A Renaissance Education: Schooling in Bergamo and the Venetian Republic, 1500–1650 by Christopher Carlsmith (review)

REVIEWS 234 Christopher Carlsmith, A Renaissance Education: Schooling in Bergamo and the Venetian Republic, 1500–1650 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2010) xvii + 435 pp., tables, maps, ill. The study of early modern and humanistic education is a topic that has already received copious scholarly attention. As with many such phenomena, however, the most prominent people, places, and ideas receive the most commentary, while, for instance, in the study of Italian education of the same period, a place such as a Bergamo, reputed to be an uneducated backwater of the Venetian Republic , will instead largely languish in the cultural shadows. Carlsmith’s A Renaissance Education proposes to demonstrate that Bergamo was not at all rightly subject to such opprobrium, but was instead a place of lively educational patronage. Taking approximately the period 1500–1650, Carlsmith examines the many institutions and individuals whose patronage and labor brought instruction to Bergamo’s youth. After an introduction in which he agrees generally with Paul Grendler and also with Robert Black’s recommendation of a regionally nuanced view of Italian Renaissance education, Carlsmith proposes a holistic examination, across institutional boundaries, of schooling in one Italian city, Bergamo. The division of the chapters reflects that conceptualization: civil, ecclesiastical, and otherwise (18). Chapter 1 examines the efforts of Bergamo’s city council to establish and support public education for its youth (and also, occasionally, for adults) beginning as early as the high mediaeval period until approximately the middle of the seventeenth century, as recorded in the civil archives. It is divided into four parts, three of which are chronologically focused on grammar and the humanities (beginnings to 1482, 1483–1525, and 1525–1659), while the fourth surveys the teaching of law through the entire period 1482–1650. Regarding grammar and the humanities, until the middle of the fourteenth century the records are sparse, but starting even in that period the names of a few private masters begin to appear. Thenceforth through the subsequent periods, increasingly though with ebbs and flows, the names of other masters, their activities, and their business with the town council are recorded, and those who left more a substantial archival wake become the subject of brief narrations throughout the chapter. Across all periods, civil support varied. Though some larger cultural trends are suggested as causes, the focus remains consistently on the relations between the commune (town council) and the educational institutions (at times personified by just a few masters active in the town) that it seeks, creates, endows, or ignores . The fourth section gives a briefer but similar treatment to the teaching of law, which was often done in conjunction with larger universities like Padua. In chapter 2, Carlsmith turns his attention to the efforts of Bermasque confraternities in similar supporting education for the youth. A confraternity was “an association of lay people who joined together for socio-religious reason and agreed to follow common rules,” which, Carlsmith remarks, in comparison to guilds, seminaries, and the like, are among the less-studied institutions of early modern Europe (75, 77). By far the largest and most influential confraternity in Bergamo was the Congregation and Fraternity of Saint Mary of Mercy (also known as the Misericordia Maggiore or MIA, founded in 1265), and the chapter examines three of its educational endeavors in the period, none of which, nevertheless, lasted more than several decades: a day school for young men in- REVIEWS 235 tending to enter the priesthood; a residential college at the University of Padua, where, by order of the Venetian Republic, all students from Bergamo had to go to study; and a boarding academy for clerics. The remainder of the chapter is devoted to other smaller confraternities in or around Bergamo and their similar efforts. Chapters 3 and 4 form a pair that considers the formal support provided by the Roman Catholic Church in Bergamo. Several of these efforts reflect the renewed emphasis upon the education of children and adults alike following the Council of Trent (1545–1563) (140–141). Chapter 3 examines two institutions: the Schools of Christian Doctrine, a lay movement that offered catechetical and some vocational instruction, as well as the rudiments of literacy to children; and the official seminary...