De Educatione.

This beautifully printed book contains an excellent Latin edition, with French translation, introduction, critical apparatus, bibliography and index, of the important treatise De educatione by the prominent early sixteenth-century humanist, Antonio de Ferrariis - better known by his pen name "Il Galateo" - born in Salento (Otranto), Apulia in 1443, but living in Naples.

The treatise, dedicated in 1505 to Crisostomo Colonna, and again in 1512 to Pietro Castriota, has had a very complicated textual history. There are no less than fourteen manuscripts in Avellino, Brindisi, Lecce, in several different libraries in Naples, including the Biblioteca Nazionale, and in a private archive of the Arditi family in Presicce, but they are all rather late, dating from the late sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. The first printed edition in Francesco Casotti's Scritti inedite e rari di diversi autori trovati nelle provincia d'Otranto (Naples, 1865, 1-43), is rather poor, and so is its reprint in Salvatore Grande, La Giapigia e varii opuscoli di Antonio De Ferrariis detto il Galateo (Collana di opere inediti scelte e di Scrittori di Terra d'Otranto, Lecce, 1867, 1:101-67).

Galateo's well-known treatise has been frequently interpreted as a typical specimen of the genre De educatione, often treated by Renaissance humanists, with its characteristic Topoi, especially by most recent historians of Renaissance education; but many modern historians, including Niccolo Tommaseo and especially Benedetto Croce, emphasize the political and polemical purpose of the author who, like a typical nineteenth-century Rinascimento intellectual and aristocrat, would have expressed his hostility against the Aragonese and Spanish kings of Naples. Vecce seems to accept exclusively this second interpretation, yet I tend to believe that both views may legitimately be defended at the same time.

Vecce's text is based, with slight changes, on that given in his own definitive critical edition appended to his study, "Il De educatione di Antonio Galateo De Ferrariis," Studi e problemi di critica testuale 36 (1988): 23-82, where he also discusses the manuscripts and their relationships.

PAUL O. KRISTELLER Columbia University, Emeritus