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176 Reviews typographical errors; although, on page 71 the reference should be to Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, Lat. 250 (not 25). The index to manuscripts is good, but there is at least one omission. Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, Lat. 2 is mentioned on page 75. The many illustrations, though black and white, are of good quality. Toby Burrows University Library University of Western Australia Gehl, Paul E., A moral art: grammar, society and culture in trecento Florence, Ithaca and London, CorneU University Press, 1993; cloth; pp. x, 310; R.R.P. US$42.85. This is a remarkable book that wiU introduce the newcomer to current, postKristeller , state-of-the-art research into Florentine culture in, from a Renaissance humanist point of view, its formative years. However, the great Florentines of the day, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, hover only around the edge of the study, banished, as it were, to the limbo of '6migr6 culture' (p. 234). The focus of Gehl's attention is, in fact, a group of minor labourers in the vineyard of learning, theteachersof Latin grammar, a cut or two above the teachers of reading and writing, but, alas, of only modest social pretensions, and enjoying but a fragile living, on the level of typical artisans or minor guildsmen. Gehl's reasons for selecting this period and subject are perhaps sound, but, if his labours are to be believed, his teachers become, by the end of his period, an unimpressive, conservative, poorly respected and, one might add, entirely ordinary group who stand out from then peers elsewhere only because of the unflagging zeal and thoroughness with which Gehl has pursued them. Much of the book is a detailed examination of the typical class study texts used by these grammarians, in an endeavour to show both that the latter were fearful of parental or municipal censure and quite rote and unadventurous in then demands, and also that they restricted the curriculum to time-honoured texts designed to introduce then students safely to the universal world of Latin culture, at the level of pious proverb and near-trite didactic moralism. It is indeed a paradox that sofinea work of scholarship as this book, has been lavished upon such underserving time-servers. A considerable manuscript feat lies at the core of this book. Gehl has identified from clues of content, usage, ownership, production, and size, a Reviews 177 core of some twenty-two 'elementary Latin readers' (ch. 2 and appendix pp. 241-85) which 'were really used in the classroom, or used regularly there', that is, which were not oversize or too late for the study period, were not for advanced use or for institutional or privatereference,and which were written in Tuscany. These workstestifyto the emergence of 'a new style of Latin reading book (that) was designed and became common in Florence toward the end of the thirteenth century, and became the standard in Florentine classrooms in the early trecento' (p. 15). With this corpus, Gehl resurrects before our eyes the narrow routine world of the poorly paid trecento Florentine elementary Latin grammarians, who 'backed themselves into a dead end in the history of Latin literature and Latin pedagogy, under the dual influence of then city's profoundly anti-intellectual commercial culture and the vital but single-minded program of the mendicants' (p. 240). If Gehl is correct in his deductions concerning these manuscripts, he has laid afinemethodological foundation for all future work on routine classical textbooks. Indeed, further studies, of other subject areas (for example, rhetoric, on which Gehl's remarks are worth attention [pp. 5-6]), would broaden the appeal, and underline the relevance, of his work. There are perceptive comments on the nature of elitist Florentine Latin humanism which hint (cf. the use of 'merely' pp. 77 and 102 in connection with Dante) that Gehl cannot quite forgive the brilliant Latinists for being so much more brilliant and succcessful than his labourers in the vineyard, who, he says, a trifle grandly, 'acted as a brake on the new humanism, in the name of the moral needs of an educated citizenry' (p. 1 and cf. p. 232). Though prone to some stereotypical generalizations about medieval didactic and grammatical emphases...

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