stream of rules and regulations handed down by municipal authorities, churchmen, and kings chipped away at the independence of the "masters of primary letters." ⁽²⁹⁾ Religious orthodoxy was of the highest priority, and this meant that the masters had to be proven Catholics. Otherwise, these instructors managed to preserve much of their freedom. Fathers interested in their services would seek out a local master, agree to pay him a certain sum, and seal the contract before a notary. Only rarely did ecclesiastical, royal, or even municipal officials intervene in the negotiations.

Operating therefore as private instructors, the cost of the lessons provided by the "masters of primary letters" was rather steep. In 1532, for example, Gomez Mosquera, resident in Santiago de Compostela, hired two masters at the cost of six gold ducats to teach his son Alonso to read and to write "in a script that scribes are able to sign." ⁽³⁰⁾ Other contracts reveal similar arrangements, although by the end of the century the services of a writing master for one year in Santiago and other nearby cities cost eight ducats and more, not to mention quantities of livestock and grain. ⁽³¹⁾ This was a sum few ordinary Spaniards could afford. ⁽³²⁾ According to contracts [13] from Galicia, private lessons were arranged only by a limited number of families, and then by wealthy landlords, lawyers, or master artisans in a luxury trade. Families of more moderate means sent their offspring to organized private and semiprivate schools, and it was there, in classrooms, that the majority of Spanish children who learned to read and write were taught.

Documentation for these "little schools" is almost nil, since few attained a level of organization that surpassed a lone master and one or two assistants; record-keeping, consequently, was at a minimum. Yet it is clear that such schools existed in numerous localities by the opening of the seventeenth century. The size of each depended on the popularity and price of the individual schoolmaster. Those who were eager for cash or exceedingly ambitious took on as many students as they could attract. So Alonso Martin de Canto, resident in Salamanca during the 1530s and author of The Art of Writing All Forms and Types of Letters, noted that he taught 150 pupils daily, ⁽³³⁾ while fragments of a 1642 inquiry in Madrid reveal schools ranging in size from 38 to 140 pupils. ⁽³⁴⁾

These relatively large classes suggest that individual attention was at a minimum, while keeping order must have occupied much of the school day. Presumably, teaching, most of which was done through the use of printed cartillas that demonstrated the rules of orthography and different writing styles, was rather difficult, and the pace at which students learned very slow. Such problems were compounded by an eight-hour day with a break only at lunchtime. Students were often bored, tired, and restless, and the recommendation of one sixteenth-century writer that special officers be hired to round up truants suggests that the schools could have been made more attractive. ⁽³⁵⁾ Other difficulties stemmed from the harsh physical punishments inflicted by masters intent on maintaining discipline and order. Such rigor earned for them the description of "barbaric idiots" from Cristóbal de Villalón and a reputation for "bestiality" from Sebastian de Covarrubias. ⁽³⁶⁾ Municipal and ecclesiastical authorities also complained of their cruelty:

they [the schoolmasters] should not treat the children or the adolescents cruelly, because this does nothing more than to make them hate to study. Treat them with kindness, applauding them loudly when they deserve it, praising them with due discretion in order that they are encouraged to go ahead with their studies. Furthermore, [14] the masters should have for their students the hearts of fathers, and they should look at them in this light, not as cruel witches who only enjoy themselves when they are making others suffer. ⁽³⁷⁾

But the system of sliding fees utilized in Madrid's schools may have also fostered within each classroom a separation of students which worked against those of humble origin and background. One can imagine the poorest students, the "readers" paying only two reales apiece, clustered in the back of the classroom and the sons of more prosperous families who were each paying six reales seated in front. Since teaching was grounded upon the premise that the master would collect a sum of money in accordance with the time he spent with each student, those paying the highest fees must have been favored to the detriment of others paying less, and this is exactly the situation which one petitioner late in the sixteenth century described. ⁽³⁹⁾ If such practices were widespread, it is easy to understand why contemporaries complained that too much time was required to teach children the rudiments of literacy. And in this perspective, it is also possible to see that the introduction of free primary education in the nineteenth century involved not only a widening of educational opportunities for the poor but also the end of a situation in which the poor, even though they might be in school, were permanently disadvantaged vis-à-vis children of wealthy backgrounds.

[15] In light of the discriminatory practices of many schoolmasters, the uneven quality of their instruction, and their eagerness to charge exorbitant fees, many towns, beginning in the middle of the sixteenth century, were prompted to bring private schools under some form of municipal control. This movement began in Spain's largest cities and aimed especially at rooting out incompetent masters and those charging excessive fees. A 1610 petition to the municipal council in Jérez de la Frontera, for instance, complained that the city's fourteen schoolmasters included individuals so ill-trained as to be unable to teach, among them several part-time teachers who were cobblers, barbers, and one who was only a student himself. ⁽⁴⁰⁾ Similarly, the city of Seville took steps to shut down schools of unlicensed masters, while attempting to fix the fees which masters could collect. ⁽⁴¹⁾ In Madrid, the situation was worse. Here as elsewhere, royal edicts on the licensing of schoolmasters had proven ineffective, and in 1600, with the consent of the Royal Council of Castile, the corregidor of Madrid was instructed to appoint examiners who were to inspect the credentials of "masters teaching in houses as well as those in private houses." ⁽⁴²⁾ Anyone not examined would be barred from teaching the three Rs, but in a city of 100,000 people, that was growing rapidly, many masters continued to teach on the sly. Twenty years later the corregidor ordered another inquiry into Madrid's schools, and on this occasion 44 masters were discovered, although the corregidor added that "there are others, unskilled and ignorant, who give lessons in houses and in the streets." ⁽⁴³⁾

Eager to impose strict licensing procedures were Madrid's established schoolmasters who, in the guise of maintaining educational standards, sought to limit their competition. This campaign was headed by Juan Diaz Morante, author of a book on how to teach the three Rs, who was later named to be a "master examiner" with the task of inspecting the credentials of all schoolmasters in Madrid. Writing in 1625, he complained "that there are more than 60 public masters, not including the many secret ones, and among these there are no more than three or four who know anything. For this city, fifteen good masters are enough." ⁽⁴⁴⁾ Morante added that unqualified masters, by charging low prices, jeopardized the careers of the reputable ones, since the "multitude prefer the cheapest schools." To bring an end to this state of affairs, he proposed a series of examinations to eliminate all but the most qualified teachers as well as a halt in the licensing of new masters, so that the total number of schools and schoolmasters would gradually decrease.

[16] In subsequent years Morante continued his campaign, arguing that if Madrid was to have good teachers, stiff examinations in the capital would not be enough, since ill-trained masters from other towns where licensing procedures were lax constantly drifted into the court city. Emphasizing this point, Morante claimed that the certification of schoolmasters should only be allowed in Madrid, because "there are not six masters in all of Old and New Castile, let alone all of Spain, who know the art [of the three Rs] well enough to be good examiners." ⁽⁴⁵⁾

In many respects Morante's complaints were justified. The capital was populated by the rich, the noble, the educated, the people most likely to seek an education for their children and pay well for it. As Madrid attracted beggars and thieves who hoped to live as parasites off the royal court, it also attracted teachers from other towns. This influx reached a peak during the second quarter of the seventeenth century, flooding the capital with schoolmasters, many of whom were no more than charlatans. ⁽⁴⁶⁾ Teaching in doorways and in stairwells, these unlicensed preceptors, or leccionistas as they were known, invariably charged lower fees than the established masters who ran organized schools. In danger of losing part of their clientele to this cut-rate competition, the licensed masters protested that "...among the leccionistas are some illiterates who have pretended to be masters with their own schools and with this title they loiter about the Court. From their classes completely ignorant persons who do not know how to read, write, or count have graduated. These unknown, 'foreign' leccionistas have given rise to other, more serious problems as well." ⁽⁴⁷⁾ Among these problems, so the regular masters alleged, was a reduction in their own ranks from 50 to 31. ⁽⁴⁸⁾

Viewed from another perspective, there was good reason for the leccionistas to exist. The established masters, however qualified for their work, had been charging excessive fees. In 1642, for example, Madrid's corregidor stated the fees demanded by the masters forced "many poor people to stop instructing their sons." ⁽⁴⁹⁾ Thus the leccionistas, though endangering the position and prosperity of the licensed schoolmasters, may have been able to teach literacy to segments of Madrid's population who would have otherwise remained ignorant.

In the end, the regular schoolmasters emerged victorious. In order to bring to a halt the unwanted competition and to protect their own interests, they organized in 1666, with the help of the crown, into a confraternity or guild, the Hermandad de San Casiano, that was empowered to set licensing procedures and to regulate student fees. ⁽⁵⁰⁾ By 1695 the schoolmasters excluded [17] from their newly self-proclaimed "noble" profession individuals who had previously exercised "vile and indecent" offices and prohibited "preceptors of grammar" from teaching primary letters, asserting that "the teaching of the one is incompatible with the other." ⁽⁵¹⁾ The guild subsequently limited the number of schools in Madrid, attempted to raise the standards required of new masters, and set the texts to be used, presumably with the aim of improving elementary education within the court city.

Abuses, however, remained, and this situation led the Bourbon monarchy in the second half of the eighteenth century to intervene in the guild's activities and to assume the supervision of elementary education in Madrid and elsewhere on an unprecedented scale. Charles III (l759-88) and his son, Charles 1V (1788-1808), acting on the premise that a literate society was vital to economic growth and religious orthodoxy, created the beginnings of a national program for elementary education in Spain. Examinations of new masters were given over to the Royal Council, elaborate licensing procedures were established, and in Madrid a normal school to train teachers, Spain's first, was created in 1780. By the close of the century the capital had twenty-four officially recognized schools of which eight, created by Charles IV in 1791, were designated as Royal Schools. ⁽⁵²⁾ So after centuries of sporadic and uneven regulation, primary education had at last become an instrument of national policy, designed to aid the kingdom rather than line the pockets of the schoolmasters.

Attempts by the Spanish Bourbons to organize public primary education can be traced not only to their interest in the ideas of the French Enlightenment but also to precedents within Spain itself. For centuries town councils and private individuals had been setting aside rents and revenues in order to organize rudimentary forms of public elementary schools, and, to a lesser extent, their work was matched by that of the Catholic church. Cathedral and collegiate churches commonly offered lessons in literacy to boys preparing for the priesthood, and secular students, paying fees, were frequently allowed to attend. The religious orders did much the same, particularly the Jesuits and Franciscans, both of whom provided free instruction. Officially, parish priests were also expected to teach the three Rs, although the extent and the quality of their contribution remains unknown. In most instances public instruction in literacy was the work of the towns. Schoolmasters were hired out of public funds and the fees, if any, charged to students were subject to municipal regulation. In addition, many town councils required local schools to admit a number of paupers free. ⁽⁵³⁾

[18] Arrangements of this nature were hammered out by hundreds of municipalities in the sixteenth century, although it is significant that large cities like Madrid, Seville, and Toledo, for example, did not follow suit. Despite pressure on officials in these cities to provide some form of subsidized instruction, they left instruction in literacy to private and religious schools, doing little more than supervise the work of these institutions and make sure that a number of poor children were admitted gratis. ⁽⁵⁴⁾ It would appear, therefore, that the tradition of public support of education in Castile was strongest in the small, provincial towns where the population was neither sufficiently large nor wealthy to support private schoolmasters of note.

So, with the exception of a handful of large metropolitan centers, the sixteenth century in Castile was marked by an extraordinary willingness on the part of municipal authorities to invest in public primary education. Teachers were paid and schools built out of the municipal budget, while subsidies offered to cathedrals and convents opened hitherto private classes to the public. At the same time, private schoolmasters were brought under some form of municipal control. The reasons for this early primary school movement are unclear. The appearance of the printed book in the late fifteenth century had certainly placed a premium upon literacy, spurring interest in learning how to read and write. But apart from families who sought to train their sons as notaries and scribes, there was never any pressure from below, no widespread, manifested desire on the part of the masses to obtain the necessary skills. Indeed, for most people living in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, literacy was no more than a luxury. Economically, its value was limited, and though it might offer some protection against forged documents, literacy was not worth the time, trouble, and expense it took to acquire.

Nevertheless, literacy was on the rise in sixteenth-century Castile, and this was a phenomenon directed and supported by people near the top of society, namely, the wealthy bourgeois and noblemen occupying positions on the local concejos, the town councils. Underlying their support was the conception that reading and writing were skills vital to the community at large and not simply a professional elite. Here one finds the influence of Renaissance humanists who stressed the importance of "learning" and "culture" for the citizenry, but, and perhaps more importantly, town fathers realized that literacy would allow the young, particularly the offspring of the poor, to enter into the Christian commonwealth. Spaniards in the sixteenth [19] century admitted the innocence of baptized infants, but they also believed that children who were left uneducated and unattended would follow their supposedly natural, "evil" instincts, become worrisome brats, and then lead depraved, criminal, and even heretical lives. ⁽⁵⁵⁾ Such reasoning was evident, for example, when the city of Seville in 1548 stated that neglected orphans would eventually become sinful and criminal in their habits "because having been brought up free and without a 'boss,' they divert themselves and that having been raised in liberty, when adults, they necessarily become destructive of the public good, corruptive of good customs, and disquieting to people and towns." ⁽⁵⁶⁾ To overcome such tendencies, it was understood that children should be placed in schools or at least in the care of conscientious adults to make sure that they were taught how to become loyal, obedient, pious, and industrious subjects. Such aims for childhood education were nothing new, but in the sixteenth century the program was emended to include the three Rs so that the means of indoctrination might be improved.

To achieve such goals Castile's cities began to establish schools and foundling homes for the care and instruction of abandoned infants, orphans, and the children of the large number of paupers (pobres) who constituted much of the urban population. The city of Seville maintained at the Cortes of 1548 that in the two years since it had built a House for the Instruction of Christian Doctrine in 1546 there were "fewer thieves than before, less disease and contagious illness, and more doctrine and better example among the poor." ⁽⁵⁷⁾ Hoping for similar results, other towns followed suit, supporting free or low-cost education for the poor and providing instruction in literacy, religion, and a number of "useful" trades.

Such subsidies, however, were unthinkable without a religious rationale. Fear of heresy was rife in the sixteenth century, and literacy was regarded as an excellent means by which the young could be taught the fundamental tenets of the faith. Religious orthodoxy could then be achieved, but only so long as subversive literature could be kept out of reach. The town councils and the Spanish inquisition shared this crucial task; the former would provide for, or at least look after, teachers and schools; the latter, through censorship, would keep the "poison" out. And together these agencies managed to preserve religious uniformity in Spain, a feat that no other European nation, with the exception of Portugal and the states of Italy, was able to achieve.

Simple Christian charity was also vital to the primary school movement of the sixteenth century. During this era of prosperity pious burghers, infused with Renaissance conceptions of learning, contributed freely to the spread of elementary education. The rationale they employed may have [20] been similar to that of Baltasar de los Reis, a Sevillian bookseller, who submitted the following petition to the aldermen of his city: "...I admit that for the love of God I want to give the poor children an ABC-primer that I have made because such a primer costs ten maravedís and poor widows do not have that sum to spend on such a book." ⁽⁵⁸⁾ Similarly, a petition in the Cortes of 1594 requested that the price of ABC-primers be held at four mrs.; it was alleged that these notebooks were selling at three and four times this price, "with harm to poor people whose sons, because they are children, ruin them." ⁽⁵⁹⁾ On another scale, such reasoning led to municipal subsidies to primary schools.

Thus for a mixture of social, religious, charitable, and personal ends, local authorities in the sixteenth century regarded public support of educational institutions to be an essential task, an effort which enabled the spread of lay literacy to make substantial if still limited gains. However, problems of finance and administration hampered this effort from the start, threatening not only the existence of the municipal schools but the continuing extension of literacy itself. Jérez de la Frontera's difficulties may have been typical. ⁽⁶⁰⁾ Master Firmiano de Marquina, the city schoolmaster, was also retained by the city council to write special letters to important dignitaries. In spite of his two posts, Marquina complained that he could not support himself, and in 1587 he quit. A new master was obtained, only to leave a few years later, and in 1600 the city complained that as a result of a local epidemic all of its writing masters, public and private, had either fled the city or were taken ill.

During the seventeenth century mounting inflation, monetary chaos, and administrative mismanagement continued to exact a heavy toll from the municipal schools. Short of money, many towns defaulted on their contracts with schoolmasters. They in turn raised their fees, but this often did little more than cause the number of students in attendance to fall. So, with uncertain and shrinking incomes, many schoolmasters abandoned the smaller towns for the larger cities, an exodus which left many communities without trained teachers, while triggering Madrid's complaints about "foreign" leccionistas.

The root cause of the difficulties faced by the municipal schools in the seventeenth century was not necessarily financial. Underlying this lack of support was a change in the attitudes of the rich toward education for the poor. Authors writing during this period of economic stagnation and decline were quick to point out the average Spaniard's supposed revulsion to manual labor, asserting that "excessive" education was its source. ⁽⁶¹⁾ They [21] argued that schooling served only to encourage youths to abandon the fields and workshops for other less economically productive pursuits, particularly those in the church. Saavedra Fajardo, a political writer during the reign of Philip IV, even maintained that education weakened the nation's defenses, since it weakened men's wills and corrupted their spirits. The more ignorant the populace, he wrote, the stronger the ruler. ⁽⁶²⁾ And while it is true that Saavedra Fajardo, along with other writers who were critical of education, aimed most of his fire at Latin schools and universities, ⁽⁶³⁾ the opinions of these writers seem to have helped to shape a reluctance on the part of Spain's urban patriciate to spend public monies for schools which had apparently brought only negative returns. As Castile's economic and political problems continued unabated, this skepticism was reinforced, compounding still further the difficulties of the municipal schools.

One other manifestation of this probable shift in opinion was a decline in the contributions of private individuals to public primary schools. Of course, there were those like Antonio de Varreda who left 100 ducats in his will to the "best" schoolmaster in Talavera de la Reina, with the proviso that twenty boys be taught for free. ⁽⁶⁴⁾ But in general it appears that the pace of such giving slacked off, particularly in the years following the decade of the 1620s.

To some extent, the increasing charitable role of the religious orders in public primary education compensated for the decline in private giving. Noted for their contributions to Latin and university education, as well as for their efforts to teach Indians in the New World, the religious orders did not take an especially active role in elementary education in Castile until the new Society of Jesus began to establish colleges of its own in 1547. ⁽⁶⁵⁾ In most of their colleges, the Jesuits offered free instruction in literacy as well as Latin, and in towns such as Huete, Logroño, and Plasencia they alone offered free instruction in the subject. Other municipalities, unable to secure qualified teachers on their own, looked to the Jesuits for aid, offering an annual subsidy if the Society guaranteed regular instruction. Guadalajara, for example, agreed in 1631 to finance one chair in Latin grammar and one "master of primary letters" if the Society supplied the necessary [22] teachers, ⁽⁶⁶⁾ this being an arrangement that was subsequently adopted by the cities of La Coruña and Pontevedra. ⁽⁶⁷⁾

Unfortunately, the Jesuits' efforts to improve elementary education in Castile were too little and too late. Their colleges, along with those of other religious orders, were relatively few in number and only a handful were situated in rural areas where the teaching of literacy was at its worst Furthermore, the state of Castile's economy in the seventeenth century was such that opportunities for free instruction were not sufficient to convince many families that they ought to send their sons to school instead of to work, the income from which could bolster the family purse. ⁽⁶⁸⁾

At the opening of the eighteenth century, Castile was saddled with a decaying system of municipal schools. Owing to the uncertain economy a  lack of private support, many had already closed. In others teaching was entrusted to unskilled instructors who themselves could barely read a write. In all probability, the incidence of literacy had ceased to advance and it may even have been on the decline. The end of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14) and the coming of the new Bourbon dynasty brought the promise of progress and reform, but recovery was slow and initiated only piecemeal. And even when Charles III made it his policy to reorganize the existing hodge-podge of schools and to create more free places for the children of the poor, improvements were limited to the larger, more prosperous towns. Rural communities, like Alcalá de las Gazules in Andalucia could write: "Because of the lack of competent instruction in [Latin] grammar and even in that of primary letters, the youth of this town are general very 'rustic'." ⁽⁶⁹⁾

The expulsion of the Society of Jesus from Spain and its dominions in 1767 seriously hampered efforts to improve the teaching of literacy. Naturally, the problems were at their worst in towns where the Jesuits had taught. Though private teachers and other religious orders moved in to fill the gap created by the expulsion of the Jesuits, costs were so high and money so short that many towns suffered more than a temporary lapse in instruction. In 1769, for example, an official in the town of Huete complained that the new masters appointed by the municipality were too young and inexperienced to teach properly, and he feared that unless something was done to improve the local school, Huete would in a few years become a totally illiterate community. ⁽⁷⁰⁾

[23] At this moment of crisis, however, the crown began to take seriously its commitment to bolster Castile's backward network of primary schools. Thanks to the influence of reformers like Pedro Rodríguez of Campomanes (l723-1803), fiscal (royal attorney) of the Royal Council of Castile under Charles III, and Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos (1744-1811), Minister of Grace and Justice to Charles IV, both of whom lobbied for the establishment of free primary education in Spain, some progress was made. Royal subsidies helped towns to reopen schools and hire teachers, while a flood of edicts devised new categories of urban and rural schools, new teacher-training procedures to fit each category, tax grants to support the establishment of new schools, and more scholarships for the poor. It is unfortunate that existing studies on these reforms are few, making it difficult to know their effectiveness or if parents responded by sending their children to school. Certainly, there was progress in some of the larger cities, but in small towns and country villages little in the way of more and better schools was achieved. And despite subsequent school reforms during the first half of the nineteenth century, Spain's population in 1860, according to official statistics, was 75 percent illiterate, one of Europe's worst scholastic records. ⁽⁷¹⁾ This figure suggests that in previous centuries no more than 10 to 15 percent of the population could read and write. ⁽⁷²⁾ Regardless of the Bourbons' good intentions, Spain in the antiguo régimen remained a kingdom overwhelmingly composed of illiterates.

The Illiterate

Those who were unable to read and write were most numerous by far in rural areas, the educational backwaters of early modern Spain. Organized schools in the hamlets and villages which dotted much of the Castilian countryside were few, and even in those localities where instruction was offered, either by a private master or the parish priest, its quality was notoriously low. Literacy, consequently, particularly in the smaller settlements, was much more the exception than the rule, a fact which is graphically illustrated in a series of tax lists (padrónes) prepared for Castile during the reign of Philip II (l556-98). ⁽⁷³⁾ For example, in Serranillo, a community of 30 vecinos (or about 150 inhabitants) in the province of Ciudad Real, the scribe preparing the padrón noted: "I testify that since there is nobody in the said village who knows how to sign for the alcaldes (mayors), nor do they [the alcaldes] know how to do it either, it is not signed." ⁽⁷⁴⁾ Countless other hamlets with fewer than 100 vecinos were in similar [24] straits; local officials, unable to sign their names to the padrón, made only their marks. ⁽⁷⁵⁾

The reason for this is obvious. Literacy a priori requires instruction, but small villages in the sixteenth century rarely possessed a resident who was able, let alone willing, to teach. It follows that nearly the entire village, with the possible exception of the priest, a few town officials, and a handful of rich peasants, was unable to read and write. On the other hand, only in village communities of substantial size, that is with 500 vecinos and more, did primary schooling begin to be organized and literacy become something less of a rarity. ⁽⁷⁶⁾ Orgaz, a wool-producing village of 550 vecinos even had a bachiller de gramática who was supposed to teach Latin, although in 1576 he was listed as a pauper. ⁽⁷⁷⁾ Yet this serves to illustrate that even those communities large enough to have a schoolmaster were not always more literate than those that did not, since these teachers, in the absence of subsidies, were obliged to charge fees which only a small minority of the local population was willing and able to afford. Looking for students, the schoolmasters of rural Spain were constantly on the go, moving from village to village in an attempt to gain a meager living from a countryside in which both the interest in and the incidence of literacy was uniformly low.

There were exceptions, of course. Villages which possessed an exceptionally pious or charitable señor might benefit from an endowed school, while others which happened to be near a monastery had an opportunity to educate their children free. Furthermore, there were village scribes who taught the three Rs to an apprentice or two, and conscientious priests would often do the same. There are references, for instance, "to parish priests and clerics" in villages in the north of Spain who taught "in their own houses for those who wish to attend." ⁽⁷⁸⁾ But not all village curas were so diligent. Uneducated themselves, many had neither the inclination nor the ability to teach their young parishioners anything more than to recite the Catechism and to understand parts of the Christian ritual. Such training, moreover, was often wholly by memory drill, since books, paper, and ink were luxuries in Spain's impoverished countryside. To be sure, a [25] number of village boys, thanks to the good graces of an interested lord or bishop, were able to attend choir schools in nearby towns, and a few of these were sent on to grammar schools, seminaries, and universities. But the vast majority of rural children remained unsponsored. Consequently, Spain's peasantry, too poor to support a schoolmaster, too hard-working to take time out for classes, remained overwhelmingly illiterate until the opening years of the twentieth century. ⁽⁷⁹⁾

But before one attributes the ignorance of the peasantry to a shortage of cheap village schools, it is also necessary to consider the peasantry's attitude toward booklearning itself. Spain's rural population never exhibited a strong, concerted demand for literacy, if only because this skill was long considered a luxury, wasteful and time-consuming, which provided few tangible benefits for those who acquired it. Hours spent in school meant hours lost in the fields, while whatever paperwork a peasant might ordinarily encounter could be handled by the village priest or a local scribe. And even if a peasant did manage to learn how to read and write, given the social and economic realities of rural life, his chances to improve his lot depended less upon these skills than upon ambition and hard work. Moreover, the high rates of infant and child mortality which prevailed among the peasantry until the late eighteenth century may have also created attitudes toward children which placed little premium upon education. If children were so delicate, poor peasants may not have stressed the importance of investing in the future of something so impermanent and vulnerable as that of a child.

The consequence of the shortage of rural schools and whatever attitudes the peasants attached to education was that the bulk of the rural population in Spain remained illiterate generation after generation. In an epoch which attached increasing importance and prestige to the ability to read and write, the peasantry stood apart. Lacking those skills, the road to further education, to the clergy, to offices, to wealth, and political power was blocked, except for a few children sponsored by the rich. The peasant remained an isolated figure, cut off from the urban, literate world by poverty and ignorance. Alone, he could maintain superstitions, magical beliefs, myths, and an oral tradition which had long passed out of fashion in [26] more literate circles. ⁽⁸⁰⁾ And this figure no doubt represented a strange, mysterious, and potentially dangerous fellow to the educated and the rich.

The peasantry was not the only undereducated group in Spanish society. Comparatively, the urban workers -- the daily wage-earners in the shipyards, the watercarriers, the attendants in the wool trade, the journeymen -- were little better off than their country cousins. Urban priests were normally far better educated than the rural curas, and in the larger towns most held university degrees. ⁽⁸¹⁾ Consequently, they may have taken greater initiative and been more successful in educating the poor of their parishes. Moreover, city schools, public and private, offered either reduced fees or free places for paupers, while the convents of those religious orders which offered free instruction to laymen were usually located near or within the towns. But the question remains: did the city's poor ever take regular advantage of these opportunities? One way to answer this is to determine the proportion of persons who signed parish registers at the time of their marriage or the baptism of their children, and this is indeed the way the incidence of literacy in historical societies is frequently (though somewhat mistakenly) calculated. ⁽⁸²⁾ Unfortunately, in most of Castile these registers are signed only by the priest and not by the interested parties. One exception is a register that was kept by the parish of Nuestra Señora la Vieja in the city of Burgos between 1587 and 1589. ⁽⁸³⁾ In the first year twenty-six baptisms were entered, and in nine of the cases the godfather or padrino "did not know how to write." In the next two years there were respectively thirty-five and thirty-seven baptisms; eight padrinos signed in the first instance, four in the second. The flgures for not signing would have probably been higher except that one literate person in the parish regularly served as padrino, and on other occasions clerics, students, scribes, and notaries were used to witness the event. More important is the fact that those padrinos who were unable to sign included a dyer, a gardener, two shoemakers, and a butcher, that is, skilled and semiskilled workers. Similarly, a certain Diego Martínez, a tailor resident in Madrid, claimed in a dowry contract of 1599 that he "did not know how to read" nor did a carpenter in Madrid in 1561. ⁽⁸⁴⁾

This information is nothing more than a handful of isolated cases from which no conclusions should be drawn, but it would be surprising to learn that literacy was common among unskilled and semiskilled workers in sixteenth-century Spain. Even late in the eighteenth century, an educational survey in Granada, a city with an abundance of private schoolmasters, [27] indicated that large numbers of children, particularly those of beggars and poor workers, arrived at puberty illiterate. ⁽⁸⁵⁾ Analphabetism remained the rule in most Spanish cities and towns until well into the nineteenth century, and so it was that the city, like the countryside, harbored its own isolated class, defined as much by culture as by income. Moreover, in the city where the contacts between rich and poor, cultured and uncultured, literate and illiterate were far more immediate and more striking than in the village, tensions between the two groups were perhaps more tense, more excitable than in the placid countryside. It may be no accident that with few exceptions the city was the stage for social strife in Spain between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. ⁽⁸⁶⁾

The poor were joined by another uneducated, semiliterate class of persons: women from all social classes. As recently as the middle of the nineteenth century, an incredible 86 percent of Spanish women were recorded as illiterate. ⁽⁸⁷⁾ Thereafter the establishment of free girls' schools raised female levels of literacy quickly, but before this epoch, Spanish girls were taught only by their parents and occasionally by a private tutor or a teacher in an orphanage or convent school. Furthermore, their training was customarily limited to the rudiments of literacy, religion, and the so-called "labors of their sex": sewing, embroidery, lace-making, etc.

Naturally, there were exceptions. Santa Teresa de Ávila, able to read the letters of St. Jerome (but only in Spanish) before she was out of her teens, was only one among a small group of female authors during the sixteenth century. ⁽⁸⁸⁾ And, surprisingly enough, around 1500 a number of women -- one was the daughter of Spain's famous classicist, Antonio Nebrija -- taught at the University of Salamanca, although it is not known whether their appointment was the result of Queen isabel's influence -- the presence of a female monarch may have raised the overall position of women in Spanish society -- or whether, in the first wave of Renaissance studies in Spain, Latinists were treated with respect regardless of their sex. ⁽⁸⁹⁾ Spanish girls in the sixteenth century were also allowed to sit in the same classroom as boys, but this practice met with increasing criticism and gradually disappeared. By the end of the seventeenth century the schoolmasters' guild of San Casiano emphasized the moral and spiritual dangers of teaching both sexes at once; it was then judged evil to have a maestro teach girls, [28] and even worst for a maestra to instruct boys, since under her influence it was thought that boys were in danger of becoming effeminate. ⁽⁹⁰⁾

Across Spain, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries coincided with the gradual separation of girls' and boys' schools in large cities and towns, although in smaller communities, too poor to support separate establishments, the sexes continued to mingle. ⁽⁹¹⁾ Private schoolmasters also violated the rules on sexual segregation, and in the late eighteenth century an official inspection of the nursery schools in Granada revealed young boys in the care of women and vice versa. ⁽⁹²⁾

With these exceptions, Spain in the seventeenth century created two worlds, one for men, one for women, separated symbolically by the iron grills on the windows of the townhouses of the rich. ⁽⁹³⁾ Indeed, this century, apparently marking the first great age of the dueña in Spain, also brought a new emphasis on the cloistering and protection of women; hard times may have placed a premium on advantageous marriages, with the result that the surveillance of girls became all the more important. In addition, counter-Reformation moralists and preachers dwelt vividly on the dangers of sin, and their warnings suggested the need to protect women by isolating them from the opposite sex until the age of marriage and beyond. Such attitudes and practices continued into the eighteenth century, when foreign travelers wrote of the ignorance of Spanish girls and the close parental supervision to which they were subjected until a beneficial match could be arranged. Thus by the end of the Habsburg era women in Spain seem to have lost much of what appears to have been an earlier epoch of independence and freedom. The result was a cultural pattern of feminine isolation and submission that was not to be broken until well into the twentieth century. This isolation no doubt encouraged a lingering fascination with amorous tales about rich, young, and handsome lovers, such as Don Juan, just as it encouraged the extreme piety and religious devotions made famous by mystics such as Santa Teresa.

Barred from boys' schools, girls in the seventeenth century had few of their own. Most of the larger cities supported orphanages and foundling homes for parentless girls, where they would be cared for and taught religion, literacy, and skills considered appropriate to their sex, but places were limited and many poor and abandoned girls, left on their own, roamed the streets as beggars, prostitutes, and thieves. ⁽⁹⁴⁾ Rich girls on the other hand had their own tutors, some of whom, even in the seventeenth century, [29] might be men. ⁽⁹⁵⁾ Convents also took in a number of girls, and instruction offered by nuns was undoubtedly the most widespread means of organized education for women before the eighteenth century. Only then did the crown call for the establishment and regulation of girls' schools. ⁽⁹⁶⁾ Meanwhile, the Society of Jesus, using contracted female instructors, offered lessons in literacy to girls as well as boys. ⁽⁹⁷⁾ By the end of the century new girls' schools had been established in Madrid, and, significantly, their program included instruction in Latin and mathematics. ⁽⁹⁸⁾

In spite of similar improvements in other large cities, female education in the early nineteenth century remained woefully inadequate in comparison with that of boys. ⁽⁹⁹⁾ Still accepted was the old motif, so common to Lope de Vega's plays: "When a woman knows how to sew, stitch, and mend, what need has she to know grammar or to compose verse?" ⁽¹⁰⁰⁾ Such opinions changed only at the end of the nineteenth century, when numerous girls' schools were founded, and by the opening of the present century the proportion of illiterates among females in Spain was 65 percent, a decrease of nearly 20 percent since 1860, and a figure which meant that Spanish women were only 13 percent less literate than Spanish men. ⁽¹⁰¹⁾

Sixteenth-century Spain harbored one other group, isolated and illiterate: the Moriscos, remnants of the old Moorish population living mainly in the south and east of the peninsula. Efforts to catechize this alien group were many, but efforts to educate them were few, another indication that Spain never wished to assimilate her Moorish population completely. Isolated attempts at education did take place and references to colleges specifically created for the Moriscos exist, but the effectiveness or regularity of this instruction is not known. ⁽¹⁰²⁾ Most Moriscos in the cities lived apart from the Christian population in their own barrios or districts; there the [30] activities of Christian schoolmasters and priests penetrated but little. And once the Moriscos were dispersed across Castile, following the revolts in Granada and the Wars of the Alpujarras in the l570s, they lived on the margin of the Christian cities, away from masters and from schools. Rather than educate the Moriscos, the crown in 1609 decided upon the expulsion of the minority from Spain.
 
 

For reasons of wealth, location, sex, and racial origin, the bulk of the population in Habsburg Spain found the skills of literacy either difficult or impossible or not worth their effort to obtain. This training, although not exclusive to, was nevertheless designed for and organized by an elite: urban, prosperous, near or at the top of the social hierarchy. After an initial extension of the school and probably of literacy in the sixteenth century, economic problems and a reluctance on the part of the rich to invest in charitable education for the poor fostered expensive private education to the detriment of the public schoolmaster. Simultaneously, many existing schools fell under the control of the regular clergy. During this epoch, progress toward mass literacy in Spain seems to have slowed, initiating a period of educational stagnation which continued well into the eighteenth century. Improvements then followed, especially when the crown began to take a direct interest in primary education and to create a nation-wide system of public schools. Gradually, the number of Spaniards who knew how to read and write increased, but little progress was made in this direction until the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In the earlier epoch, literacy was found in small pockets, outlined by social rank, geography, and sex, and this gulf between city and country, rich and poor, men and women, Christian and non-Christian, had its repercussions in the secondary schools and universities of Habsburg Spain.

1. The best introduction to the topic of children in history is Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York, 1962). See also John Demos, A Little Commonwealth, Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York, 1970); David Hunt, Parents and Children in History (New York, 1970); A. Macrfarlane, The Family Life of Ralph Josselin: An Essay in Historical Anthropology (Cambridge, 1970); Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewett, Children in English Society (London, 1969), vol. 1; and Lawrence Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford, 1965), chap. 11. An interesting collection of studies on the subject of children in history can also be found in the Annales de Démographie Historique, "Enfants et Sociétés," 1973.

2. Insights into some of the problems faced by peasant families in sixteenth-century Spain are available in Michael Weisser, "Crime and Subsistence: The Peasants of the "Tierra" of Toledo, 1550-1700" (Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 1972).

3. Literary evidence for patriarchialism in Spanish family life of the sixteenth and seventeenth cenuries can be found in Ricardo del Arco y Garay, La Sociedad Española en las Obras de Lope de Vega (Madrid, 1941), p. 628. by the same author see "La Vida Privada En La Obra De Cervantes,"RABM 56 (1950): 500. Also useful are P.W. Bomli, La Femme dans L'Espagne du Siècle d'Or (The Hague, 1950); and Caroline B. Bourland, "Aspectos de la Vida de Hogar en el Siglo XVII según las novelas de Doña Mariana Carvajal y Saavedra," Homenaje a Menéndez Pidal (1925), 2: 332.

4. A good example of this is the relationship between Mateo Vázquez and the son of his sister, Maria, widow of Andrea Barrasi. Vázquez, secretary to Philip II, directed the upbringing of his two nephews, Mateico and Agustinillo, even after the remarriage of their mother to Jerónimo Gasol. See J. Hazañas y La Rua, Vázquez de Leca, 1573-1649 (Seville, 1918), chaps. 2, 3.

5. There were exceptions, however. The Count of Lemos, nephew to the Duke of Lerma, Was a student at the University of Salamanca; see Marquis de Rafael, El Conde de Lemos (Madrid, I 1911), pp. 13-14.

6. Mateo Vázquez de Leca, nephew to Philip II's secretary, received income from various offices which had been entrusted to him at an early age by his father and uncle. Subsequently, his stepfather attempted with partial success to deprive him of this revenue. See Hazañas, Vázquez de Leca, chaps. 3, 4.

7. Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, part I describes the routine of childhood during the Anden Régime, while Arco, "La Vida Privada En La Obra De Cervantes," pp. 600-04, offers brief comments about the life and dress of Spanish children. Angel Valbuena Prat, La Vida Española en la Edad de Oro Según sus Fuentes Literarias (Barcelona, 1943), gives references to this subject as well. Also interesting is A. Rodríguez Marin, "Varios juegos infantiles del Siglo XVI," BRAE (l931). Juan Luis Morales, El Niño en la Cultura Española (4 vols., Madrid, 1960), provides a useful historical bibliography of pediatrics in Spain.

8. Hazañas, Vázquez de Leca, pp. 15-16.

9. Louis de Hericault, Les Loix Ecclesiastiques de la France... (Paris, 1730), chap. 1, art. xxx, p. 14. In the Middle Ages, the "age of discretion" appears to have come somewhat later. The Council of Beziers in 1246, for example, fixed it at seven, while the synodial statutes of Tournai in 1346 placed it around ten, "cirecter dicennium"; cf. J. Toussaert, Le Sentiment Religieux en Flandre a la Fin du Moyen Âge (Paris, 1963), p. 160.

10. Cristóbal Pérez de Herrera in his Amparo de los Legítimos Pobres (Madrid, 1608), recommended that at the age of eight poor boys be given jobs and girls be sent to find work as servants This work is cited in Morales, El Niño, 1 : 129.

11. Pedro López de Montoya, "Libro de la Buena Educación y Enseñanza de Nobles," in Las Ideas Pedagógicas del Doctor Pedro López de Montoya, ed. E. Hernández Rodríguez (Madrid, 1947), p. 257.

12. BE: Ms. L.I.l3, "Advertencias sobre el remedio que se podria poner para que los maestros de escuelas saquen con brevedad los muchachos en ellos buenos lectores y escribanos y contadores," folio 264, cites the complaints of schoolmasters during the 1580s "who say that one of the reasons they cannot teach the boys well is that some of the fathers order them not to whip [their sons], and if they do it, the fathers immediately remove their boys from the schools." For other arguments on leniency toward children in the sixteenth century, see Felix G. Olmedo, Diego Ramírez Villaescusa 1459-1537 (Madrid, 1944), p. xxiii.

13. See Hazañas, Vázquez de Leca, chap. 2, for decisions made by Mateo Vázquez regarding the schooling and future careers of his nephews. Curiously, young Agustinillo, aged six, who only a year earlier had demonstrated a preference for a room of "arms" and his distaste for "letters" by the tears he shed in school, was ordered into the household of the Archbishop of Zaragoza and launched onto an ecclesiastical career.

14. On the general question of children's passage to adulthood in the Ancien Régime, see Aries, Centuries of Childhood, pp. 25-26. For a critique of Aries' views, see Natalie Zemon Davis, "The Reasons of Misrule: Youth Groups and Charivaris in Sixteenth-Century France," Past & Present 50 (February 1971): 61, note 63.

15. See p. 12.

16. See Hericault, Loix Ecclesiastiques, chap. V, art. Ii, p. 78. In Spain, Hernando de Salazar, "Tratado que se dio el Rey el año 1643 sobre materias de gobierno y hacienda," BNM: Ms. 2375, folio 234v, claimed the age of fourteen for boys was "that of puberty." Antonio Xavier Pérez y López, Theatro de la Legislación Universal de España y las Indias (Madrid, 1791) 20: 71 , notes that in traditional Spanish law boys under fourteen and girls under twelve could not be accused of incest. Presumably, the law rested upon the premise that children below these ages were sexually immature.

17. AA Granada: leg. 894, "Visita a las escuelas de Granada, 1774-75."

18. For examples of these contracts, see Agustin G. Amezúa y Mayo, La Vida Privada Española en el Protocolo Notorial (Madrid, 1950), pp. 203-09. Not all of these arrangements were successful. Young Alonso de Contreras, apprenticed, so he later said, without his consent by his mother to a silversmith, refused to carry water for his new master's wife. "I said to her that I had not come to be a servant but to learn a craft." He then ran away to home where neighbors defended his action, believing that a boy should not be compelled to do something against his will. See The Life of Captain Alonso de Contreras, Written by Himself, trans. C.A. Phillips (New York, nd.), p. 15.

19. AA Granada: leg. 1864, royal pragmatic of 25.XI.l565.

20. Examples of these texts are Juan de Iciar, Recopilación Subtillissima Intitulada Orthographia Practica (Zaragoza, 1548); Pedro de Madariaga, Libro Subtilissimo Intitulado Honra de Escribanos (Valencia, 1565); and Juan de la Cuesta, Libro y Tratado para Enseñar Leer y Escrivir (Alcalá de Henares, 1589). Henry Thomas, "An Unrecorded Sixteenth-Century Spanish Writing Book, and More About Gothic Letters," Estudios Ofrecidos a Menéndez Pidal 3 (1952): 412-20, mentions a similar work by Alonso Martin de Canto which dates from the 1530s.

21. Cited by E.J. Zarco-Bacas y Cuevas, Relaciones de Pueblos del Obispado de Cuenca (Cuenca, 1927) 1 : cviii. A similar complaint was made by Juan Gutierrez Tello, an army officer in Seville, who in 1650 attributed part of what he called the "ignorance" of the times to the fact that noblemen put great care in looking for a good picador for their horses, "little or none in looking for a good master for the education of their sons"; cited in Felipe Picatoste, Estudios Sobre la Grandeza y Decadencia de España (Madrid, 1887) 3: 144.

22. See Hazañas, Vázquez de Leca, pp. 16-17.

23. See Lorenzo Luzuriaga, Documentos para la Historia Escolar de España (Madrid, 1916) 1: 5-9.

24. See E. García y Barbarín, Historia de la Pedagogia Española (Madrid, 1909), p. 65.

25. Olmedo, Ramírez de Villaescusa, pp. xxiii-iv.

26. Luzuriaga, Documentos 1 : 12-13.

27. AM Toledo: Registro Ms., "Colegio de los Niños de la Doctrina."

28. Cited in Zarco-Bacas, Cuenca, p. cxv.

29. For documents concerning the crown's policy toward primary schools in the sixteenth century, see BE: Ms. L.I.13.

30. Cited in Pablo Pérez Constantí, Notas Viejas Galicianas (Vigo, 1925), 1: 350. This volume lists a number of similar contracts.

31. Ibid., 1: 383.

32. A day laborer in Old Castile in the l530s earned no more than five ducats a year, and no more than seven or eight in the 1550s; private tuition was clearly out of reach. Even a master builder earning about 60 ducats a year would have been hard-pressed to spend 10 percent of his income on a private education for his son. These salary figures are approximations of actual wages; cf. Earl J. Hamilton, American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain, 1501-1650 (Cambridge, Mass., 1934), app. vii; Bartolomé Bennassar, Valladolid au Siècle d'Or (Paris, 1967), pp. 293-302.

33. See Thomas, "Spanish Writing Book," p. 416.

34. AVM: 2/376/19.

35. See BE: Ms. L.I.13, folio 264v.

36. Cristóbal de Villalón, El Scholástico, ed. M. Menéndez y Pelayo (Madrid, 1911), p. 106; A. González Palencia, Datos Biográficos del Lic. Sebastian de Covarrubias y Horozco (Madrid, 1925), p. 217.

37. Omedo, Ramírez de Villaescusa, p. xxiii.

38. Owing to the nature of the school program, reading was always much more prevalent than writing. For this reason, studies which purport to measure "literacy" by the incidence of signatures in a given population should be examined with care. For a brief discussion of some of the problems involved in measuring rates of literacy in the past, see Stone, "Literacy and Society in England, 1640-1900," Past & Present 42 (1969): 98.

39. See BE: Ms. L.I. 13, folio 213. That there were problems of division by social class in these schools is suggested in a story told by Alonso de Contreras. After playing hooky with the son of a constable, Contreras remembered that on the following day the schoolmaster, to punish him, "laid on with a parchment rod 'til he drew blood. This was done at the instance of the boy's father who was richer than mine." In revenge, Alonso, after school, stabbed the constable's son with a knife. See the Life of Alonso de Contreras, pp. 12-13.

40. See H. Sancho de Sopranís y Juan de la Lastra y Terry, Historia de Jérez de la Frontera (Jérez, 1965), 2: 317.

41. See AA Sevilla: lib. 22, nos. 1, 6, 7; J. Guichot y Parody, Historia del Excmo. Ayuntamiento de la... Ciudad de Sevilla (Sevilla, 1903), 2: 313; and Salvador Montoto, Sevilla en el Imperio (Sevilla, nd.), p. 111.

42. AVM: 2/376/ 1, decretos of 3, 26. VI.l600.

43. AVM: 2/376/10.

44. AVM: 2/376/12, letter of 20.III.1625.

45. AVM: 2/376/13, letter of 5.V.1626.

46. See AVM: 2/376/2-9, 11 , 26. These contain teaching licenses issued by the city of Madrid.

47. Cited in Luzuriaga, Documentos 1: 25.

48. Ibid., p. 25.

49. AVM: 2/376/19, letter of 9.XI.l642.

50. See Luzuriaga, Documentos I: 41 ff.

51. Ibid., p. 135.

52. Ibid., p. 240.

53. These contracts were often very precise; that of Betanzos, a town near La Coruña, might serve as a typical example. The Master Juan Domínguez de Busto received from the town in 1582 a six-year contract which stipulated that "he had to teach the students the 3 Rs, Christian doctrine, and all that a good master ought, and this for the salary he will arrange with the persons whom he teaches; moreover, he is obliged to teach without any remuneration three sons of poor residents that the city will send to him, and that when these are 'taught,' the city can send three more in their place." His maximum fees were set at one real a month for each pupil taught to read, one and one-half reales for those learning to read and write, and two reales for those busy with the 3 Rs. In addition to his fees, Busto was to receive an annual salary, paid by the town, of 6,000 mrs. This contract is cited in Pérez Constanti, Notas Viejas Galicianas, p. 385.

54. Zarco-Bacas, Cuenca, pp. cxviii-ix cites a petition to the city of Toledo which advised the establishment of municipally sponsored schools.

55. See AA Sevilla: Secc. 3, tomo 11, no. 52. This is a petition of 2.IX.1545 which lists some reasons for establishing an orphanage in Seville.

56. Cortes de Valiadolid, 1548, pet. 206. See also AA Sevilla: Secc. 3, tomo 12, no. 3.

57. Ibid.

58. Guichot, Ayuntamiento 2: 314.

59. Cited in Zarco-Bacas, Cuenca, p. cxvi, and Pérez y López, Theatro, vol. xiii, p. 20. See also the Leyes de Recopilación (Madrid, 1775), Lib. I, tit. vii, ley 30.

60. The following is taken from Sancho de Sopranís, Jérez de la Frontera, 2: 316-17.

61. See below, p. 43.

62. Idea De Un Príncipe Político Christiano (Munich, 1630), Empresa 66. This point of view is also expressed in P. Fernández de Navarrete, Conservación de Monarchías (Madrid, 1621), Discursos XLVI-XLVII and Abad Joseph Arnorfini de Illescas, "Discurso Hispano político sobre el estado presente de la Monarchía, 31 .III.1622" (BM: Add. 28, 455, folios 136 ff.).

63. See pp. 43-44.

64. AHP Toledo: lib. 422, f. 52 v. The testament is dated 27.IV.l65l.

65. In the Americas the religious orders had been active in bringing literacy to the conquered Indian population, ostensibly to aid in their missionary effort, right from the very start. In 1512, for example, the Franciscans had printed in Seville 2000 "cartyllas de ensenar a leer" for an expedition to the Americas. See F.J. Norton, Printing in Spain, 1501-1520 (New York, 1965), p. 13.

66. See F. Layna Serrano, Historia de Guadalajara y Sus Mendozas en los Siglos XV y XVI (Madrid, 1942), 4: 24.

67. See AHN: Cons. leg. 13183, report of Galicia, 1764.

68. In 1764 the town of Arcos de la Frontera reported: "the population of this city is in general composed of poor people. For this reason fathers commonly direct their sons into exercises that enable them to help support their families." As a result the city claimed that local schools were short of students. See AHN: Cons. leg. 13183, report of Arcos.

69. AHN: Cons. leg. 13183, report of Alcalá de las Gazules, 1764.

70. AHN: Cons. leg. 13183, report of Huete, 29.II.1769. The city of Caceres also mentioned a shortage of teachers at this time; see, in this same legajo, the report of Caceres, 5.IV.l768.

71. See Lorenzo Luzuriaga, El Analfabetismo en España (Madrid, 1919), p. 44.

72. My estimate is slightly above that of Manuel Fernández Alvarez, La Sociedad Española Del Renacimiento (Salamanca, 1970), who claims that only 10 percent of Spain's population in the sixteenth century was literate (p. 193).

73. These can be found in AGS: Exp. Hac., serie I.

74. AGS: Exp. Hac., serie I, leg. 82, Serranillo.

75. For example, see AGS: Exp. Hac., serie I, leg. 82, El Arguidalin; leg. 91-96, Daymalos; leg. 91-97, Vaños.

76. The distribution of Castile's rural population in the sixteenth century is known only for a few areas; cf. Noel Salomon, La Campagne de Nouvelle Castille a la Fin du XVIe Siècle (Paris, 1964), p. 42; and Michael Terrasse, "La Region de Madrid D'Apres Les 'Relaciones Topográficas," Melanges de la Casa de Velázquez 4 (1968): 153. It should be noted, however, that over one-half of the population of Old Castile in the middle of the eighteenth century lived in villages of less than 100 vecinos (cf. La España del Antiguo Régimen, ed. Miguel Artola, Fase. III, Castilla la Vieja [Salamanca, 1957], p. 41). And in the province of Salamanca, at the same time, only 15 percent of the population lived in settlements larger than 500 vecinos. 40 percent lived in communities with 100-500 vecinos, and the remainder were scattered in villages smaller than that (cf. Ibid., Fasc. 0., Salamanca [Salamanca, 1966], pp. 27-36). Such a dispersed pattern of settlement made it difficult to organize rural schools.

77. AGS: Exp. Hac., Serie I, leg. 180; leg. 39.

78. AHN: Cons. 5495, no. 2, letter of the Bishop of Mondoñedo, 28.IV.l785.

79. Luzuriaga, Analfabetismo, p. 14. The school legislation initiated by the Bourbons in the second half of the eighteenth century did little to establish rural schools or raise levels of rural literacy. The province of Navarre in the north of Spain, having been well-served by the Jesuits before their expulsion, was a well-educated region by Spanish standards. Yet twenty years after the Cortes of Navarre passed a measure in 1787 requiring all towns and villages to provide free and obligatory primary schooling, a regional survey indicated that only the cities and larger towns of the province had anything resembling formal schools and paid masters. Nearly one-half of the villages replying had no schoolmaster whatsoever, and in those that did, he was supported by student fees. One village, Goñi, responded pessimistically that its children benefited little from the local schoolmaster, since fathers were unwilling to pay the necessary fees, and, consequently, the children rarely attended classes. In 1910, illiterates in Navarre, the third best-educated province in Spain, still represented 43 percent of the population. See AGNA: lnstrucción Pública, leg. 3.

80. See Robert Mandrou, De la Culture Populaire aux 17e et 18e Siècles (Paris, 1964).

81. The university degrees of these curas can be verified in the vecindarios of Philip II's reign. See, especially, those for Granada, Madrid, Seville, and Toledo in the AGS: Exp. Hac., serie I.

82. See note 38 in this chapter.

83. AM Burgos: Ms. register "Bautizados en la parroquia de Nuestra Señora la Vieja (= Rua), 1586-1592."

84. Amezúa y Mayo, Vida Privada Española, pp. 22-24, 147-49.

85. AA Granada: Leg. 894, letter of 9.I.1777.

86. Urban centers certainly appear to be the stage of most of the rioting in the strife-torn year of 1766; cf. Laura Rodríguez, "The Spanish Riots of 1766," Past & Present, 59 (May 1973): 131.

87. Luzuriaga, A nalfabetismo, p. 44.

88. Saint Teresa's education is described briefly in her autobiography, La Vida de la Santa

Maria Teresa de Jesús, ed. Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, vol. 53 (Madrid, 1861), chaps. 1-3. For reference to other educated Spanish women in the sixteenth century, see Guillermo Furlong, La Cultura Femenina en la Epoca Colonial (Buenos Aires, 1951).

89. See T. Oettel, "Una Catedrática en el Siglo de Isabel la Cathólica," BRAH 107 (1935): 289 ff., and Vicente Beltrán de Heredia, Cartulario de la Universidad de Salamanca (Salamanca, 1971), 3: 303-15.

90. See Luzuriaga, Documentos 1: 37, 94.

91. In 1768, for example, schools of "mixed" sexes were banned in Cuenca; see AA Cuenca: leg. 1248, expediente 2.

92. AA Granada: leg. 894, visita of 1774-75.

93. On the question of feminine isolation in the seventeenth century, see Charles V. Aubrun, "L'Espagnole du XV^e au XVIII^e Siècles," Histoire Mondiale de la Femme, ed. Pierre Grimal (Paris, nd.), 2: 477-78.

94. Lic. Alonso Ruiz, head of the Home and Hospital for Orphan Girls in Seville, complained in 1639 about the abundance of young girls begging in the streets "who do not wish to work but to take alms from the 'legitimate' poor, the sick who cannot work, and the old." He wanted also a solution to the problem of cantoneras (prostitutes). See AA Sevilla: Secc. 4, lib. 24, no. 1.

95. Jerónimo de Barrionueva makes reference to a "licentiate-preceptor who gave lessons to women" in Madrid during the middle of the seventeenth century. See his Avisos, ed. A. Paz y Melia (Madrid, 1892), 3: 317.

96. See AHN: leg. 7294 which contains the findings of a 1714 inquiry into the state of girls' schools in Castile.

97. See J. Malaxechevarria, La Compañía de Jesús por la Instrucción del Pueblo Vasco en los Siglos XVII y XVIII... (San Sebastian, 1926).

98. Although girls' schools had existed previously in Madrid, they did not receive official recognition until 1783 when thirty-two such institutions were established by the crown; see Luzuriaga, Documentos 1 : 221-32. On new girls' schools in Córdoba, see AM Córdoba: Secc. 6, leg. 1, no. 12.

99. According to an inquiry conducted in Navarre in 1807, boys' schools outnumbered those for girls nearly two to one; see AGNA: Instrucción Pública, leg. 3.

100. See Aubrun, "Le Espagnole ...," p. 477. One play of Lope de Vega in which this motif is particularly evident is La Doncella Teodor.

101. Luzuriaga, Analfabetismo, p. 13.

102. The College of San Miguel in Granada, created in 1526 to teach moriscos, was converted in less than two decades into a college for Old Christians; see F. Montells y Nadal, Historia de la Universidad de Granada (Granada, 1870), 1: 552. BM: Add. 28,353, folio 114, a 1588 consulta of the Council of Aragón, refers to a "College of the Newly Converted" in Valencia.