Thomas Hobbes warns us in The Elements of Law that, although ‘words be the signs we have of one another's opinions and intentions’, these signs are never easy to read. Because of ‘the diversity of contexture’ in which our words occur, and because of the company they keep, it is difficult to rescue them from equivocation and ambiguity. Ruminating on the implications of this difficulty, Hobbes concludes that ‘it must be extreme hard to find out the opinions and meanings of those men that are gone from us long ago, and have left us no other signification thereof but their books’. The problem we face is that their writings ‘cannot possibly be understood without history enough to discover those aforementioned circumstances, and also without great prudence to observe them.’

My aim in the chapters that follow is to take Hobbes's warning to heart and try to follow his advice. My aspiration – to express it in Hobbes's words – is to supply enough history to understand the meanings and intentions of the writers I discuss by recovering the circumstances in which they wrote. As a first step in this direction, I need to clarify my use of the word ‘humanism’ in the title and body of this book. Some commentators have objected that the term lacks any precise meaning, and in particular that its use in connection with Hobbes's civil science ‘confuses rather than illuminates’ Hobbes's thought. But I have done my best to employ the term with a consistent meaning that was at the same time well-known to Hobbes and his contemporaries. When I speak of ‘humanism’ and ‘the humanities’, I am simply referring to a specific academic curriculum widely followed in the grammar schools and universities of early-modern England.

When early-modern pedagogues spoke of what Erasmus in his Apophthegmes calls ‘the liberall studies of humanitiee’, and what James Cleland in his treatise on education describes as ‘Humanities’, they were recommending a course of instruction comprising five elements: grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy. The emphasis in the grammar schools was overwhelmingly on the first two components in this syllabus. William Kempe in his Education of Children of 1588 proposes that at least five years of schooling should be devoted to grammar, that is, the learning of the Latin language.