Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy: Tradition and Innovation in Latin Schools from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century. (Reviews).

Robert Black, Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy: Tradition and Innovation in Latin Schools from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xv + 489 pp. $80. ISBN: 0-521-40192-5.

This argumentative and contradictory book defends the thesis that Italian Latin pre-university education did not change in substance between 1200 and 1500, and it dismisses the claims of the humanists and modern scholars that it did. But the author also presents evidence that the humanists did effect a "major change" in the fifteenth-century curriculum. The two thrusts produce a good deal of backing and filling. In sum, this book offers much valuable information about late medieval Italian Latin education (1200-1400) while leaving the received picture of Renaissance Latin education, especially in the second half of the fifteenth century, changed only in that some medieval texts had a longer afterlife than previously noticed.

The work begins with an historiographical chapter in which Black reviews negatively most previous scholars in the field beginning with Giuseppe Manacorda and Remigio Sabbadini, seen as representatives of the positivist tradition, followed by Eugenio Garin (who receives considerable criticism as part of the Idealist tradition and as a follower of Giovanni Gentile and Benedetto Croce), Paul Grendler (criticized for being a follower of Garin -- might surprise Garin -- and for seeing a "curriculum revolution" occurring in Latin education in the Renaissance), Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine (less criticized because of their anti-humanist arguments), and Paul Gehl, who earlier studied some of the same manuscript material, but whose work has "technical and interpretative problems" (3, n. 3) according to Black. Other scholars take their lumps in footnotes.

The basis of Black's research is examination in collaboration with Gabriella Pomaro, an obviously very skilled paleographer based in Italy, of 324 manuscript schoolbooks (selected from a pool of over 1,305 manuscripts examined), datable between 1200 and 1500, and found in Florentine libraries, plus selected manuscripts from elsewhere in Italy and Europe. Black argues that these manuscripts offer a good representation of what might be found elsewhere in Europe and, of course, many of these manuscripts are not Florentine or Tuscan. Still, one wonders if the results would have been different had he concentrated on manuscripts in the libraries of the Veneto and Venice, where Vittorino da Feltre and Guarino Guarini were active. On the basis of the manuscript study Black constructs his argument.

The chapter on elementary Latin grammar makes the argument that considerable grammatical change occurred in Italy in the thirteenth century through French influence, but thereafter the grammatical tradition remained unchanged through the fifteenth century. He provides excellent fresh information about the works of medieval Italian grammarians such as Pietro da Isolella da Cremona, Francesco da Buti, and others. One of the most valuable contributions is the considerable new manuscript evidence that Black has discovered that delineates for the first time the history of Ianua, the medieval grammar of Italian origin which replaced the Ars minor of Donatus in most Italian classrooms. He repeatedly emphasizes the continuity of the medieval grammatical approach and material through the fifteenth century. He almost invariably Finds the new grammars composed by fifteenth-century humanists to be medieval in nature. At the same rime, Black notes that a "glimmer of innovation in the Quattrocento classroom was the occasio nal use of ancient grammatical texts little used during the Italian middle ages" (170). He offers as an example the Ars de nomine et verbo by the ancient grammarian Phocas. However, despite the presence of 41 fifteenth-century manuscripts of the work, "almost all [of them] Italian" (ibid.), he does not find this significant. In the end, the new and useful material uncovered by Black and Pomaro strengthens the argument for continuity, previously advanced by several scholars, including Sabbadini and especially W. Keith Percival, in the teaching of elementary Latin grammar.

In the chapter on reading the Latin classics, Black argues that thirteenth-century Italian schools paid little attention to the classics, but that the fourteenth century embraced them. While denying significant change in the fifteenth-century curriculum, he points out that Persius, Juvenal, Terence, Sallust, and especially Vergil were much more prominent in the classroom in the fifteenth century than the fourteenth. And "New works, such as Ovid's Heroic/es and Horace's Carmina, previously little read in the classroom, achieved a sudden popularity" in the fifteenth century (274). Nevertheless, the conclusion is that "the fifteenth-century renaissance of school authors is perhaps better described as a major change of educational fashion rather than as a 'revolution in the schoolroom'" (274). What is the difference between "major change" and "revolution?" And if the new appearance of Cicero's letters and orations, and possibly Caesar, as schoolroom texts in the fifteenth century, all three of which Black ignores in this section of the book, are added to the greater use of Terence, Persius, Juvenal, Terence, Ovid's Heroides, Horace's Carmina, and Vergil, the "major change" looks very large indeed. In 1989 this reviewer wrote "By about 1450 schools in a majority of northern and north-central Italian towns taught the studia humanitatis" (Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300-1600 (Baltimore and London, 1989], 404). The extensive new evidence that Black has produced seems more likely to support this conclusion than to disprove it.

Another chapter analyzes the glosses in the school manuscripts, finding them overwhelmingly to be "simple philology," defined as "paraphrase, grammar, figures, word-order, geography, history, mythology [and] elementary rhetorical analysis" (275). Black's secondary purpose here is to deny that teachers taught and students learned moral lessons from the classics. Certainly the glosses on the manuscripts were overwhelmingly philological (in the above broad meaning of the term) in nature, again something that other scholars have noted. But Black also claims that students did not learn moral lessons or anything else from the content of the texts that they glossed. He states that "such were the technical hurdles in the period before printing that one must assume that what the medieval reader took from a classic is what appears in the glosses, not in the original text" (25), and "It is clear that they [medieval and early Renaissance readers] were able to extract far less, not more, from these texts than was offered by the glossing and commentary tradition; the fact is that whatever their glosses reveal constitutes the limit, nor the minimum, of their comprehension and understanding" (ibid.). If one accepts this assumption about readers long ago, one can agree with Black that readers did not learn moral or any other content from the classics. An alternate assumption is that the glosses represent what the student had to learn in order to be able to understand the content of books, and that they did read and understand the moral and other content of the classical texts.

This book confines itself to the fifteenth century in its effort to deny curricular change, even though Black defines Renaissance and humanist as "1400-1600" (xv). It might be argued that the sixteenth century solidified and extended the curricular innovations of the fifteenth. The book concludes with valuable appendices about Ianua and the immense store of information harvested from the manuscripts. The bibliography has a handful of slips. More puzzling is the failure to specify the number of volumes in multi-volume works.

Black offers a great deal of interesting and useful information. The criticism of other scholars, the denials of the impact of humanism, followed by grudging acknowledgments that humanism did make a difference, succeeded by further qualifications designed to reduce the humanist impact, detract from the good matter in the book. Even if the reader finds some arguments unpersuasive, he can respect the immense amount of manuscript research that has gone into the book, and the author's passionate commitment to understanding a key moment in the history of education and humanism.