Schooling in Renaissance Italy

Schooling in Renaissance Italy The popular expression is that we are what we eat - but it is at least as true that we are what we study. As Paul Grendler outlines in his study Schooling in Renaissance Italy, Literacy and Learning, 1300-1600, we can come to a deeper understanding of the ideals that were held up for the upper classes in Renaissance Italy.

This paper examines the specifics of what was taught to Italian boys during the Renaissance as well as assessing what larger cultural and social ideals were being referenced by such an education. The most obvious element of this education - especially in chapters five through nine, which this paper focuses on - is its backward-looking nature. This was above all else a neoclassical education, with a focus especially on the great Latin writers but with a nod also made to Greek writers.

It is important to remember that while there was in such a turning towards the Latinate an emphasis on the virtues and attitudes of the classical world, there was also an effort to reclaim Italy's own intellectual and cultural past. The relationship of Italy - and Italians - to the neoclassical bent of the Renaissance was thus different than was the relationship for other nations.

While Spain and France (for example) also had Romanized pasts, their relationship to the world of classical learning was mitigated by their colonial status under Rome. For the Italians themselves, studying Cicero was a mark of vindication of their own contributions to the world. The Renaissance, while it lay upon a basis of classical and particularly Latinate grammar and writings, was not simply a reprise of the classical world.

The neoclassical transformed the classical perspective, adapting it (primarily through the process of determining what would be revived and what would be left to molder) to the beginnings of the modern world. Much of the Renaissance curriculum, Grendler argues, was based upon the Latin language itself. It mattered what texts were being read, certainly: Cicero was more in favor than Ovid or Horace, at least initially, and the Greek playwrights were given short shrift.

But at least to some extent more than the texts themselves was the fact that students were being schooled in the rigors of the Latin language. Even for those who spoke Italian, the linguistic grandchild of Latin, the language would have been challenging to learn. Latin, with its complex declensions and regimented meter, is in many ways very different from Italian. It would have challenged the students to think more clearly and precisely - and this was a great deal of its appeal (Grendler 119).

The education of the well-to-do and middle-class sons of the Italian Renaissance was essentially humanistic, and this required a curriculum that demanded that each student be asked to extend himself (or perhaps in some rare cases herself). The allure of reading Cicero and indeed in general of the Studia Humanitatis was that it depended upon the rigor of the Latin language in the form of the greatest Latin writers. But it was also the allure of the humanism of a world that was not centered around the Vatican.

The world of the Renaissance classroom - with its insistence on the importance of personal expression and individual striving toward a better world - was a humanistic one (viz. 203-5). A person who studied the classics was called a humanist. Humanists recreated classical styles in art, literature, and architecture. Humanists believed that by studying the classics, they could understand people and the world better. One humanist wrote, "To each species of creature has been allotted a peculiar and instinctive gift. To horses galloping, to birds flying, comes naturally.

To man only is given the desire to learn." The humanists emphasized the importance of human values instead of religious beliefs.