Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany: Teachers, Pupils and Schools, c. 1250–1500. Vol. 1 (review)

The reader who opens this spreading volume is bound to be impressed by the thoroughness of its documentation, the technical expertise brought to bear, and the care that has been taken in formulating its wide ranging and often provocative conclusions.

Robert Black and his team of researchers have assembled as thorough a picture as anyone could imagine of pre-university education in Florentine Tuscany. The result is a massive work on the scope of such masterpieces as David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber’s Les Toscanes et leurs familles (Paris, 1978), Charles-Marie de La Roncière’s Florence. Centre économique régional au XIV^e siècle (Aix-en-Provence, 1976), and Armando F. Verde’s Lo Studio fiorentino (Florence, 1973–94).The index of names, which includes not only teachers and pupils but also the classical and medieval authors found in school texts, will be a great aid to future generations of Florentine researchers.

The “Florentine Tuscany” of the title did not yet exist in 1250, but by extending the project’s scope to most of the Tuscan territories that were acquired by the Florentine Republic in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Black is better able to judge the factors in the fourteenth century that increasingly set Florence apart from other Tuscan centers. In the second volume he plans to show how relations between center and periphery under Florentine rule affected educational practice.

In the first chapter, Black looks at autograph catasto declarations from 1427 to conclude that the literacy rate of those males who filed returns was 69.3 percent—a figure he considers evidence of a highly literate society. For years there have been suggestions that the Florentine catasto be used to study literacy, but only the Black team of researchers has risen to the challenge. There are many questions that remain to be investigated, and future scholars may wish to look at Franco Cardini’s description, in Alfabetismo e cultura scritta, ser. 1, 1 [March 1980], 9–12, of a project on the catasto that was once denied funding. In chapters 2–5 Black generally confirms the conclusions of Paul Grendler’s path-breaking Schooling in Renaissance Italy (Baltimore, 1989). He argues that with the decline of ecclesiastical schools in the late-thirteenth century and the development of a secularized free market of paid instructors, Florentine schooling began to take a path different from that of other Tuscan towns. A strong interest in Latin learning is found in places such as Arezzo, Pisa, and Pistoia from the late-thirteenth century, but at Florence throughout the fourteenth and much of the fifteenth centuries Black finds a pronounced emphasis on the commercial skills (arithmetic; reading and writing in the vernacular) taught in abacus schools. In the preface, the author writes, “This study will go some way to answering the question: why the Florentine Renaissance?” (p. xii). Possibly there will be refinements in the second volume; however, at the end of the first, Black’s answer—paradoxically for a historian who has devoted decades to the history of Latin learning—appears to be that neither humanists like Leonardo Bruni and Niccolò Niccoli nor patrons like Palla Strozzi and Cosimo de’ Medici made the Renaissance happen in Florence. Rather, it was the mathematics teachers. According to Black, humanism began to have an impact on Florentine education only in the 1470s—several decades after developments described by Grendler and others. Whether this was so is likely to remain controversial.

Previous arguments about humanism and education in the Renaissance have often relied on data that were qualitative rather than quantitative as they sought to highlight innovation. By way of contrast, Black’s program, with its emphasis on the weight of numbers, on what is today called “outcomes assessment,” and its notices concerning stragglers...