Sensory Discipline and Habit in Early Modern Education: The Italian Schools of Christian Doctrine

Increasingly across sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, schools paired training in behaviour with traditional instruction in reading and writing. Not only did the Council of Trent highlight the importance of training children in Christian comportment, but theological and philosophical tracts argued that the senses, rather than reason, governed human behaviour and so that habit guaranteed predictable actions. While connections among the senses, habit and behaviour became central to education by the early 1700s, these connections have remained little considered as historians have focused on teaching techniques and patronage history. This article explores such connections through the Italian Schools of Christian Doctrine, the network by which the Council of Trent instituted its training in Christian behaviour. It is argued that surveillance and strict choreography of student movement through school spaces became key techniques of instruction and thus that the history of early modern education converges with architectural and intellectual history.