College of Antiquaries

During the early part of the 17th century, and persisting in some form into the early 18th century, there were a number of proposals for an English Academy: some form of learned institution, conceived as having royal backing and a leading role in the intellectual life of the nation. Definite calls for an English Academy came in 1617, based on the Italian model dating back to the 16th century; they were followed up later, after the 1635 founding of the French Académie, by John Dryden (1664), John Evelyn (1665), and Daniel Defoe (1697).

The proposals for an English Academy were initially and typically characterised by an antiquarian interest, for example in heraldry and medieval history. They represented a conservative wing in the larger discussion, and in different ways they informed approaches to the idea of a learned society as an active educational and regulatory body. In fact no such Academy would be set up, though discussion of the perceived need for one continued into the eighteenth century. The development of ideas on the language-regulation function of a putative English Academy was studied initially by Hermann Martin Flasdieck. Flasdieck distinguished three phases: first private initiatives up to the middle of the 17th century; then the Restoration period in which the Royal Society and its membership took an interest; and a later period in which proposals to mirror the French Académie met with serious opposition.

Nothing much came directly of such proposals, typically for an "academy royal" or court academy; but they formed part of a wider debate including the role of the universities, and the foundation of new institutions such as the successive Gresham College, Chelsea College, Durham College, and the Royal Society, which had very different fates, as well as the pansophic projects that failed to get off the drawing board.

In the early 1570s Humphrey Gilbert published The erection of an achademy in London, concerned with the education of wards and the younger sons of gentlemen. The proposed course included subjects seen as practical, as well as classical studies. This conception already had a generation of history behind it: in the reign of Henry VIII Nicholas Bacon (with Robert Carey and Thomas Denton) had reported on a project to create a new inn of court, conceived along the lines of a humanist academy. Bacon had then taken the idea further and combined it with legal experience of wardship, and in a paper of 1561 made a recommendation to the queen.

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