Abstract

This chapter provides a synthesis of the ‘Reformation of Common Learning’, which progressively developed from Peter Ramus’s pedagogy in the mid-sixteenth century to the work of the Moravian Comenius in the mid-seventeenth. The essay stretches the traditional periodisation and disciplinary boundaries often applied to reformation studies. By implication, it calls into question the understanding of a seventeenth-century ‘post-reformation’ era, a point underscored by mid-seventeenth-century writers such as Milton who spoke of reform as a continuous process. The wider intellectual currents that were contemporaneous to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theological developments become essential to understanding the reception of reformation.