Studio e scuola in Arezzo durante il Medioevo e il Rinascimento. I documenti d'archivio fino al 1530 ed. by Robert Black (review)

book reviews541 André Vauchez has vigorously pursued his scholarly agenda in the years following the publication of this book. He has not, however, significantly updated this particular work. Although it has appeared in two further French editions, they are essentially reprintings, with no changes to text or notes. This English translation is of the second edition, which dates to 1987 and has only a few pages of a cursory "bibliographic update." The student, therefore, should not rely on this translation as a guide to current scholarship, or even necessarily for bibliographic references, as many of the works cited in the notes have been since published in significantly different versions. It is also worth noting that much of Vauchez's own work has already appeared in English translation. An important sampling of his articles written between 1981 and 1987 may be found in The Laity in the MiddleAges:Religious Beliefs and Devotional Practices (Notre Dame, Indiana, 1993). Perhaps even more important for the Anglophone student of medieval Christianity is his brief,but brilliant overview of The Spirituality ofthe Medieval West: The Eighth to the Twelfth Century (Kalamazoo , Michigan, 1993), which was first published in 1975. (Unfortunately, the English translation necessarily lacks a wonderful chapter on the mendicants added to the second edition of 1994.) In any and all forms, André Vauchez is a scholar whose work is to be carefully considered and even treasured. Thomas Head Washington University Studio escuola inArezzo durante UMedioevo e il Rinascimento. I documenti d'archivio fino al 1530. A cura di Robert Black. (Arezzo: Accademia Petrarca di lettere arti e scienze. 1996. Pp. 873. Lire 150.000 paperback.) This is a collection of 1,284 documents and parts of documents dealing with education inArezzo, 1241 through 1530. Some 1,123 documents focus on preuniversity education; the rest detail Arezzo's failures to restore its university, which flourished in the early thirteenth century, then died. As Black informs the readers, he has not uncovered anything new of significance before 1384, but has found an abundance of new materials after that date. The documents come from three Aretine archives and the Archivio di Stato in Florence. Black summarizes the key points of the material in an historical survey of seventy-nine pages. Numerous documents deal with the two teachers paid by the communal goverment , the Latin or grammar master, who sometimes had an assistant, and the abbaco master, who taught commercial mathematics in the vernacular. Limited publicly-funded education was common in small Italian centers; Black has found little evidence of private teachers in Arezzo. Student fees supplemented the teachers' salaries. A document of i486 states that the Latin teacher had 120 students, which Black estimates to have been 25% of the masculine school-age population. Unfortunately, he offers no population figures to support the estimate . The abbaco teacher taught forty boys in 1471 and twenty-five in 1506, 542book reviews which was between 5% and 10% of the masculine school-age population, according to Black's estimate. Again supporting evidence is lacking. On the whole, the communal Latin and abbaco schools were successful and continuous. The university was neither. It probably was very small, perhaps eight professors in 1255, and seem to have died by the early fourteenth century. The government made several unsuccessful efforts to revive it in the next 200 years. AlthoughArezzo awarded some degrees, the university did not recover as a teaching institution for several reasons. The costs would have been higher than the Aretines were willing to bear. The ruling class never reached a consensus that a local university was needed. And Florence, which ruled Arezzo from 1384, did not grant permission for a university. When Lorenzo de' Medici signaled his intention of moving the University ofFlorence, the Aretines eagerly offered to be hosts. But it moved to Pisa in 1473. Beyond the individual documents, Black makes the case that Arezzo's strong tradition of Latin schooling nourished such important Aretine-born humanists as Leonardo Bruni, Carlo Marsuppini, and Benedetto Accolti. Indeed, Black claims that Arezzo was the only Italian town to maintain an unbroken tradition of classical studies from the end of the thirteenth century to the flowering of the Renaissance in...