Reply to Paul Grendler

Abstract

With regard to Paul Grendler's points about the curriculum, it may be replied that the impact of Ciceronianism in fifteenth-century Italian education was mainly felt at the post-grammatical level of Latin teaching, i.e., in the study of rhetoric and moral philosophy. There was of course a great difference between medieval dictamen and Ciceronian rhetoric, based on classical rhetorical treatises and modelled on Cicero's speeches and letters, but this new material was usually encountered after the completion of normal secondary education which ended with grammar. In the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, rhetoric and moral philosophy were normally tertiary, i.e., post-school, subjects, and as such the usual place for their study was in universities, equivalent centers of higher education, or the advanced, post-grammatical classes of humanist teachers. Grendler's discussion of the broadening of the Renaissance Latin curriculum after the study of grammar (Schooling, 235-71) corresponds to the further teaching of Latin prose authors in the Middle Ages. A number of classical Latin prose authors had a powerful commentary tradition in the Middle Ages, and this can be related to post-grammatical teaching just as much then as in the Renaissance. With regard to Grendler's point about the predominance of free education in the Italian communes, it is true that Grendler's actual formulation of this trend is cautiously worded; but the evidence that he cites, together with the material in Manacorda, vol. I, 174-75, with the material in Peter Denley's Governments and Schools in Late Medieval (in City and Countryside in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy. Essays Presented to Philip Jones, ed. T. Dean and C. Wickham, London, 1990, 104-5), and with my own still unpublished archival research on Tuscan schools in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, suggests that free grammar education was becoming the norm in Italy by the end of the fifteenth century. In fact free education was established regularly in San Gimignano after 1435, in Colle di Val d'Elsa after 1445, in Arezzo after 1456, in Prato after 1464 and in Pistoia after 1466. The interesting point in all thisunderemphasized by Grendler-is that the free schooling introduced by the Counter Reformation had been largely anticipated by the communal schools of Italy by the turn of the sixteenth century. In reply to Grendler's doubts about the Italian diffusion of Doctrinale and Catholicon in the fifteenth century, manuscript survival and contemporary book inventories suggest a widespread use of these texts, especially Doctrinale. For Catholicon, see Manacorda, II, 237, 253; Bursill-Hall, Census, 55, 78, 136, 140 (3 copies), 142, 166, 208, 252 (2 copies), 255 (2 copies), 257 (3 copies), 264; A. Marigo, I codici manoscritti delle Derivationes di Uguccione Pisano: saggio

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