Humanism And Education In Medieval And Renaissance Italy: Tradition And Innovation In Latin Schools From The Twelfth To The Fifteenth Century

HUMANISM AND EDUCATION IN MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE ITALY ROBERT BLACK CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS H U M A N I S M A N D E D U C AT I O N I N M E D I E VA L A N D R E NA I S S A N C E I TA LY This is the first comprehensive study of the school curriculum in medieval and Renaissance Italy. Robert Black’s analysis finds that the real innovators in the history of Latin education in Italy were the thirteenth-century schoolmasters who introduced a new method of teaching grammar based on logic, and their early fourteenthcentury successors, who first began to rely on the vernacular as a tool to teach Latin grammar. Thereafter, in the later fourteenth and for most of the fifteenth century, conservatism, not innovation, characterized the earlier stages of education. The study of classical texts in medieval Italian schools reached a highpoint in the twelfth century but then collapsed as universities rose in importance during the thirteenth century, a sharp decline only gradually reversed in the two centuries that followed. Robert Black demonstrates that the famous humanist educators did not introduce the revolution in the classroom that is usually assumed, and that humanism did not make a significant impact on school teaching until the later fifteenth century. Humanism and Education is a major contribution to Renaissance studies, to Italian history and to the history of European education, the fruit of sustained manuscript research over many years.        ’  publications include Benedetto Accolti and the Florentine Renaissance (), Romance and Aretine Humanism in Sienese Comedy (with Louise George Clubb, ), Studio e Scuola in Arezzo durante il medioevo e Rinascimento () and Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy in Italian Medieval and Renaissance Education (with Gabriella Pomaro, ). A woodcut from Niccolò Perotti’s Rudimenta grammatices, published by Christophorus Pesis at Venice in . Copyright: The British Library. The woodcut illustrates the full grammar curriculum of an Italian Renaissance school. Elementary education is represented by the child on the right holding an alphabet table / psalter (reproduced here with a typical handle). On the left is a slightly more advanced pupil who has moved beyond the psalter to the parts of speech (Donatus); his own psalter is shown cast aside on the floor. Beyond him is a disciplinary whip. The pupils on the right appear younger than those facing them; the former seem to represent the level of secondary Latin grammar while the latter are possibly beginning the study of rhetoric and letter writing. It is significant that the pupils in the school have their own textbooks, illustrating pupil ownership of schoolbooks in Italian education, a practice documented as far back as the thirteenth century. This illustration may constitute an advertisement for Perotti’s own textbook, published here, which covered the whole range of Latin grammatical education, from the alphabet and parts of speech, through secondary grammar (syntax), up to elementary rhetoric and letter writing. HUMANISM AND E D U C AT I O N I N M E D I E VA L A N D R E NA I S S A N C E I TA LY Tradition and Innovation in Latin Schools from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth