Renassaince Education

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Italian Renaissance Education: Changing Perspectives and Continuing ControversiesAuthor(s): Robert BlackSource: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 52, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1991), pp. 315-334Published by: University of Pennsylvania PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2709531.

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t a l i a n Renaissance Educationhanging Perspectives n dContinuing ontroversies

RobertBlack

Over the past hundred years studies in the history of Italian Renaissanceeducation have tendedto developin the wake of wider intellectual andphilosophi-cal movements. The great age of Italian posivitism at the turn of the centuryencouraged widespread research in local archives and led to the publication ofnumerous fundamental documentary studies, including Bellemo on Chioggia,Cecchetti,Bertanza and Della Santa,and Segarizzion Venice, Barsantion Lucca,Debenedetti on Florence, Gabotto on Piedmont, Massa on Genoa, Zanelli onPistoia, and Battistini on Volterra.1 Archival work was complemented by thestudy of manuscripts and early printed editions, particularly focusing on thecontributionof prominentteachers, including for example Rossi on Travesi,butmost notablehere was of course Sabadiniwith his work on Giovanni da Ravenna,Barzizza, and especiallyGuarino.2Such studies formed the basis of Manacorda'sV. Bellemo, L'insegnamentoe la cultura in Chioggia fino al secolo XV, Archivioveneto,n.s., 35 (1888), 277-301, and 36 (1888), 37-56; B. Cecchetti, Libri, scuole, maestri,sussidii allo studio in Venezia nei secoli XIV e XV, Archivio veneto, 32, pt. 1 (1886),

329-63; A. Segarizzi, Cenni sulle scuole pubbliche a Venezia nel secolo XV e sul primomaestro d'esse, Atti del R. Istituto Veneto di scienze, lettere ed arti, 75 (1915-16), pt. 2,637-67; E. Bertanzaand G. Dalla Santa,Documentiper la storiadella cultura in Venezia,I: Maestri, scuole e scolari in Venezia verso la fine del Medio Evo (Venice, 1907); P.Barsanti, II pubblico insegnamentoin Lucca dal secolo XIV fino al secolo XVIII (Lucca,1905); S. Debenedetti, Sui piu antichi 'doctores puerorum'a Firenze, Studi medievali,2 (1907), 327-51; F. Gabotto, Lo stato Sabaudo da Amedeo VIII a Emanuele Filiberto,III: La cultura e la vita in Piemonte nelRinascimento (Turin, 1895);A. Massa, Documentie notizie per la storiadell'istruzionein Genova, Giornalestoricoe letterariodella Liguria,7 (1906), 169-205, 311-28; A. Zanelli, Del pubblico insegnamento in Pistoia dal XIV alXVI secolo (Rome, 1900); M. Battistini, II pubblico insegnamentoin Volterradal secoloXIV al secolo XVIII (Volterra, 1919).

2 V. Rossi, Un grammatico cremonese a Pavia nella prima eta del Rinascimento,Bollettino della Societa Pavese di Storia patria, 1 (1901), 16-46 (reprinted in his Dalrinascimentoal risorgimento Florence, 1930], 3-30); R. Sabbadini,Giovannida Ravenna,insigne figura d'umanista (1343-1408) (Como, 1924); Studi di GasparinoBarzizza suQuintilianoe Cicerone(Livorno, 1886); Lettere e orazioni edite e inedite di GasparinoBarzizza, Archiviostorico lombardo, 13 (1866), 363-78, 563-83, 825-36; Vita di GuarinoVeronese Genoa, 1891);and La scuola e gli studi di Guarino Guarini Veronese Catania,1896).

315Copyright 1991 by JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS, INC.

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316 Robert BlackStoria della scuola in Italia. II medioevo,3which, although primarily concernedwith the earlier Middle Ages, nevertheless extended its scope into the fourteenthand fifteenth centuries.

All these works, including Manacorda's survey, enjoyed the advantages aswell as the limitations of other studies influenced by positivist fashions. Thecontents and the problemswere usually determinedby the documentaryevidenceuncovered. There was little need felt to go beyond empirical discussion to forma broader or more analytical view of the development of schools and educationin Italy. There was much importantand extremely interestingmaterialbroughtto light, but no overall synthesis or general picture emerged. It is characteristicof all this work that there was almost no assessment of the impact of humanismand the Renaissance on education;not even Sabbadini came up with a coherentevaluation of Guarino's place in the overall history of schools and teaching.When Eugenio Garin turned to the study of Renaissance education after theSecond World War,4Italian intellectual fashions had changed: positivism hadbeen discredited and the dominant currents were neo-Hegelian and very oftenCroceanor Gentilian idealism. Garin's reaction to Sabbadini'swork on Guarinoshows how much the climate had altered:On closer inspection, the fact that several decades of tireless and constant work,conducted with great rigour and over a vast horizon, did not even lead to anattempt at [genuine]history is not without good reason. The material, at timeschaotically assembled,was too much and too little.... Whoever looks at Sabba-dini's notes and at his attempts at synthesis will be almost dumbfounded;thecontours are dulled, all is lost in a uniform grey. The discussion of particularpointsdoes not alwaysmeet the needfor a comprehensive udgement;all historicalperspectiveis diminished.5Garin here reveals the impatience of a new generationwith the outmoded waysof their predecessors.Garin, unlike his positivist antecedents,does not see his principal purpose asan intellectual historian in bringing to light new evidence or information whichthen of itself will lead to greater knowledge; although he has examined and evenedited a number of unpublishedsources for Renaissance education,6most of hiswork consists of reinterpretingpublishedsources and secondarymaterial.Indeed,it is his major contribution to have developed a highly focused, yet broadlyrangingview of Renaissance education and particularlyof the impact of human-ism on schools and teaching.Garin's interpretation is based on a sharply drawn contrast between theMiddle Ages and the Renaissance. He paints a gloomy picture of late medievalscholastic methods, aims, and curriculum.He suggests that barbarousdiscipline

3Milan, Palermo, and Naples, 1914.4 E. Garin, L'educazione umanistica in Italia (Bari, 19532); L'educazione in Europa(1400-1600) (Bari, 1957); ed., II pensiero pedagogico dello Umanesimo (Florence, 1958);and Guarino Veronese e la cultura a Ferrara, Ritratti di umanisti (Florence, 1967),69-106.

5Ibid., 79-80.6 See especially his Pensieropedagogico, 434ff, 534ff.



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Italian Renaissance Education 317was the norm in medieval Italianschools.7The mainstaysof the curriculum weremanuals such as Ianua, Alexanderof Villedieu'sDoctrinale,Everard of Bethune'sGraecismus,Giovanni of Genoa's Catholicon,Papias and Hugutio of Pisa's Deri-vationes;these were, he continues, read mainly in conjunction, not usually withthe Roman classicsbut with the traditionalschool authors such as Cato'sDistichs,Ecloga Theoduli,Facetus, Matthew of Vendome's Thobias,Liberparabolarum,Aesop's fables (translated by Walter the Englishman),Floretus,Prudentius'sEvaColumba(Dittochaeum),Prosperof Acquitaine'sEpigrams,and the Physiologus.From such a curriculumboys weretaughtcontemptfor the secularworld;indeed,all medieval education-even at its most classicizing-was directed, accordingto Garin, to religious, theological, and spiritualgoals.9When the Roman classicswere occasionally broughtinto the schoolroom, they were a means to an end, notan end in themselves.10Indeed, it had been the fundamental antipathy of theMiddle Ages to classical culture more than the barbarian invasions which, forGarin, had destroyed the ancient world.11When secular learningwas cultivatedin the later Middle Ages, it was for technical, professional training, to allow eachindividual to fit into his appropriatelevel in the social hierarchy.12Scholasticeducation was fundamentally antipathetic to the empirical study of nature or toany real content in education;texts, not genuine subjectsin themselves, were theobjects of learning:13For Garin, Renaissance humanism represented a revolutionary change inEuropeanculturalhistory, and this dramaticnew force was particularlypowerfuland effective in the classroom. Most important were new aims for education:The school createdin fifteenth-centuryItaly was ... an educatorof man, capableof shapinga child's moral characterso as not to be preconditionedbut free, openin the future to every possible specialization, but before all else humane andwhole, with social links to all mankind and endowed with the prerequisitesforthe mastery of all techniquesbut in full self-control ... and not liable to run therisk of becoming a tool itself.14In this new process of the liberal education of the whole man, Garin emphasizesthe role of the classics- the discovery of the antique accomplished by thehumanists, their discovery of man as an individual entity, historically concreteand determinable. 15The study of the ancients representedtheacquisitionof historical consciousness and critical consciousness, of awarenessofself and others, of an understandingof the fulness of the human world and itsdevelopment.... The revived study of the ancients, rediscoveredas such, cameto signify the discovery of a sense of human colloquium and collaboration, theinitiation to the world of men. Educating youth in the classics truly thus helped

7Europa, 21.8Ibid., 26; Pensieropedagogico, 91-104.9Europa, 82-85.1 Ibid., 51-52.1Ibid., 44.12Ibid., 71, 93.13Ibid., 70ff.14 Guarino, 75.5Europa, 102.



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318 Robert Blackto provide the beginningof an awarenessof the human community in its develop-ment and its unity.16Garin'sview is that objectiveself-knowledgeis developedonly throughknowledgeof others: to know himself, an individual must be able to take someone else'sperspective. This is what Garin believes the humanist educators accomplishedwith their revival of antiquity. Through their philological, critical, historicalunderstanding of the ancients, they enabled their pupils to know the great,exemplary figures of antiquity and hence to know themselves. This could nothave occurredin the Middle Ages because antiquitywas not then studied histori-cally and objectively for its own sake but rather subjectively and uncriticallyand so medieval classical studies-insofaras they existed-could not lead to thedevelopment of the whole man.New aims mean a new curriculum and so Garin points to the abrupt changeof textbooks. The auctoresocto tend to disappearrapidlyfrom Italian schools....In their place are substitutedmanuals and adaptationsby Guarino and the directreading of the classics. 17New aims also mean new types of institutions. Thehumanistschools were identical to neither the elementaryschools nor the univer-sities of medieval Italy. Educators such as Guarino Veronese or Vittorino daFeltre, as well as their humbler imitators among communal teachers, developedbroader institutions of secondary instruction, which provided a wide generaleducation,taking pupilsfromelementaryLatinup to the threshold of professionaluniversity study. According to Garin, they were not mere grammarschools butprovidedteaching in all the subjectsof the trivium and quadrivium,as well as inphilosophy in its widest sense. They minimized the study of formal grammar,emphasizing instead the direct readingof the classics; moreover, they used textsnot as ends in themselves as in the Middle Ages but as genuine gateways to realsubjects.They were not guardiansof the social hierarchy,givingtechnicaltrainingfor narrow professionsor occupations, but they educated all men equally beforethe choice of a career. True to their concern with the development of the wholeman, humanist educators abandoned the cruel and barbarousdiscipline of themedievalschoolmastersin favorof persuasion,example,and reason.18 From Italy,this educational revolution engulfed Northern Europe: a Parisian master, if hehad reawakenedafter a century'ssleep, at the middle of the Cinquecento,wouldnot have recognizedthe world of learning,would have found nothing with whichhe had been familiar. In Italy, the phenomenon occurredfirst, almost a hundredyears before. 19

Although this picture of humanist education was not without its precursors(the most notable of which was Giuseppe Saitta'sportraitin L'educazione dell'u-manesimo in Italia),20Garin's formulationquickly establisheditself as the ortho-dox interpretation;and it was only in 1982 that a fundamental challenge wasmounted by Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine with their article Humanism

'6 bid., 103.17Pensieropedagogico, xxii.18 See especially Guarino, 74ff; Educazione umanistica, 1-10; Pensieropedagogico,xi-xiii, xix-xxi; Europa, 21, 24, 27, 85ff, 102ff, 114, 120-21, 124, 137.9Ibid., 14.20Venice, 1928.



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Italian Renaissance Education 319and the school of Guarino: a problem of evaluation, 21which was then incorpo-rated into their book, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and theLiberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-CenturyEurope.22While Garin lackssympathy with scholasticism and deeply identifies with humanism, the oppositeis true of Grafton and Jardine:they see humanism as the modem foundation ofthe liberal artsmovementin education,againstwhich, it would be no exaggerationto say, they are launching an open polemic. In essence they reject the equationbetween characterbuilding and the study of a canon of texts which is fundamen-tally assumedin all systemsof liberaleducation,whetherby Cicero andQuintilianor the Renaissance humanists, Gentile and Garin, or Eliot and Leavis. On theother hand, they champion the merits of scholasticism on intellectual as well asutilitarian grounds:Scholasticism was very much a going concern in the fourteenth and fifteenthcenturies. At the level of the school, it offered literacy in Latin of a sort tothousands of boys. At the higher level of the university arts course, it provideda lively and rigorous training in logic and semantics. At the higher level still ofthe professional faculties of law, medicine, and theology, it trained men foremployment in powerful and lucrative occupations. And on its fringes, in theseverelypracticalcourseson the artsof the notary, it even taught the future estatemanager,governmentclerk or solicitor how to keepbooks, drawup contractsandwrite business letters ... it was no sterile indoctrination in the authoritativemessages of a few selected texts. Recent research ... has brought to light vast,unsuspectedviews of insight and speculation ... The liquidationof this intellec-tual system was clearly the murderof an intact organism, not the clearing awayof a disintegratedfossil.23

On a more concrete level, Grafton and Jardine examine Guarino's school onthe basis primarily of four commentaries apparently deriving from Guarino'sactual classroom practice.These seem to show that, whether Guarino was teach-ing his own lexical Carminadifferentialia, Vergil's Georgics,Rhetoricaad Heren-nium, or Cicero'sDe amicitia,his focus was on language, grammar,andphilology(in its broad sense including historical,mythological, and geographicalexegesis),not on moral philosophy;24n other words, despite Guarino's own claims that heshapedhis pupils'characters,equippingthem for the active life in order to benefitstate and society, he in fact offeredlittle explicit trainingin morals. Grafton andJardine therefore conclude that the product provided by humanist teachers didnot live up to the claims of their advertising.25Why then did parents,civic governments,rulers,or the church employ theseself-importantand dubious educators?Graftonand Jardineanswerthat humanisteducation was not successfulor appealingbecauseit created bettermen but rather

21Past and Present, 96 (1982), 51-80.22 London, 1986. An earlier, more limited critique of Garin's work on humanisteducation had been made by David Robey in his article Humanism and Education inthe Early Quattrocento: he De ingenuismoribusof P. P. Vergerio, Bibliothequed'human-isme et renaissance,42 (1980), 27-58, where he argues that Vergerio's treatise is moreconcerned with learning for its own sake than with inculcating civic virtue in pupils.23From Humanism to the Humanities, xii-xiii.24Ibid., 12-15, 18-19, 22.25 Ibid., 2-3, 14, 23, 25.



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320 Robert Blackbecause its tedious philological and mnemonic methods, with their emphasis onrote learningratherthan analysisand logical argument,trainedpupils to be docileand servile-hence the potentially maleable bureaucrats who would become cogsin the emergingabsolutist regimesof early modem Europe;scholasticism, on theother hand, was unsuited for this new social and political function of educationbecause it trained men to think and argue for themselves:The new system, we would argue, fitted the needs of the new Europe that wastaking shape, with its closed governing elites, hereditary offices and strenuousefforts to close off debate on vital political and social questions. It stamped themore prominent members of the new elite with an indelible cultural seal ofsuperiority, it equipped lesser members with fluency and the learned habit ofattention to textual detail and it offered everyone a model of true culture assomething given, absolute, to be mastered,not questioned-and thus fostered inall its initiates a properly docile attitude to authority. The education of thehumanistswas made to order for the Europeof the Counter-Reformationand oflate Protestant orthodoxy. And this consonance between the practical activitiesof the humanists and the practical needs of their patrons, we argue, was thedecisive reason for the victory of humanism. Scholasticism bred too independentan attitude to survive.26

The studies of Garin, on the one hand, and of Grafton and Jardine,on theother, might best be approachedas contributions which have set the terms of aheated debate;their works are not necessarily the balanced reflections of uncon-troversial authorities. Nevertheless, in his book, Schooling in RenaissanceItaly:Literacyand Learning, 1300-1600,27Paul Grendlerhas tended to regardGarin'sview as the definitiveinterpretationof the influence of humanismon Renaissanceeducation, while discounting the critique of Grafton and Jardine. FollowingGarin, he paints a negative picture of late medieval Italian school education;hedenies the widespread teaching of the Roman classics (if they were used at all,one suspects that the pupils read only selections, perhaps in florilegia )28andasserts the predominance,until the arrival of the humanists, of the traditionalmedievalschool authors.29Moreover,like Garin, he emphasizesthe wider limita-tions of medieval thought: The Middle Ages were profoundly unhistorical. 30The coming of the studia humanitatis, on the other hand, represented acurriculum revolution, one of the few in the history of Western education, inthe relatively short time of about fifty years-1400 to 1450. 31Like Garin, heemphasizes the decisive discarding of the medieval syllabus: The humanists ofthe fifteenthcenturychangedthe Latin curriculum,a majoracademic revolution.They discardedthe late medieval Latincurriculum of versegrammarsand glossa-ries, morality poems, a handful of ancient poetical texts, and ars dictaminis. 32Grendler, again like Garin, concedes that classical Latin poetry was taught in

26Ibid., xiii-xiv.27 Baltimore, 1989.28Ibid., 116.29Ibid., 111-17.30Ibid., 255.31Ibid., 140-41.32Ibid., 404.



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Italian Renaissance Education 321the medievalclassroom,33and so he limits the novelty of this revolution primarilyto the introductionby humanist pedagoguesof Cicero's letters into the grammarsyllabus: Above all, they inserted the letters of Cicero as the Latin prosemodel. 34He stalwartly defends this picture against the assaults of Grafton andJardine. He suggests that their critique is anachronistic:the Latin humanistic curriculum lasted so far beyond the Renaissance that atwentieth-centuryperspectivemay underlie some of the criticism. But a curricu-lum and educational structureneed satisfy on its own era. Viewing Renaissanceschooling within the context of the Italian fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenthcenturies makes it difficult to agree with the criticism.35Moreover, he opposes Grafton and Jardine's conclusion that the content ofhumanist pedagogy did not live up to its pretentious claims of moral improve-ment: they have objectedthat Italian Renaissance Latin education failed to inculcate the values of thecitizen-orator, partly because of a preoccupation with the minutiae of learningVergil, Cicero, and others. Obviously, schools devoted a great deal of effort tominutiae, particularlyat the primary and secondary levels. But there seems noreason to doubt that teachers and theorists who asked students to compile note-books of moral and civic sententiaetried to teach these values. And the reading,from the Disticha Catonis o Cicero'sletters,was full of moral and social common-places.36

Grendler is certainly right to stress that Grafton and Jardine have beeninfluenced by the climate of moder pedagogic debate, but it also needs to bepointedout that Garinhas been equallyaffectedby twentieth-centuryeducationalcurrents. Grafton and Jardineseem to reflect recent disillusion with the elitismof an establishment whose monopoly of influence and status has been in partguaranteedby the mystique surroundinga classical, liberal arts education suchas that providedby the public schools and Oxford and Cambridge,while Garin'sworks are powerfullyredolentof Italian educationalpreoccupations.In 1923 theidealist philosopher, Giovanni Gentile, as minister of education, reorganizedItalian secondary schooling, shifting the emphasis from a technical to a broadernon-specialized curriculum. After primary school, scuole complementariwereestablished,furnishingthe majoritywith a generalacademic educationandreplac-ing the old technical schools which were abolished; the technical institutes re-maining were downgraded,providing for only about half as many pupils as theformer technical schools. Gentile reorganized the syllabus too, putting morestress on humanities such as Italian literature and history; Latin, previouslylimited to the licei, was introduced into technical institutes, teacher-trainingschools (istitutimagistral) and scientific and girls' licei. Philosophy, not surpris-ingly, was to be taught not only in licei classici but even in istituti magistraliandlicei scientifici;it became the key, unifying subjectof the curriculum.Even whenthese reforms were watered down throughout the 1930s, the humanist tone of

33 bid., 116-17. See Garin, L'educazione umanistica, 5.34Schooling, 404.35 bid., 407.36 bid., 408.



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322 Robert BlackItalian secondary education remained,and Latin became the core subjectof thecurriculum at the new scuole medie established as junior secondary schools formost of the population.37

Of course these reforms,introducedby and identified with the Fascist regime,became controversialin the heated political atmosphereof post-war Italy. Garinwas not the only non-Fascist who did not want to lose what many Italian intellec-tualsconsideredto be one of the main achievements of the Fascists under Gentile'sguidance-the establishment of a national humanist, liberal arts education notjust for an elite but for a wide segment of the population. Hence, Garin's impas-sioned defenseof the humanist school in the forewordto L'educazionein Europa;indeed, he explicitly relates his forthcoming historical treatment of Renaissanceeducation to the contemporary debates, ever more intense, on the reform ofItalian schools. 38For him, humanist education was and is not the study of deadlanguages but a moral formation in contact with exemplary human experience,shaping the critical historical consciousness. Humanist education gives freedomfrom tyranny, whether of bosses, institutions, machines, organizing groups,church, or state. The association with exemplaryindividuals of the past leads tocritical and tolerant understandingand a concrete sense of humanity. He rejectsa type of schooling in which each person is given a technical training accordingto his social station and function, thus perpetuating class differences. Instead,youth should be broughtby generaleducationto the point of professionalchoice,so that they can think, direct and control the political leadersthemselves.39Garinmight just as well be speaking of the dispute between humanists and scholasticsin the Renaissance as of the debate between Gentilian theorists and technocratsin the twentieth century. He identifies the educational issues of contemporaryItaly with those of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.Grendler has the considerablemerit of greaterdetachment than either Garinor Grafton and Jardine,but following Garin as the authorityon humanist educa-tion can mean adopting a thesis which is not only the product of educationalpolitics but also one that is enmeshed in the intellectual world of neo-Hegelianidealist philosophy. Garin repeatedly emphasizes freedom as the end result of ahumanist education, maintaining that liberal studies create the free man, anidea which is connected with Croce's central tenet that the history of mankindrepresentsan instinctive striving for freedom, that history is the story of liberty.Croce's stress on the self-development of the human spirit through history isreflected in Garin's view that through the historical study of the ancients thewhole man is formed. Croce'srejectionof materialismin favor of idealismis seenin Garin's view that a humanist education gives men ideals, not material benefitsgained through vocational competence; similarly, this Crocean emphasis on thehistorical development of ideas rather than things is found in Garin's view thatthe difference between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is not so much amaterial distinction in the level of classical culture as a new intellectual attitude

37 Martin Clark, ModernItaly (London, 1984), 276-78. L. Minio-Paluello, Educationin Fascist Italy (London, 1946), contains an excellent outline of educational reforms inItaly under the Fascists, as well as a lucid explanation of Gentile's educational theory andits close parallels to Croce's ideas on pp. 68-75.38Europa, 5.39 bid., 5-11.



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Italian Renaissance Education 323towards the classics. Garin is a true Crocean historicist:historicism's axiom thatthere are no absolute standardsand that everythingis contingent on its historicalposition is found in Garin's emphasis on the humanists' discovery, through theirliberal education, of the diversity of man and his development: they acquire analmost Crocean enlightened relativism, realizing there is no unique truth, thatknowledge [scienza]in 1400 cannot be the same as [it was] in 500 B.C., that itis organic and the rationalresult of precisedata. 40For Garin, through philologyand liberaleducation,pupils in the Renaissance became aware of the individualityof all human societies and of the entire historical process; his view that trueclassical learningresults only from historical understandingreflectshistoricism'spostulate that genuine knowledge can be obtained only through history.Particularly historicist are Garin's tendency to see events and phenomenain terms of a larger historical process and his suggestions that only throughcomprehendingthese greaterhistorical abstractionscan concreteeventsbe under-stood. Thus the succession of Barzizza to Travesi as the communal grammarianof Verona representeda profound changeof times. 41Gregory the Great's andPeter Damian's criticisms of secular learning are not mere polemical positions,specifically related to particular controversies (the suppression of paganism orthe encouragement of purer monasticism), but for Garin they become signs ofthe profoundly anti-classical Weltanschauungof the Middle Ages.42Cicero wasrevived by earlierhumanist teachers not because of their greaterenthusiasm forantiquity but because of their new focus on man, with whom Cicero had beencompletelypreoccupied.43Poliziano'srejectionof Cicero as a model and his stresson self-expression representedthe growth of historicist individualism not merelya preferencefor Quintilian (who stressedingenium)over Cicero (who emphasizedimitatio).44Valla's revival of Latin was not the result of his Roman patriotismbut the historicistrecognitionof the universal humancommunity and of a generalhuman, not just Roman, renaissance.45The roots of twentieth-centuryItalian idealism are in Hegel, and so it is notsurprisingthat Garin voices a number of Hegelian commonplaces. The notion ofthe essential interrelation of differentaspects of life in a given period-central tothe Hegelian concept of the spirit of the age46-is seen in Garin's vision of a newpoetry, linked to a new education, to a new political and social equality, liberty,humanity, secularism.47The Hegelian view of the Reformation as the religiousembodiment of the Renaissance is apparentin Garin's view that humanism ledto a religious reform because it freed man's critical spirit.48A Hegelian historianwith whom Garin particularly sympathizes is Burckhardt,whose famous motto

40Ibid., 104.41 bid., 37.42 bid., 44.43 bid., 86.44 bid., 104-5, 114. See R. Black, The New Laws of History, RenaissanceStudies,1 (1987), 134ff.45Europa, 107-8.46 E. H. Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History (Oxford, 1969).47Europa, 81.48Ibid., 115.



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324 Robert Blackthediscoveryof man and the world he repeatsandparaphrases.49Characteristicof the Hegelian/Burckhardtian approach to historical periodization are Garin'schronological ambiguities.Just as Burckhardt had to push the beginnings of the

Renaissance back to the court of Frederick II, so Garin has to allow for theappearanceof typically Ciceronian(and Renaissance) attitudes to language, elo-quence, character formation, and education under the Carolingians and in thetwelfth century.50Similarly,in order to find concern with subjectsexclusive fromtexts he seems to make Descartes appear as a Renaissance philosopher.5'One feature shared by Garin's, Grafton and Jardine's,and Grendler'sworkis an emphasis on the contrast between medieval and humanist education; thisperspective, stressing the sharp distinction between the Renaissance and theMiddle Ages, has caused difficultiesfor its upholdersin many branches of Renais-sance studies, and so it is hardlysurprisingthat educationsimilarlyis problematicfor advocatesof the Renaissanceas an intellectual revolution. Graftonand Jardineargue that the humanist pedagoguesdestroyed,with their philological approach,the intellectually stimulating schooling of their scholastic predecessors whoselively methods had built genuinely independent, freethinkingand unsubservientcharacters;but this is a difficult thesis to sustain, in view of the close resemblancebetween school education in medieval and Renaissance Italy. Before the comingof humanism,few schoolmasterswere appointedwithout the admonitionin theirterms of service to teach good morals to their pupils, and the link betweenscholastic and humanist schooling goes beyondthese often elaboratemoralis-tic statements of educational aims.52In a recent important article, Paul Gehl,while discussing manuscript textbooks in fourteenth-centuryTuscany, has ob-served that the glosses on these characteristic school texts were philological, notmoral:Propernames are glossed historicallyor mythologically;a few difficultwords aregiven etymological or morphological explanations;and difficult or complicatedsyntax is sorted out with small numbers or letters to guide the eye of the inexpertreader in finding the correct word order. Some texts that were also used at theintermediate,auctoreslevel of instruction also have simple accessus or are pro-vided with rhetorical observationson structureor the use of figures of speech.53The methods and aims of schooling in the pre-humanistand humanist classroomthus show remarkablesimilarities,and Grafton and Jardine'sdistinction betweenmedieval and Renaissance education is further put into question by the verynature of the comparison: to contrast scholasticism with humanism is to setuniversity-levelinstruction against pre-universityschooling; the humanist peda-

49Ibid., 71, 86-87.50Ibid., 50-58.51Ibid., 73.52 For a typical sample of documentarymaterial on the moral aims of education in theearly Renaissance, see my article Humanism and education in Renaissance Arezzo, ITatti Studies:Essays in the Renaissance, 2 (1987), 171-237; there is comparableevidencein the documentary appendices of the well-known studies of Zanelli on Pistoia, Barsantion Lucca and Battistini on Volterra, cited in note 1.53 Latin readers in fourteenth-centuryFlorence: schoolkids and their books, Scrit-tura e civilta, 13 (1989), 387-440, at 407-8.



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Italian Renaissance Education 325gogues are comparablewith thirteenth- or fourteenth-centurygrammarand/orrhetoric masters rather than with dialecticians, philosophers, or theologians. Ifsuch a comparison of like with like is made, then a notable continuity will befound between medieval and humanist schooling. In higher education, too, therewas similarity in the educationalpattern;Salutati,Donato Acciaiuoli, AlamannoRinuccini (not to mention Ficino and Pico) had extensive scholastic training inAristotelian logic and philosophy, and great patrons such as Lorenzo de' Mediciwere just as keen to support university faculties of arts, law, and medicine asthey were to encourage great humanist scholars such as Landino or Poliziano.Moreover, the philological style of grammarteaching in the Middle Ages andRenaissance can hardly be argued to have discouraged independent and livelyargument, when pupils proceeded to the next level and studied rhetoric; theremarkable intellectual vitality of Salutati's public letters were the product ofthe medieval ars dictaminis, while the equally lively and original dialogues andinvectives of Poggio, Bruni, and Valla were the conscious creations of humanistrhetoricians. Indeed, Grafton and Jardine's distinctions between medieval andhumanist schooling obscuresone obvious answer to the central question of theirbook: society accepted the humanists' failure to provide explicit moral trainingin the classroom precisely because it had been traditionalfor medieval grammarmastersto be appointedto give instructionin good morals and yet in fact in theirlessons to teach only grammar.Nor does Grendler always find it easy to sustain a sharp contrast betweenmedieval and humanist schooling. A predisposalto minimize the depth of classi-cal studies in the Middle Ages is possiblyapparent n the suggestionthat medievalschoolmasters taught florilegia: in fact, schoolbooks including classical authorsin pre-humanistTuscany usually give full texts, not selections, just as they giveentire versions of traditional school authors;54moreover, a number of pre-humanist grammar teachers have left their commentaries on entire classicalauthors which reflect classroom practice similar to the commentaries of subse-quent humanist teachers.5 Grendlergives prominenceto Guarino's one innova-tion in the teaching of Latin grammar-the use of Cicero's letters-which, how-ever, played a relatively minor role in his grammar syllabus, as reconstructedby Sabbadini;otherwise, the grammatical phase of Guarino's curriculum wasfundamentally traditional in the authors chosen. Although it is well knownthat manuals such as Doctrinale or Catholicon retained enormous popularitythroughout the fifteenth century, it is stated that Renaissance students did not

54 E.g., Biblioteca Laurenziana,Florence, 38, 8, containing Statius'sAchilleis, whichconcludes explicit liber quintus et ultimus Statii Achilleydos deo gratias die Xa aprelis1415, Senis in scolis magistri Nofri, Sanctes scripsi (fol. 17v);Bibl. Laurenziana,91, 30,a text of Seneca's tragedies signed on 15 August 1385 per me Jovannem Antonii ... inscholis MagistriAntonii ser Salvi de Sancto Geminiano (fol. 171r);Biblioteca Guarnacci,Volterra, 240, a Persiusfinishing Iste liberest mei Iohannis Michaelis de civitate Vulterremanentis in schola mag. Benacci de Casentino (fol. 13r).55E.g., Maestro Goro d'Arezzo, who taught grammar in Siena in 1278, wrote acommentaryon Lucan (British Library,Harleian,2458), which, to judge from the extremesimplicity of its contents, representedhis classroom practice. Dott.a. Teresa D'Alessandroof Arezzo is making a detailed study of this commentary. See also R. Avesani, Quattromiscellanee medievali e umanistiche (Rome, 1967), 9.



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326 Robert Blackgo on to medieval verse grammarsuch as the Doctrinale ;56t may perhaps besymptomaticof the ambiguity engenderedby a paradigm contrastingthe MiddleAges and the Renaissance that in one list Boethius appearsas a classical author,while later it is stated that Giovanni Conversino read a group of unnamedpoetical works ... followed by the Disticha Catonis,Prospero,and Boethius. Heread no classics, at this stage. 57Moreover, Guarino's was not only a school ofgrammarbut also of rhetoricand should be comparedwith medievalforerunnersaccordingly; Roman prose authors were the staple diet of academic rhetoricteaching in the Middle Ages, and Guarino'scontribution was perhapsto blur theline between grammarand rhetoric-a naturaldevelopmentfor a teacherof bothsubjects at the same institution, and one with a strong medieval precedent.58Despite the force of Sabbadini's and Percival's research on the sources andterminology of Guarino'sRegulae, which are therein shown to be heavily tradi-tional,59Grendleremphasizesthe innovatoryfeaturesof this textbook: Guarinobroke with the past in severalways. The first, obvious, point is that he wrote hisown manual.... Second, he purged much medieval syntactical material. 60Butthere are no lack of medievalgrammarteachers who wrote their own textbooks,61and it is likely that the abbreviatedItaliangrammar,a style of textbookto becomeso popular in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, was not initiated by Guarinoas implied by Grendler,62or by Sozomeno as suggested by Percival63but wentback to at least the thirteenth century.64Moreover, as Grendler recognizes,Guarino'shumanist successorssuch as Guaspareda Verona or Perotti, continuedto compose introductory Latin grammarsladen with traditional content.65It ishard not to see a lack of sympathy with the Middle Ages in the assertion thatmedievalpedagoguesdid not bequeathto the Renaissancea strong traditionofschoolroom study of ancient poetry, when in fact it is stressed earlier that the

56Schooling, 182.57Ibid., 114, 116.58 E.g., see Zanelli, Pistoia, 17, 19, 24, 30, 31, 35; Barsanti,Lucca, 58, 112;Battistini,Volterra,9-10, 13, 83, 87, 88, 95.59 Sabbadini,La scuola e gli studi di Guarino, 38 ff; W. K. Percival, The HistoricalSourcesof Guarino'sRegulae grammaticales:a Reconsideration of Sabbadini'sEvidence,in Civiltadell'umanesimo, ed. G. Tarugi (Florence, 1972), 263-84.60Schooling, 168.61 G. Bursill-Hall, A Census of Medieval Latin Grammatical Manuscripts (Stuttgart,1981).62Schooling, 168-69.63 Historical Sources, 280-81.64E.g., the Regule parve by the thirteenth-centurygrammar teacher, Maestro Gorod'Arezzo (C. Marchesi, Due grammatici latini del medio evo, Bulletino della Societafilologica romana, 12 [1910], 37-56), or the Regule grammaticales of Theobald (of Pia-cenza?;see R. W. Hunt, The History of Grammar in the Middle Ages. CollectedPapers,147 and S. A. Hurlbut, A Forerunner of Alexander de Villa-Dei, Speculum, 8 [1933],261-62), which are no later than from the thirteenth century, preserved as they are onfols. 60v-72r of Biblioteca Laurenziana,Strozzi, 80, a thirteenth-centurymanuscript, onwhich see R. Black, An Unknown Thirteenth-CenturyManuscript of Ianua, Churchand Chroniclein the Middle Ages: Essayspresented to John Taylor, ed. I. Wood and G.

Loud (London, forthcoming).65 Schooling, 172-74.



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Italian Renaissance Education 327classical authors taught by medieval grammarianswere almost exclusively theRoman poets.66But it is Garin whose contrast between medieval and Renaissance educationis the most artificial. A new style school, neither elementary nor university, isproposed: a new school, intermediate between elementaryand university, is onthe one hand formed as a renovation and unification of elementary teaching,while on the other it encroaches on the teaching of [university-level]disciplines[i.e., arts]. 67 n fact this is an institution which corresponds with the medievalgrammarschool, where teaching could range from elementaryreadingand writ-ing to the advanced study of the classical authors, not to mention rhetoric anddialectic.68A suggested shift in the centers of cultural gravity from traditionaluniversities to private schools, individual courses, academies 69 tands in theteeth of the well-known expansionof established universitiesand even foundationof new studii in the Renaissance.A stress on the other-worldly, theological aimsof secular learning in the Middle Ages, in contrast to the earthly orientation ofthe Renaissance, overlooks many texts (a particularlyfamous example is Pico'sOration)in which there is a traditional progressionfrom grammarand rhetoricto dialectic and philosophy and finally to theology as the queen of the sciences.Most forced, however, is Garin's dichotomy between disciplines as texts in theMiddle Ages and as genuine subjectsin the Renaissance, when in practice Aris-totle, Cicero, Ptolemy, Galen, and Euclid remainedthe core of teaching whetherin the thirteenth or sixteenth century.In terms of the educationalcurriculum,the age of humanism and the Renais-sance, accordingto Grendler,was an era of revolutionarychange,but with regardto the institutional structuresof education he stresses the fundamentalcontinuityof the period 1300 to 1600:the educationalstructure erected in the late MiddleAges underwent little change until 1600 ;70 pupils attended several differentkinds of schools in an educational structure that assumed definite form by 1300and did not change until the late sixteenth century ;71he structureof Italianschooling was set in the fourteenth century and did not change for threecenturies. 72 n fact his book offersa greatdeal of evidence for significantinstitu-tionalchange,particularly n the sixteenthcentury.The widespreaddisseminationof schools of Christiandoctrine;the rise of the schools of the religious orders ofthe Counter-Reformation;the emergence of vernacular reading, writing, andarithmetic(abacus)schools (in contrastto earliervernacularabacus schools only);the appearanceof specialist calligraphyand writingschools; the predominanceoffree education in the communes-these were all developments of great impor-tance and even innovationwhich Grendlerdescribeswith clarityand in detail and

66 Ibid., 236; see ibid., 113-14, 116-17.67 Pensieropedagogico, xix.68 E.g., Zanelli,Pistoia, 115, 126-28;Barsanti,Lucca, 109, 112,212; Battistini, Volterra,10, 83, 95.69Europa, 123-24.70Schooling, 2.71 bid., 3.72 Ibid., 403.



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328 Robert Blackwhich fundamentally altered the structure of Italian education in the sixteenthcentury.73Indeed, 1500 would perhaps seem to be more of a watershed than 1400 hadbeen with the rise of humanism. As Garin and Avesani have shown, there was abasic change in textbooks around 1500:the traditional auctores octo were hardyprinted at all as an anthology in Italy, whereas these had representeda widelycirculated manuscript schoolbook before 1500.74It was during the sixteenthcentury that standardschool fare of the Middle Ages, such as the Cartula,beganto be regardedas obscure curiosities of a bygone era.75Here the invectives of theearlierItalian humanistswere crucial. Although Petrarch, Guarino, Alberti, andthe like seem to have had relativelylittle impact on the curriculum used by theircontemporaries,that is not to say that they did not preparea climate of opinionwhich would be decisive in the future, particularlywhen humanists found them-selves in influential positions as editors for early publishers. In The LiberalArtsand theJesuit CollegeSystem,Aldo Scaglionepoints out that in their determinedand enlightened campaign conducted with the added weapon of ridicule heapedunceasinglyon the medievalDoctrinale, Graecismus,and such paraphernalia, hehumanists' success was limited. Indeed those outmoded but hardy textbookscontinued to be used until close to the middle of the sixteenth century ;76butjust as significantas their longue duree was the final decline at that time of thesemanuals. With regard to the curriculum, the main survivors of the sixteenth-century upheaval, according to the evidence offered by Grendler, Grafton andJardine,and Scaglione, were Cato's Distichs and Ianua.77Possibly related to Grendler's inclination to view the period 1300 to 1600 asa unit in the history of educational institutions is the absence of comparisonbetween the Venetian data resulting from the Professionedi fede of 1587 andthe archival researchesof Bertanza and Della Santadealingwith the periodbefore1500. The material from 1587 seems to show a greater following for vernacularschools than was apparentin the earlier Venetian evidence, according to whichLatin secondaryschools seem to have predominated; f this representsa changingpattern,then it is perhapsto be relatedto the growing popularityin the sixteenthcentury of vernacular readers, such as the Babuino, which, according to theimportant articles by Piero Lucchi, appear to have been associated with thebroadening scope and more appealingsyllabus of abacus schools in the sixteenthcentury.78This is an indication of further curricularand structuralchange after

73 Ibid., 102-8, 275-305, 323-99.74Europa, 13-14;Pensieropedagogico, 92; Avesani, Quattromiscellanee, 21ff., 89-92.75Ibid., 31-32.76 Amsterdam and Philadelphia, 1986, 10.77Schooling, 59, 140, 174-84, 188-91, 198-99, 378, 413-17; From Humanism, 154;Jesuit College System, 47-48. See Avesani, QuattroMiscellanee, 19-25.78 La Santacroce, il Salterio, e il Babuino: libri per imperare a leggere nel primosecolo della stampa, Quadernistorici, 38 (1978), 593-630; Leggere, scrivere e abbaco:l'istruzione elementare agli inizi del'eta moderna, Scienze, credenze occulte, livelli dicultura (Florence, 1982), 101-19. See also CarlaFrova, La scuola nella citta tardomedie-vale: un impegno pedagogico e organizzativo, La citta in Italia e in Germania nel

Medioevo:cultura, istituzioni, vita religiosa, ed. R. Elze and G. Fasoli (Bologna, 1981),119-43.



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Italian Renaissance Education 3291500, and if the pattern of educational institutions is more chronologically com-plex than Grendler perhaps suggests, there is possibly more regional and geo-graphicalvariation,too. The majorvariablein Italian Renaissanceschooling was,in his view, the size of the community:Small towns hired communal masters more often than did large cities.... Com-munal schools appeared in small towns and villages throughout northern andnorth-centralItaly. By contrast, large and powerful cities such as Venice, Milan,and Florence had few communal teachers.... Sixteenth-centuryVenice had atypical Renaissance mixture of independent, communal, and church schools ...in 1587-88, about 89 percent of Venetian students ... studied in independentschools, 7 percent... in church schools, and 4 percent... in communal schools.This distributionby kind of school probablytypified the situation in other largecities such as Milan, Florence, and Rome, becausesuch cities had a large numberof wealthy nobles and merchants who could afford to hire independentmasters,including household tutors. Few of the very wealthy neededto rely on communalschools to educate their children. On the other hand, one or two communalmasters probably taught a larger proportion of the total school population invillages and towns of a few hundredto a few thousand souls, because the smallerand less wealthy upperclass in them lacked the means to hire numerous indepen-dent masters.9

Local traditions,however,may haveplayedas greata role as size in producingregional variations. It is puzzling why Grendler names Milan, for which nosupporting evidence is cited; moreover, he does not mention Massa's or PettiBalbi'swork on Genoa in this context, although this shows a greatercommitmentto publicly regulatededucation in a large city than in either Venice or Florence.It is conceded that Rome had more communal schools than the two commercialrepublics [of Venice and Florence], which relied overwhelminglyon independentschools ;80 ndeed, the evidence offered by Grendler, in addition to other pub-lished documentation,suggests that Venetian and Florentine preferencefor inde-pendent, as opposed to communal or communally supervised, education wasexceptional for Italy as a whole. However, Grendler perhaps takes the resem-blance between Venice and Florence rather too far. For him, Florentineschool-ing looks like a smaller version of Venetianschooling, but he does not point outone startling contrast:in Florence only 23 boys out of 1031 in 1480 were said tobe studying Latin, whereasin Venice 47% of the total enrollmentof c. 4625 boyswere at Latin schools in 1587.81Grendlerattemptsto account for this remarkablylow Latin enrollment in Florence by saying that a good number of boys who'va a schuola,' and possibly a few who 'va a leggere' studied Latin, 82but itwould perhapsbe more appropriateto investigatefurther this strange paradoxofeducational history in the Athens of the Renaissance.83In spite of these reservationsabout his treatmentof the earlierperiod, Grendl-

79Schooling, 15, 43.80Ibid., 78. On Genoa, see G. Petti Balbi, L'insegnamento nella Liguria medievale.Scuole, maestri, libri (Genoa, 1979), and the article by Massa cited in n. 1 supra.81 Schooling, 43, 75.82Ibid., 75.83 See my forthcoming article, Florence, The Renaissance in National Context, ed.R. Porter and M. Teich (Cambridge, 1991).



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330 RobertBlacker's book providesa wide-ranging,well-researched,nd suggestivesurveyofItalianschooling n the sixteenthcentury.Oneof the most interestingpatternstoemergeromhisdiscussion fsixteenth-centuryeachingmethodssthegeneralabsenceof moralsas a topicin pedagogic ommentaries:Despite hebarrage fhumanisticassertionshat Terence aughtvirtue,printedcommentaries id notdrawout moral essonsbutconfined hemselves o expositoryparaphrase, ram-maticalanalysis,andexplanation f unfamiliar ersonsandterms ;84Renais-sancecommentators n Horaceconfined hemselves o grammatical,hetorical,andpoeticalanalysis ;85he commentaryraditionof Caesarconsistedalmostexclusivelyof geographicalndhistoricalnformation, or didcommentariesdrawmoral essons romCaesar'sworks ;86 teacherwhoparaphrasedhetextand explainedSallust'smeaningdid not have to developmorallessonsfromhistoricalbehavior,becauseSallustdid it forhim ;87lassroom ommentatorsexplainedwithparaphrase,ynonyms,and elaboration verynoun and verbinValerius,and many other words,as well. Historicalpersonages, vents,andclassicalsourcesfor the episodeswere identified; ometimesquotations romother ancientauthorsexpandedpoints.Butthe commentariesfferedvery ittlegrammatical,hetorical, r etymologicalanalysis,despiteValerius's ometimescomplexanguage.Nor didtheydrawparallelswith thepresentor add to Valeri-us'spervasivemoralizing.ValeriusMaximusmightbe seen as a moralphiloso-pher,but Renaissance chools treatedhim as a historian.88

Moreover,Grendler'sworkshowsthattherewas a tacitassumption mongsixteenth-centurytalianteachers hat closereading tselfengenderedmorality:although heir commentariesn Terencecontainedno moral essons,some in-structorsdevelopedhemoral essonsorally.Theeditorof a newAldineprinting(1570)of the Comoediae,who claimedto have spentyearsteachingVenetianyouths,madethispoint.Onemustexplainorallyto boysthatTerencedevelopsvirtue. His ingeniousartificesand situationsengenderdelightand teachgoodhabits o theyoung,hewrote. 89imilarly, espite hesolely iterary ndrhetori-cal character f Horacecommentaries,GiovanniFabrini n 1566summarizedthe view thatmoralphilosophy ouldbetaught hroughHorace:Horace'snten-tion is to bringman toperfection, illinghimwith thosemoralvirtues hatmakehimperfect, n effect rationaland,as a consequence, lessed.' 90TheseItalianteachers ssertedhattherewasa connection etween eadingTerenceorHoraceand thedevelopmentf goodcharacter, uttheirclassroompractice,asrevealedby theircommentaries, idnot develop he linksexplicitlyor concretely.Theparallelwiththe practiceof northern ixteenth-centuryedagogues, spresentedby GraftonandJardine,s striking:What Erasmusdoes not explain (whatfrom his point of view as a humanistpedagogue equires oexplanation)s how theyoungtheologian anbesurethat

84 Schooling, 252.85 Ibid.,253.86Ibid., 259, 260.87Ibid., 261.88Ibid., 263.89 bid., 252.9 Ibid., 254.



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Italian Renaissance Education 331simple, straightforwardreadingwill produce right doctrine.... Erasmus sees noproblemhere-and in this context the assumptionis a clear one-because for himthe secular humanist's method of close readingin context is itself an enterpriseofevident moral value. The mereexercise of readingthe text as it really is will makethe reader moral and wise in a direct way.... The real point of close reading isthat it produces the right sort of person-a person of evident worth. Agricolaand Erasmus together provided the sixteenth century with a promise that thehumanist education they promoted and developed would make its recipientsbetter people, and they provided the pedagogic tools to make that educationaccessible to many.... The tacit assumptionis that the two things necessarilygotogether:that successfuldrillingin copiaand methodus will guaranteea classroomproduct of moral uprightness and good character.91

The similarities, points of contact, and mutual influences between Italy andnorthernEuropeare interestingfeatures of Scaglione'sdiscussionof Jesuiteduca-tion, its background, and its context. One example is the practice of organizingclasses according to decuriae:each class (often of about 100 students) was divided into decuriae often under astudentnominated decurioor monitor and regularly replacedif no longerefficientin his supervisory assignments. The ten members of such teams were classifiedin order of achievement, and the decuriones were also hierarchicallygraded, thefirst one watching over the second and so on in order. The decuriae existed inParis only at the College of Montaigu and are mentioned in 1503, though notagain until after 1550, but they existed at Deventer and at StrasbourgunderSturm,and then againamongboth the Jesuits and the Reformed... it was clearlythe Brethren [of the Common Life] who adopted this method systematically inthe schools....92Especially significant for the internationalizing of education in the sixteenthcentury was the Parisian College de Montaigu:Montaigu is particularly important for us for two main reason: first, for itsconnection with the Devotiomoderna ... to the extent that it has been regardedas a sort of branch of the Brethren.... Second, because it was at Montaigu thatLoyola's group studied during their days in Paris. In other words, this was ameeting point for crucial experiments in religious-humanisticeducation (Chris-tian Humanism) which would later evolve in both directions, the Protestant andthe Catholic.93Similarly,Scaglionestresses the parallels among Protestant,Erasmianand Jesuitefforts to expurgateand censor problematicclassical literature,94 nd he under-lines the resemblancebetween the Protestant Sturm'shighly structureddidacticsystem with its goal of pietas litterata and the Jesuits' structures and aims.95Scaglione's emphasison the similarities,rather than the differences,of Reformedand Jesuit education, appearsfully justified:

91From Humanism, 148-49.92Jesuit College System, 12-13.93 Ibid., 28.94Ibid., 31.95Ibid., 42-43.



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332 RobertBlackThe closeness of Renaissance educators to the humanistic ideals can be observedin all social settings, secular as well as religious, both Catholic and Protestant.In particular,the Jesuitpedagogicalsystem, undoubtedlythe most successful andinfluential to come out of the Renaissance, is demonstrablyan adaptationof thehumanistic postulates to the new needs of the time. Loyola and his followersinherited and, in their way, preservedthe educational idea of the Renaissance astransmittedthrough the humanists' philological method and general philosophyof learning. They produced a southern, Italy-centered ChristianHumanism ,parallel to the northern Christian Humanism of the Brethren and Erasmus ...one can assert that the Jesuits carried on ... the lessons and basic desiderataofRenaissance Humanism ... (and a parallel discourse could be made, mutatismutandis, of the Protestant denominations).96

Perhaps the greatest contribution of Grafton and Jardine's book is theirinsight into the gulf between the humanist pedagogues'claims to build characterand their actual almost wholly philological teaching methods, but their studyalso includes a perceptive discussion of humanist education for women in theQuattrocento. In fact the chapter entitled Women Humanists: Education forWhat? s the work of Jardineherself rather than a collaborativeeffort,conflatingas it does two of her previously published articles.97In her analysis Jardinereconsidersmaterialalreadybrought first to current scholarly attentionby Mar-garet King.98Almost none of the sources used by either scholar was unknown orunpublished, but King's role in reviving academic interest in fifteenth-centurywomen humanists is demonstrated by Maria Lenzi in her useful anthology ofpublishedsources on women's education in the early Italian Renaissance, whereit is observedthat despite a fine critical edition of her works, published togetherwith a careful reconstructionof biographicaldetails..., Isotta Nogarola of Ve-rona, along with her contemporarywomen humanists, has suffered the fate ofbeing almost completely neglected and forgotten by social and literary histori-ans. 99 n her earlier articleJardineacknowledges King's pioneering contribu-tion,100and Lenzi, too, touches on the work of a number of the same fifteenth-century women humanists in her anthology.101This overlap and repetitiontestifies to the limited material available for the growing preoccupation withgender questions in fields such as Renaissance intellectual history.Jardinedoes demonstrate,nevertheless,that such revaluationdoes not neces-sarily have to represent mere bowing to the latest academic fashion. King'streatmentof the material had led to not entirely unexpected conclusions: women

96Ibid., 51-52.97 IsottaNogarola:Women Humanists-Education for What?, Historyof Education,12 (1983), 231-44; 'O decus Italiae virgo', or the Myth of the Learned Lady in theRenaissance, The Historical Journal, 28 (1985), 799-819.98 Thwarted Ambitions: Six Learned Women of the Renaissance, Soundings, 59

(1976), 280-304; The Religious Retreat of Isotta Nogarola (1418-1466), Signs, 3 (1978)807-22; Book-lined Cells: Women and Humanism in the Early Italian Renaissance,Beyond Their Sex: Learned Womenof the EuropeanPast, ed. P. H. Labalme (New York,1980), 66-90.99Donne e madonne: I'educazioneemminile nel primo Rinascimento italiano (Turin,1982), 21.

100 O decus, 799.101Donne e madonne, 206-16.



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Italian Renaissance Education 333humanists were not able to fulfil their scholarly ambitions because of the preju-dices of society and so were forced to compromise; they had either to seekreligious retreatand preservesome scholarly activity or marry and give up theirhumanist interests. Jardine also points to the near-impossibilityof following ahumanist path for a woman in the fifteenth century, but she interestingly turnsthe question round, asking not just what this shows about women and societybut about humanism itself. Her answer is that the study of female humanismexposes yet further the hollowness of the claimsby humanist educators to providea moral education for their pupils. Humanist education and scholarly activitymight plausibly endow a man with virtue, somehow enabling him to participatein the active life of his society; but the same kind of education and occupationfor a woman almost inevitably led to suspicion of immorality, promiscuity, oreven worse. Why was a woman such as Isotta Nogarola without a husband?Whydid she, an unmarried woman, carry on active correspondence and even meetwith male scholars? Why did Casandra Fedele appear in male gatherings atuniversitiesand public assembliesand call attention to herselfby giving orationsand even perhaps indulge in conspicuous gesticulation? Such behavior was nottypical of the virtuous maiden or matron, and it was hardly surprisingthat onescurrilous pamphleteerput into writing what many contemporarieswere think-ing: a woman of fluent tongue is never chaste. Grafton and Jardine have castsome doubt on the humanists' claim to provide their male pupils with virtue,but certainly Jardine has demonstrated the hypocrisy of asserting that, in theQuattrocento,a humanist education could enhance a woman's moral reputation.The 1970s and 1980s seem to have been a watershed in the study of ItalianRenaissance schooling. Garin's contribution, continuing the work of Saitta andother students of humanist pedagogy,102marks the culmination of a previousgeneration'sachievement rather than the beginning of a new approach. Theoryand theorizing were the concerns of the neo-Crocean heyday;now the emphasishas turnedmuch more to the classroomitself. Graftonand Jardinehave suggestedthe possibilitiesofferedby the study of humanistcommentariesbased on teachingpractice; Gehl has highlighted a hitherto almost undisclosed window onto theschoolroom, the manuscript textbook; Klapisch-Zuberhas given a reminder ofthe rich possibilities for understandingindividual academic careersand elemen-tary curriculum offered by family diaries and memoirs;103Lucchi has shownhow much more there is to say about elementaryand vernaculartextbooks andcurriculum; local educational traditions have perhaps been illuminated by the

102 V. Benetti-Brunelli,Le originiitaliane della scuola umanisticaovvero efonti italichedella coltura moderna (Milan, 1919); G. Gerini, Gli scrittoripedagogici del secolo XV(Turin, 1896); W. Krampe, Die italienischenHumanisten und ihre Wirksamkeit ur dieWiederbelebunggymnastische idagogik (Breslau, 1895);G. Vidari,L'educazionein Italiadall'umanesimo al risorgimento(Rome, 1930); W. H. Woodward, Studies in EducationduringtheAge of the Renaissance(Cambridge, 1906), and his Vittorinoda Feltre and otherHumanist Educators(Cambridge, 1897);V. M. Geerts, De HumanistischePaedagogiek inItalie (Leuven, 1953);V. J. Horkan, Educational Theoriesand Principlesof Maffeo Vegio(Washington, D. C., 1953); R. Kelso, Doctrinefor the Lady of the Renaissance (Urbana,Ill. 1956).

103 Le chiavi fiorentine di barbablu: 'apprendimentodella lettura a Firenze nel XVsecolo, Quadernistorici, 57 (1984), 765-92.



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334 RobertBlackstudyof unpublished rchivalappointment ndpaymentdocuments or teach-ers;04Grendler as shown heimportancef earlyprintingor theunderstandingof the sixteenth-centuryatin and vernacularyllabus;105caglionehas shownhow much there is to discoverabout international choolingpatterns n theRenaissance.On the basisof suchuntapped runder-used ourcesandbyfollow-ing such innovativemethods,we can hope in the 1990s for a more sensitiveunderstandingf regionaland local variations n Italianeducation, or greaterinsightinto the similarities nddifferencesn educationbetweenItalyand therest ofEurope,or a morerealistic ssessment f the contentof humanist nstruc-tion,forabetter omprehensionf the usesoftextbooks ndofthestructure fthecurriculum, ndfor a moresympathetic nd udiciousapproacho theperennialquestionof the transitionrom the MiddleAges to the Renaissance.

Universityof Leeds.

104 Humanism and Education in Renaissance Arezzo, cited in n. 52 above.105Schooling, 142-61, 174-94, 278-304, 333-62, 413-29.

The Humanities Center of The Johns Hopkins University is seek-ing an Assistant or Associate Professor (non-tenured but tenure-track) in the history of psychiatry, psychoanalysis and/or psychol-ogy. The candidateshould have a strong interest in the relevance ofthese disciplines to humanistic studies. Send letters of applicationand complete dossiers to Professor Walter Benn Michaels, Chair,Search Committee, Department of English, Johns Hopkins Univer-sity, Baltimore,MD 21218. Deadline:September15, 1991. The JohnsHopkins University is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Actionemployer.

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