Você está na página 1de 21

Italian Renaissance Education: Changing Perspectives and Continuing Controversies Author(s): Robert Black Source: Journal of the History

of Ideas, Vol. 52, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1991), pp. 315-334 Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2709531 . Accessed: 17/02/2014 06:57
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

University of Pennsylvania Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the History of Ideas.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 164.73.224.2 on Mon, 17 Feb 2014 06:57:06 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Italian

Renaissance

Education:

Changing

Perspectives and
Controversies
Robert Black

Continuing

Over the past hundred years studies in the history of Italian Renaissance education have tended to develop in the wake of wider intellectual and philosophical movements. The great age of Italian posivitism at the turn of the century encouraged widespread research in local archives and led to the publication of numerous fundamental documentary studies, including Bellemo on Chioggia, Cecchetti, Bertanza and Della Santa, and Segarizzi on Venice, Barsanti on Lucca, Debenedetti on Florence, Gabotto on Piedmont, Massa on Genoa, Zanelli on Pistoia, and Battistini on Volterra.1 Archival work was complemented by the study of manuscripts and early printed editions, particularly focusing on the contribution of prominent teachers, including for example Rossi on Travesi, but most notable here was of course Sabadiniwith his work on Giovanni da Ravenna, Barzizza, and especially Guarino.2Such studies formed the basis of Manacorda's
V. Bellemo, "L'insegnamento e la cultura in Chioggia fino al secolo XV," Archivio veneto,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 primo maestro d'esse," Atti del R. Istituto Venetodi scienze, lettere ed arti, 75 (1915-16), pt. 2, 637-67; E. Bertanza and G. Dalla Santa, Documenti per la storia della cultura in Venezia, I: Maestri, scuole e scolari in Venezia verso la fine del Medio Evo (Venice, 1907); P. Barsanti, II pubblico insegnamento in 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, "Documenti e notizie per la storia dell'istruzione in Genova," Giornalestorico e letterariodella Liguria, 7 (1906), 169-205, 311-28; A. Zanelli, Del pubblico insegnamento in Pistoia dal XIV al XVI secolo (Rome, 1900); M. Battistini, II pubblico insegnamento in Volterradal secolo XIV 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 Dal rinascimentoal risorgimento[Florence, 1930], 3-30); R. Sabbadini, Giovannida Ravenna, insigne figura d'umanista (1343-1408) (Como, 1924); Studi di Gasparino Barzizza su Quintiliano e Cicerone (Livorno, 1886); "Lettere e orazioni edite e inedite di Gasparino Barzizza," Archiviostorico lombardo, 13 (1866), 363-78, 563-83, 825-36; Vita di Guarino Veronese(Genoa, 1891); and La scuola e gli studi di Guarino Guarini Veronese(Catania, 1896). 315

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

This content downloaded from 164.73.224.2 on Mon, 17 Feb 2014 06:57:06 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

316

Robert Black

Storia della scuola in Italia. II medioevo,3which, although primarily concerned with the earlier Middle Ages, nevertheless extended its scope into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. All these works, including Manacorda's survey, enjoyed the advantages as well as the limitations of other studies influenced by positivist fashions. The contents and the problems were usually determinedby the documentary evidence uncovered. There was little need felt to go beyond empirical discussion to form a broader or more analytical view of the development of schools and education in Italy. There was much important and extremely interesting material brought to light, but no overall synthesis or general picture emerged. It is characteristic of all this work that there was almost no assessment of the impact of humanism and the Renaissance on education; not even Sabbadini came up with a coherent evaluation of Guarino's place in the overall history of schools and teaching. When Eugenio Garin turned to the study of Renaissance education after the Second World War,4 Italian intellectual fashions had changed: positivism had been discredited and the dominant currents were neo-Hegelian and very often Crocean or Gentilian idealism. Garin's reaction to Sabbadini'swork on Guarino shows 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 an attempt at [genuine] history is not without good reason. The material, at times chaotically assembled, was too much and too little.... Whoever looks at Sabbadini's notes and at his attempts at synthesis will be almost dumbfounded; the contours are dulled, all is lost in a uniform grey. The discussion of particular points does not always meet the need for a comprehensivejudgement; all historical perspective is diminished.5 Garin here reveals the impatience of a new generation with the outmoded ways of their predecessors. Garin, unlike his positivist antecedents, does not see his principal purpose as an intellectual historian in bringing to light new evidence or information which then of itself will lead to greater knowledge; although he has examined and even edited a number of unpublished sources for Renaissance education,6most of his work consists of reinterpretingpublished sources and secondary material. Indeed, it is his major contribution to have developed a highly focused, yet broadly ranging view of Renaissance education and particularly of the impact of humanism on schools and teaching. Garin's interpretation is based on a sharply drawn contrast between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. He paints a gloomy picture of late medieval scholastic methods, aims, and curriculum. He suggests that barbarousdiscipline
3 Milan, Palermo, and Naples, 1914. 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.
4 E.

This content downloaded from 164.73.224.2 on Mon, 17 Feb 2014 06:57:06 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Italian Renaissance Education

317

was the norm in medieval Italian schools.7 The mainstays of the curriculum were manuals such as Ianua, Alexander of Villedieu's Doctrinale, Everardof Bethune's Graecismus,Giovanni of Genoa's Catholicon,Papias and Hugutio of Pisa's Derivationes;these were, he continues, read mainly in conjunction, not usually with the Roman classics but with the traditional school authors such as Cato's Distichs, Ecloga Theoduli, Facetus, Matthew of Vendome's Thobias, Liber parabolarum, Aesop's fables (translatedby Walter the Englishman), Floretus, Prudentius's Eva 8 Columba (Dittochaeum), Prosper of Acquitaine's Epigrams, and the Physiologus. From such a curriculumboys were taught contempt for the secular world; indeed, all medieval education-even at its most classicizing-was directed, according to Garin, to religious, theological, and spiritual goals.9 When the Roman classics were occasionally brought into the schoolroom, they were a means to an end, not an end in themselves.10Indeed, it had been the fundamental antipathy of the Middle Ages to classical culture more than the barbarian invasions which, for Garin, had destroyed the ancient world.11When secular learning was cultivated in the later Middle Ages, it was for technical, professional training, to allow each individual to fit into his appropriate level in the social hierarchy.12Scholastic education was fundamentally antipathetic to the empirical study of nature or to any real content in education; texts, not genuine subjects in themselves, were the objects of learning:13 For Garin, Renaissance humanism represented a revolutionary change in European cultural history, and this dramatic new force was particularlypowerful and effective in the classroom. Most important were new aims for education: The school created in fifteenth-centuryItaly was ... an educator of man, capable of shaping a child's moral character so as not to be preconditioned but free, open in the future to every possible specialization, but before all else humane and whole, with social links to all mankind and endowed with the prerequisites for the mastery of all techniques but in full self-control ... and not liable to run the risk of becoming a tool itself.14 In this new process of the liberal education of the whole man, Garin emphasizes the role of the classics-"the discovery of the antique accomplished by the humanists, their discovery of man as an individual entity, historically concrete The study of the ancients represented the and determinable."15 acquisition of historical consciousness and critical consciousness, of awareness of self and others, of an understanding of the fulness of the human world and its development.... The revived study of the ancients, rediscovered as such, came to signify the discovery of a sense of human colloquium and collaboration, the initiation to the world of men. Educating youth in the classics truly thus helped
7Europa, 21. 8Ibid., 26; Pensieropedagogico, 91-104. 9 Europa, 82-85. 1 Ibid., 51-52. 1Ibid., 44. 12 Ibid., 71, 93. 13 Ibid., 70ff.
14 "Guarino," 75.

5Europa, 102.

This content downloaded from 164.73.224.2 on Mon, 17 Feb 2014 06:57:06 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

318

Robert Black

to provide the beginning of an awareness of the human community in its development and its unity.16 Garin's view is that objective self-knowledge is developed only through knowledge of others: to know himself, an individual must be able to take someone else's perspective. This is what Garin believes the humanist educators accomplished with their revival of antiquity. Through their philological, critical, historical understanding of the ancients, they enabled their pupils to know the great, exemplary figures of antiquity and hence to know themselves. This could not have occurred in the Middle Ages because antiquity was not then studied historically and objectively for its own sake but rather subjectively and uncritically and so medieval classical studies-insofaras they existed-could not lead to the development of the whole man. New aims mean a new curriculum and so Garin points to "the abrupt change of textbooks. The auctoresocto tend to disappearrapidly from Italian schools.... In their place are substituted manuals and adaptations by Guarino and the direct reading of the classics."17New aims also mean new types of institutions. The humanist schools were identical to neither the elementary schools nor the universities of medieval Italy. Educators such as Guarino Veronese or Vittorino da Feltre, as well as their humbler imitators among communal teachers, developed broader institutions of secondary instruction, which provided a wide general education, taking pupils from elementary Latin up to the threshold of professional university study. According to Garin, they were not mere grammar schools but provided teaching in all the subjects of the trivium and quadrivium, as well as in philosophy in its widest sense. They minimized the study of formal grammar, emphasizing instead the direct reading of the classics; moreover, they used texts not as ends in themselves as in the Middle Ages but as genuine gateways to real subjects.They were not guardiansof the social hierarchy, giving technical training for narrow professions or occupations, but they educated all men equally before the choice of a career. True to their concern with the development of the whole man, humanist educators abandoned the cruel and barbarous discipline of the medieval schoolmasters in favor of persuasion, example, and reason.18 From Italy, this educational revolution engulfed Northern Europe: a Parisian master, if he had reawakenedafter "a century's sleep, at the middle of the Cinquecento, would not have recognized the world of learning, would have found nothing with which he had been familiar. In Italy, the phenomenon occurred first, almost a hundred years before."19 Although this picture of humanist education was not without its precursors (the most notable of which was Giuseppe Saitta's portrait in L'educazione dell'umanesimo in Italia),20Garin's formulation quickly established itself as the orthodox interpretation; and it was only in 1982 that a fundamental challenge was mounted by Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine with their article "Humanism
'6 bid., 103. 17 Pensieropedagogico, xxii. 18 See especially "Guarino," 74ff; Educazione umanistica, 1-10; Pensiero pedagogico, xi-xiii, xix-xxi; Europa, 21, 24, 27, 85ff, 102ff, 114, 120-21, 124, 137. 9 Ibid., 14.
20Venice,

1928.

This content downloaded from 164.73.224.2 on Mon, 17 Feb 2014 06:57:06 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Italian Renaissance Education

319

which was then incorpoand the school of Guarino: a problem of evaluation,"21 Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the From rated into their book, While Arts in and Garin lacks Liberal Sixteenth-Century Europe.22 Fifteenthand identifies with the scholasticism humanism, deeply opposite sympathy with is true of Grafton and Jardine:they see humanism as the modem foundation of the liberal arts movement in education, against which, it would be no exaggeration to say, they are launching an open polemic. In essence they reject the equation between character building and the study of a canon of texts which is fundamentally assumed in all systems of liberal education, whether by Cicero and Quintilian or the Renaissance humanists, Gentile and Garin, or Eliot and Leavis. On the other hand, they champion the merits of scholasticism on intellectual as well as utilitarian grounds: Scholasticism was very much a going concern in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. At the level of the school, it offered literacy in Latin of a sort to thousands of boys. At the higher level of the university arts course, it provided a lively and rigorous training in logic and semantics. At the higher level still of the professional faculties of law, medicine, and theology, it trained men for employment in powerful and lucrative occupations. And on its fringes, in the severely practical courses on the arts of the notary, it even taught the future estate manager, government clerk or solicitor how to keep books, draw up contracts and write business letters ... it was no sterile indoctrination in the authoritative messages of a few selected texts. Recent research ... has brought to light vast, unsuspected views of insight and speculation ... The liquidation of this intellectual system was clearly the murder of an intact organism, not the clearing away of a disintegrated fossil.23 On a more concrete level, Grafton and Jardine examine Guarino's school on the basis primarily of four commentaries apparently deriving from Guarino's actual classroom practice. These seem to show that, whether Guarino was teaching his own lexical Carmina differentialia, Vergil's Georgics,Rhetorica ad Herennium, or Cicero'sDe amicitia, his focus was on language, grammar,and philology (in its broad sense including historical, mythological, and geographical exegesis), in other words, despite Guarino's own claims that he not on moral philosophy;24 his shaped pupils' characters,equipping them for the active life in order to benefit state and society, he in fact offered little explicit training in morals. Grafton and Jardine therefore conclude that the product provided by humanist teachers did not live up to the claims of their advertising.25 Why then did parents, civic governments, rulers, or the church employ these self-importantand dubious educators?Grafton and Jardineanswer that humanist education was not successful or appealingbecause it created better men but rather
and Present, 96 (1982), 51-80. London, 1986. An earlier, more limited critique of Garin's work on humanist education had been made by David Robey in his article "Humanism and Education in the Early Quattrocento:the De ingenuis moribusof P. P. Vergerio,"Bibliothequed'humanisme et renaissance, 42 (1980), 27-58, where he argues that Vergerio's treatise is more concerned with learning for its own sake than with inculcating civic virtue in pupils. 23From Humanism to the Humanities, xii-xiii. 24 Ibid., 12-15, 18-19, 22. 25 Ibid., 2-3, 14, 23, 25.
22

21 Past

This content downloaded from 164.73.224.2 on Mon, 17 Feb 2014 06:57:06 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

320

Robert Black

because its tedious philological and mnemonic methods, with their emphasis on rote learning rather than analysis and logical argument, trained pupils to be docile and servile-hence the potentially maleable bureaucratswho would become cogs in the emerging absolutist regimes of early modem Europe; scholasticism, on the other hand, was unsuited for this new social and political function of education because it trained men to think and argue for themselves: The new system, we would argue, fitted the needs of the new Europe that was taking shape, with its closed governing elites, hereditary offices and strenuous efforts to close off debate on vital political and social questions. It stamped the more prominent members of the new elite with an indelible cultural seal of superiority, it equipped lesser members with fluency and the learned habit of attention to textual detail and it offered everyone a model of true culture as something given, absolute, to be mastered, not questioned-and thus fostered in all its initiates a properly docile attitude to authority. The education of the humanists was made to order for the Europe of the Counter-Reformationand of late Protestant orthodoxy. And this consonance between the practical activities of the humanists and the practical needs of their patrons, we argue, was the decisive reason for the victory of humanism. Scholasticism bred too independent an attitude to survive.26 The studies of Garin, on the one hand, and of Grafton and Jardine, on the other, might best be approached as contributions which have set the terms of a heated debate; their works are not necessarily the balanced reflections of uncontroversial authorities. Nevertheless, in his book, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300-1600,27Paul Grendler has tended to regard Garin's view as the definitive interpretationof the influence of humanism on Renaissance education, while discounting the critique of Grafton and Jardine. Following Garin, he paints a negative picture of late medieval Italian school education; he denies the widespread teaching of the Roman classics (if they were used at all, "one suspects that the pupils read only selections, perhaps in florilegia")28and asserts the predominance, until the arrival of the humanists, of the traditional medieval school authors.29 Moreover, like Garin, he emphasizes the wider limitations of medieval thought: "The Middle Ages were profoundly unhistorical."30 The "coming of the studia humanitatis," on the other hand, represented "a curriculum revolution, one of the few in the history of Western education, in the relatively short time of about fifty years-1400 to 1450."31Like Garin, he emphasizes the decisive discarding of the medieval syllabus: "The humanists of the fifteenth century changed the Latin curriculum, a major academic revolution. They discarded the late medieval Latin curriculum of verse grammarsand glossaries, morality poems, a handful of ancient poetical texts, and ars dictaminis."32 Grendler, again like Garin, concedes that classical Latin poetry was taught in
Ibid., xiii-xiv. Baltimore, 1989. 28Ibid., 116. 29Ibid., 111-17. 30Ibid., 255.
27

26

31 Ibid., 140-41. 32 Ibid.,

404.

This content downloaded from 164.73.224.2 on Mon, 17 Feb 2014 06:57:06 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Italian Renaissance Education

321

the medieval classroom,33and so he limits the novelty of this revolution primarily to the introduction by humanist pedagogues of Cicero's letters into the grammar syllabus: "Above all, they inserted the letters of Cicero as the Latin prose model."34He stalwartly defends this picture against the assaults of Grafton and Jardine. He suggests that their critique is anachronistic: the Latin humanistic curriculum lasted so far beyond the Renaissance that a twentieth-century perspective may underlie some of the criticism. But a curriculum and educational structure need satisfy on its own era. Viewing Renaissance schooling within the context of the Italian fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries makes it difficult to agree with the criticism.35 Moreover, he opposes Grafton and Jardine's conclusion that the content of humanist pedagogy did not live up to its pretentious claims of moral improvement: they have objected that Italian Renaissance Latin education failed to inculcate the values of the citizen-orator, partly because of a preoccupation with the minutiae of learning Vergil, Cicero, and others. Obviously, schools devoted a great deal of effort to minutiae, particularly at the primary and secondary levels. But there seems no reason to doubt that teachers and theorists who asked students to compile notebooks of moral and civic sententiae tried to teach these values. And the reading, from the Disticha Catonisto Cicero's letters, was full of moral and social commonplaces.36 Grendler is certainly right to stress that Grafton and Jardine have been influenced by the climate of moder pedagogic debate, but it also needs to be pointed out that Garin has been equally affected by twentieth-centuryeducational currents. Grafton and Jardine seem to reflect recent disillusion with the elitism of an establishment whose monopoly of influence and status has been in part guaranteed by the mystique surrounding a classical, liberal arts education such as that provided by the public schools and Oxford and Cambridge,while Garin's works are powerfully redolent of Italian educational preoccupations. In 1923 the idealist philosopher, Giovanni Gentile, as minister of education, reorganized Italian secondary schooling, shifting the emphasis from a technical to a broader non-specialized curriculum. After primary school, scuole complementari were established, furnishingthe majoritywith a general academic education and replacing the old technical schools which were abolished; the technical institutes remaining were downgraded, providing for only about half as many pupils as the former technical schools. Gentile reorganized the syllabus too, putting more stress on humanities such as Italian literature and history; Latin, previously limited to the licei, was introduced into technical institutes, teacher-training schools (istituti magistral) and scientific and girls' licei. Philosophy, not surprisingly, was to be taught not only in licei classici but even in istituti magistrali and licei scientifici; it became the key, unifying subject of the curriculum. Even when these reforms were watered down throughout the 1930s, the humanist tone of
33Ibid., 116-17. See Garin, L'educazione umanistica, 5. 34Schooling, 404. 35Ibid., 407. 36Ibid., 408.

This content downloaded from 164.73.224.2 on Mon, 17 Feb 2014 06:57:06 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

322

Robert Black

Italian secondary education remained, and Latin became the core subject of the curriculum at the new scuole medie established as junior secondary schools for most of the population.37 Of course these reforms, introduced by and identified with the Fascist regime, became controversial in the heated political atmosphere of post-war Italy. Garin was not the only non-Fascist who did not want to lose what many Italian intellectuals considered to be one of the main achievementsof the Fascists under Gentile's guidance-the establishment of a national humanist, liberal arts education not just for an elite but for a wide segment of the population. Hence, Garin's impassioned defense of the humanist school in the foreword to L'educazione in Europa; indeed, he explicitly relates his forthcoming historical treatment of Renaissance education to the contemporary "debates, ever more intense, on the reform of Italian schools."38For him, humanist education was and is not the study of dead languages but a moral formation in contact with exemplary human experience, shaping the critical historical consciousness. Humanist education gives freedom from tyranny, whether of bosses, institutions, machines, organizing groups, church, or state. The association with exemplary individuals of the past leads to critical and tolerant understanding and a concrete sense of humanity. He rejects a type of schooling in which each person is given a technical training according to his social station and function, thus perpetuating class differences. Instead, youth should be brought by general education to the point of professional choice, Garin so that they can think, direct and control the political leaders themselves.39 might just as well be speaking of the dispute between humanists and scholastics in the Renaissance as of the debate between Gentilian theorists and technocrats in the twentieth century. He identifies the educational issues of contemporary Italy with those of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Grendler has the considerable merit of greater detachment than either Garin or Grafton and Jardine,but following Garin as the authority on humanist education can mean adopting a thesis which is not only the product of educational politics but also one that is enmeshed in the intellectual world of neo-Hegelian idealist philosophy. Garin repeatedly emphasizes freedom as the end result of a humanist education, maintaining that liberal studies create the free man, an idea which is connected with Croce's central tenet that the history of mankind represents an instinctive striving for freedom, that history is the story of liberty. Croce's stress on the self-development of the human spirit through history is reflected in Garin's view that through the historical study of the ancients the whole man is formed. Croce's rejection of materialism in favor of idealism is seen in Garin's view that a humanist education gives men ideals, not material benefits gained through vocational competence; similarly, this Crocean emphasis on the historical development of ideas rather than things is found in Garin's view that the difference between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is not so much a material distinction in the level of classical culture as a new intellectual attitude
37 Martin Clark, Modern Italy (London, 1984), 276-78. L. Minio-Paluello, Education in Fascist Italy (London, 1946), contains an excellent outline of educational reforms in Italy under the Fascists, as well as a lucid explanation of Gentile's educational theory and its close parallels to Croce's ideas on pp. 68-75.

38Europa, 5.

39Ibid., 5-11.

This content downloaded from 164.73.224.2 on Mon, 17 Feb 2014 06:57:06 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Italian Renaissance Education

323

towards the classics. Garin is a true Crocean historicist: historicism's axiom that there are no absolute standards and that everything is contingent on its historical position is found in Garin's emphasis on the humanists' discovery, through their liberal education, of the diversity of man and his development: they acquire an almost Crocean enlightened relativism, realizing there is no unique truth, that "knowledge [scienza] in 1400 cannot be the same as [it was] in 500 B.C., that it For Garin, through philology is organic and the rational result of precise data."40 and liberal education, pupils in the Renaissance became aware of the individuality of all human societies and of the entire historical process; his view that true classical learning results only from historical understandingreflects historicism's postulate that genuine knowledge can be obtained only through history. Particularly historicist are Garin's tendency to see events and phenomena in terms of a larger historical process and his suggestions that only through comprehendingthese greaterhistorical abstractionscan concrete events be understood. Thus the succession of Barzizza to Travesi as the communal grammarian of Verona represented a profound "change of times."41Gregory the Great's and Peter Damian's criticisms of secular learning are not mere polemical positions, specifically related to particular controversies (the suppression of paganism or the encouragement of purer monasticism), but for Garin they become signs of the profoundly anti-classical Weltanschauungof the Middle Ages.42Cicero was revived by earlier humanist teachers not because of their greater enthusiasm for antiquity but because of their new focus on man, with whom Cicero had been Poliziano's rejection of Cicero as a model and his stress completely preoccupied.43 on self-expression representedthe growth of historicist individualism not merely a preferencefor Quintilian (who stressed ingenium) over Cicero (who emphasized imitatio).44Valla's revival of Latin was not the result of his Roman patriotism but the historicist recognition of the universal human community and of a general human, not just Roman, renaissance.45 The roots of twentieth-century Italian idealism are in Hegel, and so it is not surprising that Garin voices a number of Hegelian commonplaces. The notion of the essential interrelationof different aspects of life in a given period-central to the Hegelian concept of the spirit of the age46-is seen in Garin's vision of a new poetry, linked to a new education, to a new political and social equality, liberty, humanity, secularism.47The Hegelian view of the Reformation as the religious embodiment of the Renaissance is apparent in Garin's view that humanism led to a religious reform because it freed man's critical spirit.48A Hegelian historian with whom Garin particularly sympathizes is Burckhardt, whose famous motto

41

40Ibid., 104.
bid., 37.

42Ibid., 44. 43Ibid., 86. 44Ibid., 104-5, 114. See R. Black, "The New Laws of History," Renaissance Studies, 1 (1987), 134ff. 45Europa, 107-8. 46 E. H. Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History (Oxford, 1969). 47Europa, 81. 48Ibid., 115.

This content downloaded from 164.73.224.2 on Mon, 17 Feb 2014 06:57:06 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

324

Robert Black

"the discovery of man and the world" he repeats and paraphrases.49 Characteristic of the Hegelian/Burckhardtian approach to historical periodization are Garin's chronological 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 the appearance of typically Ciceronian (and Renaissance) attitudes to language, eloquence, character formation, and education under the Carolingians and in the twelfth century.50Similarly, in order to find concern with subjects exclusive from texts he seems to make Descartes appear as a Renaissance philosopher.5' One feature shared by Garin's, Grafton and Jardine's, and Grendler's work is an emphasis on the contrast between medieval and humanist education; this perspective, stressing the sharp distinction between the Renaissance and the Middle Ages, has caused difficulties for its upholders in many branches of Renaissance studies, and so it is hardly surprisingthat education similarly is problematic for advocates of the Renaissance as an intellectual revolution. Grafton and Jardine argue that the humanist pedagogues destroyed, with their philological approach, the intellectually stimulating schooling of their scholastic predecessors whose lively methods had built genuinely independent, freethinking and unsubservient characters;but this is a difficult thesis to sustain, in view of the close resemblance between school education in medieval and Renaissance Italy. Before the coming of humanism, few schoolmasters were appointed without the admonition in their terms of service to teach good morals to their pupils, and the link between "scholastic" and "humanist"schooling goes beyond these often elaboratemoralistic statements of educational aims.52In a recent important article, Paul Gehl, while discussing manuscript textbooks in fourteenth-century Tuscany, has observed that the glosses on these characteristic school texts were philological, not moral: Proper names are glossed historically or mythologically; a few difficult words are given etymological or morphological explanations; and difficult or complicated syntax is sorted out with small numbers or letters to guide the eye of the inexpert reader in finding the correct word order. Some texts that were also used at the intermediate, auctores level of instruction also have simple accessus or are provided with rhetorical observations on structure or the use of figures of speech.53 The methods and aims of schooling in the pre-humanist and humanist classroom thus show remarkablesimilarities, and Grafton and Jardine'sdistinction between medieval and Renaissance education is further put into question by the very nature of the comparison: to contrast scholasticism with humanism is to set university-level instruction against pre-university schooling; the humanist peda49Ibid., 71, 86-87. 50Ibid., 50-58. 51Ibid., 73. 52 For a typical sample of documentary material on the moral aims of education in the early Renaissance, see my article "Humanism and education in Renaissance Arezzo," I Tatti Studies: Essays in the Renaissance, 2 (1987), 171-237; there is comparable evidence in the documentary appendices of the well-known studies of Zanelli on Pistoia, Barsanti on Lucca and Battistini on Volterra, cited in note 1. 53 "Latin readers in fourteenth-century Florence: schoolkids and their books," Scrittura e civilta, 13 (1989), 387-440, at 407-8.

This content downloaded from 164.73.224.2 on Mon, 17 Feb 2014 06:57:06 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Italian Renaissance Education

325

gogues are comparable with thirteenth- or fourteenth-century grammar and/or rhetoric masters rather than with dialecticians, philosophers, or theologians. If such a comparison of like with like is made, then a notable continuity will be found between medieval and humanist schooling. In higher education, too, there was similarity in the educational pattern; Salutati, Donato Acciaiuoli, Alamanno Rinuccini (not to mention Ficino and Pico) had extensive scholastic training in Aristotelian logic and philosophy, and great patrons such as Lorenzo de' Medici were just as keen to support university faculties of arts, law, and medicine as they were to encourage great humanist scholars such as Landino or Poliziano. Moreover, the philological style of grammar teaching in the Middle Ages and Renaissance can hardly be argued to have discouraged independent and lively argument, when pupils proceeded to the next level and studied rhetoric; the remarkable intellectual vitality of Salutati's public letters were the product of the medieval ars dictaminis, while the equally lively and original dialogues and invectives of Poggio, Bruni, and Valla were the conscious creations of humanist rhetoricians. Indeed, Grafton and Jardine's distinctions between medieval and humanist schooling obscures one obvious answer to the central question of their book: society accepted the humanists' failure to provide explicit moral training in the classroom precisely because it had been traditional for medieval grammar masters to be appointed to give instruction in good morals and yet in fact in their lessons to teach only grammar. Nor does Grendler always find it easy to sustain a sharp contrast between medieval and humanist schooling. A predisposal to minimize the depth of classical studies in the Middle Ages is possibly apparentin the suggestion that medieval schoolmasters taught florilegia: in fact, schoolbooks including classical authors in pre-humanist Tuscany usually give full texts, not selections, just as they give entire versions of traditional school authors;54moreover, a number of prehumanist grammar teachers have left their commentaries on entire classical authors which reflect classroom practice similar to the commentaries of subsequent humanist teachers.5 Grendler gives prominence to Guarino's one innovation in the teaching of Latin grammar-the use of Cicero's letters-which, however, played a relatively minor role in his grammar syllabus, as reconstructed by Sabbadini; otherwise, the grammatical phase of Guarino's curriculum was fundamentally traditional in the authors chosen. Although it is well known that manuals such as Doctrinale or Catholicon retained enormous popularity throughout the fifteenth century, it is stated that "Renaissance students did not
54 E.g., Biblioteca Laurenziana, Florence, 38, 8, containing Statius's Achilleis, which concludes "explicit liber quintus et ultimus Statii Achilleydos deo gratias die Xa aprelis 1415, 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 ... in scholis Magistri Antonii ser Salvi de Sancto Geminiano" (fol. 171r);Biblioteca Guarnacci, Volterra, 240, a Persius finishing "Iste liber est mei Iohannis Michaelis de civitate Vulterre manentis in schola mag. Benacci de Casentino" (fol. 13r). 55E.g., Maestro Goro d'Arezzo, who taught grammar in Siena in 1278, wrote a commentary on Lucan (British Library,Harleian, 2458), which, to judge from the extreme simplicity of its contents, representedhis classroom practice. Dott.a. Teresa D'Alessandro of Arezzo is making a detailed study of this commentary. See also R. Avesani, Quattro miscellanee medievali e umanistiche (Rome, 1967), 9.

This content downloaded from 164.73.224.2 on Mon, 17 Feb 2014 06:57:06 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

326

Robert Black

it may perhaps be go on to medieval verse grammar such as the Doctrinale";56 a of the ambiguity engendered by paradigm contrasting the Middle symptomatic and the Renaissance that in one list Boethius appears as a classical author, Ages while later it is stated that Giovanni Conversino "read a group of unnamed poetical works ... followed by the Disticha Catonis, Prospero,and Boethius. He read no classics, at this stage."57Moreover, Guarino's was not only a school of grammarbut also of rhetoric and should be compared with medieval forerunners accordingly; Roman prose authors were the staple diet of academic rhetoric teaching in the Middle Ages, and Guarino's contribution was perhaps to blur the line between grammarand rhetoric-a natural development for a teacher of both subjects at the same institution, and one with a strong medieval precedent.58 Despite the force of Sabbadini's and Percival's research on the sources and terminology of Guarino's Regulae, which are therein shown to be heavily traditional,59Grendler emphasizes the innovatory features of this textbook: "Guarino broke with the past in several ways. The first, obvious, point is that he wrote his own manual.... Second, he purged much medieval syntactical material."60 But there are no lack of medieval grammarteachers who wrote their own textbooks,61 and it is likely that the abbreviatedItalian grammar,a style of textbook to become so popular in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, was not initiated by Guarino as implied by Grendler,62or by Sozomeno as suggested by Percival63but went back to at least the thirteenth century.64 Moreover, as Grendler recognizes, Guarino's humanist successors such as Guaspare da Verona or Perotti, continued to compose introductory Latin grammars laden with traditional content.65It is hard not to see a lack of sympathy with the Middle Ages in the assertion that "medieval pedagogues did not bequeath to the Renaissance a strong tradition of schoolroom 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 Historical Sources of Guarino's Regulae grammaticales:a Reconsideration of Sabbadini'sEvidence," in Civilta dell'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-century grammar teacher, Maestro Goro d'Arezzo (C. Marchesi, "Due grammatici latini del medio evo," Bulletino della Societa filologica romana, 12 [1910], 37-56), or the Regule grammaticales of Theobald (of Piacenza?; see R. W. Hunt, The History of Grammar in the Middle Ages. Collected Papers, 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 on fols. 60v-72r of Biblioteca Laurenziana, Strozzi, 80, a thirteenth-century manuscript, on which see R. Black, "An Unknown Thirteenth-Century Manuscript of Ianua," Church and Chronicle in the Middle Ages: Essays presented to John Taylor, ed. I. Wood and G. Loud (London, forthcoming). 65 Schooling, 172-74.

This content downloaded from 164.73.224.2 on Mon, 17 Feb 2014 06:57:06 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Italian Renaissance Education

327

classical authors taught by medieval grammarians were almost exclusively the Roman poets.66 But it is Garin whose contrast between medieval and Renaissance education is the most artificial. A new style school, neither elementary nor university, is proposed: "a new school, intermediate between elementary and university, is on the 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]."67In fact this is an institution which corresponds with the medieval grammar school, where teaching could range from elementary reading and writing to the advanced study of the classical authors, not to mention rhetoric and dialectic.68A suggested shift in the centers of cultural gravity from traditional universities to "private schools, individual courses, academies"69stands in the teeth of the well-known expansion of established universities and even foundation of new studii in the Renaissance. A stress on the other-worldly, theological aims of secular learning in the Middle Ages, in contrast to the earthly orientation of the Renaissance, overlooks many texts (a particularly famous example is Pico's Oration) in which there is a traditional progression from grammar and rhetoric to 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 the Middle Ages and as genuine subjects in the Renaissance, when in practice Aristotle, Cicero, Ptolemy, Galen, and Euclid remained the core of teaching whether in the thirteenth or sixteenth century. In terms of the educational curriculum, the age of humanism and the Renaissance, according to Grendler, was an era of revolutionary change, but with regard to the institutional structures of education he stresses the fundamental continuity of the period 1300 to 1600: the "educational structure erected in the late Middle Ages underwent little change until 1600";70"pupils attended several different kinds of schools in an educational structure that assumed definite form by 1300 the "structure of Italian and did not change until the late sixteenth century";71 in the fourteenth century" and "did not change for three schooling was set In fact his book offers a great deal of evidence for significant institucenturies."72 tional change, particularlyin the sixteenth century. The widespreaddissemination of schools of Christian doctrine; the rise of the schools of the religious orders of the Counter-Reformation; the emergence of vernacular reading, writing, and arithmetic (abacus) schools (in contrast to earliervernacularabacus schools only); the appearanceof specialist calligraphy and writing schools; the predominance of free education in the communes-these were all developments of great importance and even innovation which Grendler describes with clarity and in detail and

Ibid., 236; see ibid., 113-14, 116-17. Pensieropedagogico, xix. 68 E.g., Zanelli, Pistoia, 115, 126-28;Barsanti,Lucca, 109, 112, 212; Battistini, Volterra, 10, 83, 95. 69Europa, 123-24. 70 Schooling, 2.
66 67 71 72

bid., 3.

Ibid., 403.

This content downloaded from 164.73.224.2 on Mon, 17 Feb 2014 06:57:06 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

328

Robert Black

which fundamentally altered the structure of Italian education in the sixteenth century.73 Indeed, 1500 would perhaps seem to be more of a watershed than 1400 had been with the rise of humanism. As Garin and Avesani have shown, there was a basic change in textbooks around 1500: the traditional auctores octo were hardy printed at all as an anthology in Italy, whereas these had represented a widely circulated manuscript schoolbook before 1500.74 It was during the sixteenth century that standard school fare of the Middle Ages, such as the Cartula, began to be regarded as obscure curiosities of a bygone era.75Here the invectives of the earlier Italian humanists were crucial. Although Petrarch, Guarino, Alberti, and the like seem to have had relatively little impact on the curriculum used by their contemporaries, that is not to say that they did not prepare a climate of opinion which would be decisive in the future, particularly when humanists found themselves in influential positions as editors for early publishers. In The Liberal Arts and the Jesuit CollegeSystem, Aldo Scaglione points out that in their "determined and enlightened campaign conducted with the added weapon of ridicule heaped unceasingly on the medieval Doctrinale, Graecismus,and such paraphernalia,the humanists' success was limited. Indeed those outmoded but hardy textbooks but continued to be used until close to the middle of the sixteenth century";76 just as significant as their longue duree was the final decline at that time of these manuals. With regard to the curriculum, the main survivors of the sixteenthcentury upheaval, according to the evidence offered by Grendler, Grafton and Jardine, and Scaglione, were Cato's Distichs and Ianua.77 Possibly related to Grendler's inclination to view the period 1300 to 1600 as a unit in the history of educational institutions is the absence of comparison between the Venetian data resulting from the "Professione di fede" of 1587 and the archival researchesof Bertanza and Della Santa dealing with the period before 1500. The material from 1587 seems to show a greater following for vernacular schools than was apparent in the earlier Venetian evidence, according to which Latin secondary schools seem to have predominated;if this represents a changing pattern, then it is perhaps to be related to the growing popularity in the sixteenth century of vernacular readers, such as the Babuino, which, according to the important articles by Piero Lucchi, appear to have been associated with the broadening scope and more appealing syllabus of abacus schools in the sixteenth century.78This is an indication of further curricular and structural change after
73 Ibid., 102-8, 275-305, 323-99. 74Europa, 13-14; Pensieropedagogico, 92; Avesani, Quattro miscellanee, 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, Quattro Miscellanee, 19-25. 78 "La Santacroce, il Salterio, e il Babuino: libri per imperare a leggere nel primo secolo della stampa," Quaderni storici, 38 (1978), 593-630; "Leggere, scrivere e abbaco: l'istruzione elementare agli inizi del'eta moderna," Scienze, credenze occulte, livelli di cultura (Florence, 1982), 101-19. See also Carla Frova, "La scuola nella citta tardomedievale: 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.

This content downloaded from 164.73.224.2 on Mon, 17 Feb 2014 06:57:06 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Italian Renaissance Education

329

1500, and if the pattern of educational institutions is more chronologically complex than Grendler perhaps suggests, there is possibly more regional and geographical variation, too. The major variable in Italian Renaissance schooling was, in his view, the size of the community: Small towns hired communal masters more often than did large cities.... Communal schools appeared in small towns and villages throughout northern and north-central Italy. By contrast, large and powerful cities such as Venice, Milan, and Florence had few communal teachers.... Sixteenth-century Venice had a typical Renaissance mixture of independent, communal, and church schools ... in 1587-88, about 89 percent of Venetian students ... studied in independent schools, 7 percent... in church schools, and 4 percent... in communal schools. This distribution by kind of school probably typified the situation in other large cities such as Milan, Florence, and Rome, because such cities had a large number of wealthy nobles and merchants who could afford to hire independent masters, including household tutors. Few of the very wealthy needed to rely on communal schools to educate their children. On the other hand, one or two communal masters probably taught a larger proportion of the total school population in villages and towns of a few hundred to a few thousand souls, because the smaller and less wealthy upper class in them lacked the means to hire numerous independent masters.9 Local traditions, however, may have played as great a role as size in producing regional variations. It is puzzling why Grendler names Milan, for which no supporting evidence is cited; moreover, he does not mention Massa's or Petti Balbi's work on Genoa in this context, although this shows a greater commitment to publicly regulated education in a large city than in either Venice or Florence. It is conceded that Rome "had more communal schools than the two commercial republics [of Venice and Florence], which relied overwhelmingly on independent schools";80indeed, the evidence offered by Grendler, in addition to other published documentation, suggests that Venetian and Florentine preference for independent, as opposed to communal or communally supervised, education was exceptional for Italy as a whole. However, Grendler perhaps takes the resemblance between Venice and Florence rather too far. For him, "Florentine schooling looks like a smaller version of Venetian schooling," but he does not point out one startling contrast: in Florence only 23 boys out of 1031 in 1480 were said to be studying Latin, whereas in Venice 47% of the total enrollment of c. 4625 boys Grendler attempts to account for this remarkably were at Latin schools in 1587.81 low 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 it would perhaps be more appropriateto investigate further this strange paradox of educational history in the "Athens" of the Renaissance.83 In spite of these reservationsabout his treatment of the earlierperiod, Grendl79Schooling, 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

Ibid., 75. See my forthcoming article, "Florence," The Renaissance in National Context, ed. R. Porter and M. Teich (Cambridge, 1991).
83

82

Schooling, 43, 75.

This content downloaded from 164.73.224.2 on Mon, 17 Feb 2014 06:57:06 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

330

Robert Black

and suggestivesurvey of er's book providesa wide-ranging, well-researched, Italianschoolingin the sixteenthcentury.One of the most interesting patterns of sixteenth-century methodsis thegeneral fromhis discussion to emerge teaching commentaries: of absenceof moralsas a topicin pedagogic "Despitethe barrage that Terencetaughtvirtue,printedcommentaries did not humanistic assertions to expository drawout morallessonsbut confinedthemselves paraphrase, gramof unfamiliar maticalanalysis,and explanation "Renaispersonsand terms";84 to grammatical, on Horaceconfinedthemselves sancecommentators rhetorical, traditionof Caesarconsistedalmost the "commentary and poeticalanalysis";85 nor "didcommentaries and historicalinformation," exclusivelyof geographical who paraphrased the text a "teacher drawmorallessonsfromCaesar's works";86 and explainedSallust'smeaningdid not have to develop moral lessons from classroomcommentators historicalbehavior,becauseSallustdid it for him";87 everynoun and verb in synonyms,and elaboration explainedwith paraphrase, Valerius,and many other words, as well. Historicalpersonages,events, and classicalsources for the episodeswere identified;sometimesquotationsfrom offeredverylittle otherancientauthorsexpanded points.But the commentaries or etymological sometimes rhetorical, analysis,despiteValerius's grammatical, withthe presentor addto ValeriNor did they drawparallels complexlanguage. ValeriusMaximusmightbe seen as a moralphilosous's pervasive moralizing. treatedhim as a historian.88 but Renaissance schools pher, workshows that therewas a tacit assumption Grendler's Moreover, among teachers that close readingitself engendered Italian sixteenth-century morality: on Terencecontainedno morallessons,some "inalthoughtheircommentaries moral the lessonsorally.The editorof a new Aldineprinting structors developed who the claimedto have spent years teachingVenetian of Comoediae, (1570) One this must made point. explainorallyto boys that Terencedevelops youths, virtue.His ingeniousartificesand situationsengenderdelight and teach good andrhetorihabitsto the young,he wrote."89 Similarly, despitethe solelyliterary Fabriniin 1566summarized of Horacecommentaries, "Giovanni cal character 'Horace's intenthe viewthatmoralphilosophy couldbe taughtthroughHorace: him moral that with those virtues make tion is to bringman to perfection, filling him perfect,in effectrationaland, as a consequence, blessed.'"90 These Italian asserted Terenceor Horace teachers thattherewas a connection betweenreading of good character, but theirclassroom and the development practice,as revealed did not developthe links explicitlyor concretely. by theircommentaries, as The parallelwith the practiceof northernsixteenth-century pedagogues, is striking: presented by Graftonand Jardine, What Erasmusdoes not explain(what from his point of view as a humanist no explanation) is how the youngtheologian can be surethat pedagogue requires
84 85

Schooling, 252.

Ibid., 253.

86Ibid., 259, 260. 87Ibid., 261. 88Ibid., 263. 89Ibid., 252. 9 Ibid., 254.

This content downloaded from 164.73.224.2 on Mon, 17 Feb 2014 06:57:06 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Italian Renaissance Education

331

simple, straightforwardreading will produce right doctrine.... Erasmus sees no problem here-and in this context the assumption is a clear one-because for him the secular humanist's method of close reading in context is itself an enterprise of evident moral value. The mere exercise of reading the text as it really is will make the reader moral and wise in a direct way.... The real point of close reading is that it produces the right sort of person-a person of evident worth. Agricola and Erasmus together provided the sixteenth century with a promise that the humanist education they promoted and developed would make its recipients better people, and they provided the pedagogic tools to make that education accessible to many.... The tacit assumption is that the two things necessarilygo together: that successful drilling in copia and methoduswill guaranteea classroom product of moral uprightness and good character.91 The similarities, points of contact, and mutual influences between Italy and northern Europe are interesting features of Scaglione's discussion of Jesuit education, its background, and its context. One example is the practice of organizing classes according to decuriae: each class (often of about 100 students) was divided into decuriae often under a student nominated decurio or monitorand regularly replaced if no longer efficient in his supervisory assignments. The ten members of such teams were classified in order of achievement, and the decuriones were also hierarchically graded, the first one watching over the second and so on in order. The decuriae existed in Paris only at the College of Montaigu and are mentioned in 1503, though not again until after 1550, but they existed at Deventer and at Strasbourg under Sturm, and then again among both the Jesuits and the Reformed... it was clearly the Brethren [of the Common Life] who adopted this method systematically in the schools....92 Especially significant for the internationalizing of education in the sixteenth century was the Parisian College de Montaigu: Montaigu is particularly important for us for two main reason: first, for its connection with the Devotio moderna ... to the extent that it has been regarded as a sort of branch of the Brethren.... Second, because it was at Montaigu that Loyola's group studied during their days in Paris. In other words, this was a meeting point for crucial experiments in religious-humanistic education (Christian Humanism) which would later evolve in both directions, the Protestant and the Catholic.93 Similarly, Scaglione stresses the parallels among Protestant, Erasmian and Jesuit efforts to expurgate and censor problematic classical literature,94 and he underlines the resemblance between the Protestant Sturm's highly structured didactic system with its goal of pietas litterata and the Jesuits' structures and aims.95 Scaglione's emphasis on the similarities, rather than the differences, of Reformed and Jesuit education, appears fully justified:
92Jesuit College System, 12-13. 93 Ibid., 28. 94Ibid., 31. 95 Ibid., 42-43.
91From Humanism, 148-49.

This content downloaded from 164.73.224.2 on Mon, 17 Feb 2014 06:57:06 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

332

Robert Black

The closeness of Renaissance educators to the humanistic ideals can be observed in all social settings, secular as well as religious, both Catholic and Protestant. In particular, the Jesuit pedagogical system, undoubtedly the most successful and influential to come out of the Renaissance, is demonstrably an adaptation of the humanistic postulates to the new needs of the time. Loyola and his followers inherited and, in their way, preserved the educational idea of the Renaissance as transmitted through the humanists' philological method and general philosophy of learning. They produced a southern, Italy-centered "Christian Humanism", parallel to the northern Christian Humanism of the Brethren and Erasmus ... one can assert that the Jesuits carried on ... the lessons and basic desiderata of Renaissance Humanism ... (and a parallel discourse could be made, mutatis mutandis, of the Protestant denominations).96 Perhaps the greatest contribution of Grafton and Jardine's book is their insight into the gulf between the humanist pedagogues' claims to build character and their actual almost wholly philological teaching methods, but their study also includes a perceptive discussion of humanist education for women in the Quattrocento. In fact the chapter entitled "Women Humanists: Education for What?"is the work of Jardineherself rather than a collaborative effort, conflating as it does two of her previously published articles.97 In her analysis Jardine reconsiders material already brought first to current scholarly attention by Margaret King.98Almost none of the sources used by either scholar was unknown or unpublished, but King's role in reviving academic interest in fifteenth-century women humanists is demonstrated by Maria Lenzi in her useful anthology of published sources on women's education in the early Italian Renaissance, where it is observed that despite "a fine critical edition of her works, published together with a careful reconstruction of biographical details..., Isotta Nogarola of Verona, along with her contemporary women humanists, has suffered the fate of being almost completely neglected and forgotten by social and literary historians."99In her earlier article Jardine acknowledges King's "pioneering"contribution,100and Lenzi, too, touches on the work of a number of the same fifteenthcentury women humanists in her anthology.101This overlap and repetition testifies to the limited material available for the growing preoccupation with gender questions in fields such as Renaissance intellectual history. Jardine does demonstrate, nevertheless, that such revaluation does not necessarily have to represent mere bowing to the latest academic fashion. King's treatment of the material had led to not entirely unexpected conclusions: women
96Ibid., 51-52. 97 "Isotta Nogarola: Women Humanists-Education for What?,"Historyof Education, 12 (1983), 231-44; "'O decus Italiae virgo', or the Myth of the Learned Lady in the Renaissance," 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 European Past, ed. P. H. Labalme (New York, 1980), 66-90. 99Donne e madonne: I'educazione femminile nel primo Rinascimento italiano (Turin, 1982), 21. 100"O decus," 799. 101 Donne e madonne, 206-16.

This content downloaded from 164.73.224.2 on Mon, 17 Feb 2014 06:57:06 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Italian Renaissance Education

333

humanists were not able to fulfil their scholarly ambitions because of the prejudices of society and so were forced to compromise; they had either to seek religious retreat and preserve some scholarly activity or marry and give up their humanist interests. Jardine also points to the near-impossibility of following a humanist path for a woman in the fifteenth century, but she interestingly turns the question round, asking not just what this shows about women and society but about humanism itself. Her answer is that the study of female humanism exposes yet further the hollowness of the claims by humanist educators to provide a moral education for their pupils. Humanist education and scholarly activity might plausibly endow a man with virtue, somehow enabling him to participate in the active life of his society; but the same kind of education and occupation for a woman almost inevitably led to suspicion of immorality, promiscuity, or even worse. Why was a woman such as Isotta Nogarola without a husband?Why did she, an unmarried woman, carry on active correspondence and even meet with male scholars? Why did Casandra Fedele appear in male gatherings at universities and public assemblies and call attention to herself by giving orations and even perhaps indulge in conspicuous gesticulation? Such behavior was not typical of the virtuous maiden or matron, and it was hardly surprising that one scurrilous pamphleteer put into writing what many contemporaries were thinking: "a woman of fluent tongue is never chaste." Grafton and Jardine have cast some doubt on the humanists' claim to provide their male pupils with virtue, but certainly Jardine has demonstrated the hypocrisy of asserting that, in the Quattrocento, a humanist education could enhance a woman's moral reputation. The 1970s and 1980s seem to have been a watershed in the study of Italian Renaissance schooling. Garin's contribution, continuing the work of Saitta and marks the culmination of a previous other students of humanist pedagogy,102 generation's achievement rather than the beginning of a new approach. Theory and theorizing were the concerns of the neo-Crocean heyday; now the emphasis has turned much more to the classroom itself. Grafton and Jardinehave suggested the possibilities offered by the study of humanist commentariesbased on teaching practice; Gehl has highlighted a hitherto almost undisclosed window onto the schoolroom, the manuscript textbook; Klapisch-Zuber has given a reminder of the rich possibilities for understanding individual academic careers and elemenLucchi has shown tary curriculum offered by family diaries and memoirs;103 how much more there is to say about elementary and vernacular textbooks and curriculum; local educational traditions have perhaps been illuminated by the
Benetti-Brunelli,Le origini italiane della scuola umanistica ovverolefonti italiche della "coltura"moderna (Milan, 1919); G. Gerini, Gli scrittoripedagogici del secolo XV (Turin, 1896); W. Krampe, Die italienischen Humanisten und ihre Wirksamkeitfur die Pidagogik (Breslau, 1895); G. Vidari, L'educazione in Italia Wiederbelebunggymnastische dall'umanesimo al risorgimento(Rome, 1930); W. H. Woodward, Studies in Education during the Age of the Renaissance (Cambridge, 1906), and his Vittorinoda Feltre and other Humanist Educators (Cambridge, 1897); V. M. Geerts, De Humanistische Paedagogiek in Italie (Leuven, 1953); V. J. Horkan, Educational Theoriesand Principles of Maffeo Vegio (Washington, D. C., 1953); R. Kelso, Doctrinefor the Lady of the Renaissance (Urbana, Ill. 1956). 103 "Le chiavi fiorentine di barbablu:l'apprendimento della lettura a Firenze nel XV secolo," Quaderni storici, 57 (1984), 765-92.
102 V.

This content downloaded from 164.73.224.2 on Mon, 17 Feb 2014 06:57:06 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

334

Robert Black

and paymentdocumentsfor teacharchivalappointment study of unpublished of earlyprinting forthe understanding hasshownthe importance ers;04Grendler Latin and vernacular of the sixteenth-century syllabus;105 Scaglionehas shown how much there is to discoverabout international schooling patternsin the or under-used On the basisof suchuntapped sourcesandby followRenaissance. in can 1990s for a more sensitive we the such innovative methods, hope ing for greater and local variations in Italian of education, understanding regional in differences education into similarities and between and the the Italy insight of the contentof humanist assessment instrucrestof Europe,for a morerealistic of the usesof textbooks andof the structure of the tion,fora bettercomprehension andjudiciousapproach to the perennial andfor a moresympathetic curriculum, from the MiddleAges to the Renaissance. questionof the transition Universityof Leeds.

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

The Humanities Center of The Johns Hopkins University is seeking an Assistant or Associate Professor (non-tenured but tenuretrack) in the history of psychiatry, psychoanalysis and/or psychology. The candidate should have a strong interest in the relevance of these disciplines to humanistic studies. Send letters of application and complete dossiers to Professor Walter Benn Michaels, Chair, Search Committee, Department of English, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218. Deadline: September 15, 1991. The Johns Hopkins University is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer.

This content downloaded from 164.73.224.2 on Mon, 17 Feb 2014 06:57:06 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Você também pode gostar