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

Black's book is an examination of primary and secondary education in medieval and Renaissance Italy. He demonstrates that gaining a knowledge of Latin language and literature—that is, acquiring a facility in reading and writing Latin—was the sole aim of primary and secondary education. The curriculum was not at all interdisciplinary. Students learned their grammatical lessons from ancient texts with moral, political, and historical content, but these texts were employed and digested only as grammatical texts; the moral, political, and historical content was never discussed. Heavy glossing of the texts with paraphrasing, grammatical analysis, etymology, word-order analysis, synopsis, and synonyms was the major pedagogical device. Since verse was easier to memorize, it became a popular learning tool in a society where few owned their textbooks. No regionalism existed in Italy because education was the heritage of Roman education, and teachers migrated from city to city, much like jurists.

Black finds an amazing amount of continuity between the primary/secondary curriculum in the Middle Ages and the same level curriculum in the Renaissance. Humanism did not add a great deal to it beyond some post-secondary teaching of rhetoric. Important innovations were made in earlier centuries, such as the logical approach to grammar created by twelfth-century grammarians, and vernacular explanations of Latin grammar constructions facilitating the understanding of Latin invented in the fourteenth century.

This book is a close examination of many manuscripts. Black's way of mapping out the curriculum is to chronicle and examine all the school books used and to read the glosses in order to understand how the students used them. This task required him to understand the content of each manuscript, a difficult task because one author borrowed from another, compilations contained the works of many authors, texts were illogically ordered, and subtle changes sometimes were important. The profundity and exactness of Black's understanding, as well as the completeness of his account, are what make the book so interesting. Black has reviewed an astounding number of manuscripts and filled his book with a great amount of valuable information. This book has an Annales-like quality; it looks at the education that the broadest group of society would have had and quantifies manuscripts from different centuries for comparison.

The relationship between primary/secondary education and humanism, however, is not articulated clearly enough. Black sees Renaissance humanism as a new rhetoric appended to the grammar curriculum. But Renaissance humanism was not simply a narrow movement in secondary education. It was, rather, a blossoming of the moral, political, and historical viewpoints embedded in the classical texts. By ignoring the great thinkers, Black ignores the upper component of humanism where the more creative changes resided. Humanism may have had only a small effect on the primary and secondary curriculum, but this effect did not represent the sum total of what humanism was. Black's belief that fifteenth-century mass learning was unaffected by humanism may well be possible because the teaching of basic Latin was done quite proficiently already. One of the great values of his book is its ability to demonstrate the soundness of this basic curriculum, but it underestimates the less measurable influence that humanism had on Renaissance thought.