Hornbook

Miss Campion holding a hornbook, 1661. From Tuer's History of the Horn-Book.

Hornbook in Derby Museum and Art Gallery

A hornbook is an alphabet tablet which served as primer for study and sometimes included vowel combinations, numerals or short verse.^[1] The hornbook was in common use in England around 1450,^[2] but may originate much earlier.^[3] The term has been applied to a few different study materials in different fields. In children's education, in the years before modern educational materials were used, it referred to a leaf or page displaying the alphabet, religious materials, etc., covered with a transparent sheet of horn (or mica) and attached to a frame provided with a handle.^[4]

Use in United States legal education[]

In United States law, a hornbook is a text that gives an overview of a particular area of law. A law hornbook is a type of treatise, usually one volume, which could be a briefer version of a longer, multi-volume treatise. Students in American law schools often use hornbooks as supplements to casebooks.

Use in early childhood education[]

In childhood education from the mid-16th century to the late 19th century, a hornbook was a primer for children consisting of a sheet containing the letters of the alphabet, mounted on wood, bone, leather, or stone and protected by a thin sheet of transparent horn or mica. Sometimes the sheet was simply pasted against the slice of the horn. The wooden frame often had a handle, and it was usually hung at the child's girdle. The sheet, which was first of vellum and later of paper, contained first a large cross, from which the horn-book was called the Christ Cross Row, or criss-cross row. The alphabet in large and small letters followed. The vowels then formed a line, and their combinations with the consonants were given in a tabular form. The usual Trinitarian formula – "in the name of the Father and of the Sonne and of the Holy Ghost, Amen" – followed, then the Lord's Prayer, the whole concluding with the Roman numerals.

In art, entertainment, and media[]

• The hornbook is mentioned in William Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost (written in the mid-1590s), act 5, scene 1, where Moth refers to the ba, the a, e, i, o, u, and the horn:

ARMADO. [To HOLOFERNES] Monsieur, are you not lett'red?

MOTH. Yes, he teaches boys the hornbook. What is a, b, spelt backward with the horn on his head?

HOLOFERNES. Ba, pueritia, with a horn added.

MOTH. Ba, most silly sheep with a horn. You hear his learning.

HOLOFERNES. Quis, quis, thou consonant?

MOTH. The third of the five vowels, if You repeat them; or the fifth, if I.

HOLOFERNES. I will repeat them: a, e, i—

MOTH. The sheep; the other two concludes it: o, u.

• Ben Jonson also describes it in his play Volpone (1605–06), act 4, scene 2:

CORVINO: ... And yet I hope that I may say, these eyes
Have seen her glued unto that piece of cedar,
That fine well-timber'd gallant; and that here
The letters may be read, through the horn,
That make the story perfect.

• Robert Burns, in his poem Death and Doctor Hornbook (1785), refers to a local schoolmaster with a sideline as an apothecary, as Doctor Hornbook.^[5]

References[]

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Horn-book". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Hornbook.

External links[]

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Hornbook

• Wood Hornbook from the Rare Book and Special Collections Division at the Library of Congress
• Ivory Hornbook from the Rare Book and Special Collections Division at the Library of Congress