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

This large book, the first of two projected volumes, presents excerpts from documents dealing with education found in the archives of Florence and the towns ruled by Florence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The most important series used is the Florentine catasto of 1427, supplemented by the catasti of 1457 and 1480. The book also includes excerpts from many manuscripts, especially Florentine ricordanze (family memoirs). The excerpts are given in the original Latin or Italian. The narrative connects, explains, and interprets the documentary excerpts. The book presents the results of years of research by Black and four other scholars (the title page might have read “with the assistance of” these other scholars).

The focus is Florentine Tuscany, that is, Florence plus the towns that it ruled in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: Colle Valdelsa, Fucecchio, Pistoia, Poggibonsi, Prato, San Gimignano, Volterra, Arezzo, San Miniato, Pescia, and Sansepolcro. It does not include other Tuscan towns, such as Lucca, Pisa, and Siena, although some comparisons are made. The purpose of the book is to discover everything possible to be learned about the organization of schooling, the teachers, and instruction.

Black describes the organization and history of Florentine Tuscan education as follows. Before 1100 ecclesiastical institutions dominated schooling, but then the number of church schools declined drastically. Lay authorities, that is, communes (urban governments) and private teachers became the dominant purveyors of schooling in the thirteenth century; this was “a veritable revolution in the provision of instruction” (190). By 1300 communes and parents paid the teachers, while communes issued directives about education. Towns had both Latin and vernacular schools. Florence differed from other towns in Tuscany and the rest of Northern and north-central Italy in that it had specialized abacus schools in which boys spent about two years learning commercial mathematics. The Latin schools used medieval grammar manuals to teach the rudiments of Latin, followed by study of the ancient Latin classics. In the fifteenth century the Latin schools taught more classics, and the influence of humanism gradually became manifest in the schools. In other words, the pattern described by Black is exactly what this reviewer described for Florence and the rest of Northern and north-central Italy in 1989, although Black never mentions this. The only difference is that Black sees the humanist change to occur about 1470 in Florence instead of about the middle of the century. Black attributes the slowness of Florentine schools to adopt a humanist upper-school Latin curriculum to the strength of abacus schooling.

This book repeats the interpretations that Black offered in his 2001 book, including his claim that schools did not teach good morals. On the other hand, he quotes several teacher contracts in which communes ordered school masters to teach good morals. Did teachers ignore the wishes of their employers at the peril of their jobs? Communes also sometimes offered civic and practical justifications for funding education: producing cultured citizens, keeping students out of mischief, preparation for university study, and the topos that learning led to good government and communal prosperity.

In chapter 1 Black estimates potential Florentine male literacy in 1427. On the basis of a close examination of the 1427 catasto he notes that 69% (5,111 of 7,370) of male heads of households who made catasto declarations were literate, thus projecting a potential male literacy rate of 69%. However, it should be remembered (as Black notes) that catasto declarations excluded male and female religious, servants, slaves, business employees, apprentices, and wetnurses. Moreover, the total population of Florence in 1427 was between 37,000 and 38,000, according to David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber. In other words, additional demographic calculation is needed. Nevertheless, on the basis of his study of the 1427 catasto Black declares that Florence had just as...