Cicero in the curriculum of italian Renaissance grammar schools

Abstract

It is well known that Cicero had a place in the curriculum of fJ.fteenth-century Italian grammar schools: his treatises, De officiis, De senectute and De amicitia were recommended by Aeneas Sylvius in his De liberorum educatione(l); Cicero's letters were used by Guarino Veronese, so suggests his son Battista, to teach Latin(2); schoolmasters in communes such as Pistoia were enjoined to lecture on Ciceronian texts including De officiis(3).Nevertheless, this didactic interest was not ).mprecedented in the long and complex history of Cicero's post-antique transmission.There is evidence to show the important place which Cicero occupied in the medieval grammar curriculum as well.Thus, in Aimeric of Gatinaux's Ars lectoria of 1086, Cicero was one of the recommended authors, albeit placed in the second or silver rank alongside Donatus, Priscian or Boethius(4).In the following century he received higher status at the hands of Conrad of Hirsau, who placed him firmly among the auctores maiores(5) of the grammar curriculum, recommending in particular De amicitia and De senectute(6).Even more Ciceronian texts were endorsed at the end of the twelfth century by Alexander Neckham, who added De oratore, the Tusculan Disputations, the Paradoxa stoicorum and De officiis to Conrad's more modest suggestions(?).

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