ABSTRACT
Contemporaneously with the utopian, reforming literature of education a less conspicuous extension of schooling was proceeding throughout western Europe. Although its pace was quite uneven, a pattern can be discerned; its primary emphasis was the consolidation of religious belief through the school; its secondary motivation was to respond to economic, commercial and technological demands. Politically, the seventeenth century was characterized by the collapse of the great Spanish-Austrian Habsburg dynasty with the consequent enfeeblement of Spain, the emergence of France as the greatest nation of Europe under the absolutist rule of Louis XIV (1643–1715), and the strengthening of experiments in bourgeois democracy in England and the United Dutch Provinces. At the same time there was an increasing participation in European affairs of peripheral nations, chiefly those adjacent to England - Scotland, and to a lesser extent Ireland and Wales - along with Scandinavia, Prussia and Russia, and the newly founded European settlements in the New World. The religious crisis in France, however, remained a central issue in Europe; the action of Louis XIV in revoking the Edict of Nantes in 1685, ending a century of toleration towards Protestantism, proved completely 106ineffectual in stifling Protestant dissent and promoting national unity. The forces of dissent were much greater than any repressive edict could dissolve, and throughout the seventeenth century Catholicism in France was divided not only by the Huguenot confession but from within by continuing Gallicanism, along with the new movement of Jansenism. Into the conflict between these opposing religious forces the school was inevitably drawn.
