Teaching Classics in the Renaissance: Two Case Histories

I have always enjoyed this plenary session, and especially the awards, for they give us an opportunity to think about—and to celebrate—what it is to be a classicist, and what got us into this business in the first place: the desire to find out about the ancient world and the eagerness to convey our knowledge and enthusiasm to others. In a word: scholarship and teaching. These two activities are complementary and symbiotic in every field, but especially so in classics, where not only our discipline, but our material itself has depended on their interaction for over two thousand years. Both our reading of the ancient authors and the fact that we have them to read have depended on generations of scholars, teachers, and students reading them before us—and not just reading them, but transcribing, interpreting, imitating, and above all making them meaningful in terms of their own lives.

The process is an active one—much too active to be described by the terms we use for it: classical tradition, transmission, or reception. If our predecessors had merely received and transmitted the ancient texts, handing them down like so many unopened packages, the continuum of classical scholars, teachers, and readers would have ended long ago.

This afternoon I want to talk about two of our predecessors in this continuum—two great scholar-teachers of the Renaissance, Filippo Beroaldo and Pierio Valeriano. Each taught an author whose survival from antiquity hung by a slender thread, depending as it did on a single manuscript. Beroaldo lectured on Apuleius' Golden Ass, preserved only in an eleventh-century manuscript from Montecassino, Valeriano on Catullus, whose text was recovered only at the beginning of the thirteenth century in a manuscript now lost to us. We have an excellent record of the teaching of both from their lectures, which suffered very different fates through the accidents of history. Beroaldo's teaching is preserved in his famous commentary on the Golden Ass, which was printed in many editions and is only now being fully superseded. Valeriano's lectures on Catullus are only partially preserved in a mutilated and almost unknown manuscript in the Vatican Library. Beroaldo's commentary influenced the way in which the Golden Ass was read all over Europe for generations. Valeriano's lectures influenced no one at all—except for the students who heard them.

1. Filippo Beroaldo

In the late fifteenth century Filippo Beroaldo of Bologna was one of the most popular and influential teachers in Italy.¹ As many as 300 students regularly attended his daily morning lectures at the University of Bologna.² Many of these students were foreign, for Beroaldo's reputation extended far beyond Italy. They came from Spain and France, but above all from Germany and eastern Europe; indeed, a contemporary chronicler tells us both that he had 200 students "from the other side of the Alps" and that they all left Bologna after his death.³ Beroaldo's students were undoubtedly attracted by his kindly, genial manner, for he seems to have been a happy, hospitable man, deeply religious, but also good company and a bit of a bon vivant.⁴ But it was his teaching they came to hear.

We know quite a bit about Renaissance teaching. Both the appearance of the classroom and the teaching style were inherited from the Middle Ages.⁵ The professor, in his pulpit, read the text aloud, commenting on it word by word. He glossed difficult vocabulary, explained historical and mythological references, cited parallels from other authors, and corrected readings. The students either had texts or created them from the professor's dictation. This teaching method long outlasted the Renaissance: a form of it was still in use at the University of Edinburgh in the early 1960s, as I know from my own experience. By this time, of course, the students all owned printed texts, but the professor still went through the play—we were studying Aeschylus' Agamemnon—word by word, as his predecessors had done for a thousand years.

As he prepared his lectures, the teacher (whether Renaissance or modern...