Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning Review

Introduction: A Shifting View of Education

"Let those men teach boys who can do nothing greater." The first quotation from the Italian author Petrarch in Paul F. Grendler's Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning 1300–1600 is perhaps most humorous to a modern reader, because it sounds dangerously like the phrase "those who can't do, teach" — a very common and often-repeated cliché today. However, this quotation also highlights the profound shift in the way education was viewed, and would be viewed, over the course of the next three hundred years of Italian history.

Increasingly, education became valued by members of the Italian elite and by Italian society as a whole. Education came to be prized as a commodity and an example of refinement and taste, when exhibited by oneself and one's children among the wealthier elements of society. Education also became more valued in a practical fashion: by the end of the era, vernacular schools were established to educate students not in Latin, rhetoric, or theology, but in the language of the people and in the instruments of trade.

With this shift in attitude toward education came a corresponding shift in the way teachers were viewed. No longer a despised profession for those of a "plodding" mentality, educators eventually became esteemed and noteworthy — historical celebrities, as Grendler chronicles later in his text. For example, the educators Guarino and Vittorino introduced the phenomenon of the boarding school, modeled upon Latin and Greek systems of education, an institution that still holds popular currency among members of the British and American ruling class today.

Structure and Scope of Grendler's Work

Despite its numerical subtitle, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning 1300–1600 chronicles the shift in educational philosophy that characterized the Renaissance not in a purely chronological fashion, but by organizing the text around several broad historical overviews. Grendler begins with an ideological contrast between medieval forms of education and Renaissance educational methodology. He then shifts to a more geographical perspective, dividing his work between two major city-states of Italy — a choice that reflects the divided, sectional nature of Italy at the time, where each city-state had its own unique character. For instance, the Venetian schools of the High Renaissance in the 1500s were quite different from the Florentine schools of the Early Renaissance and the later Roman vernacular schools.

Grendler backs up his overviews with specific biographical examples, such as accounts of the famous teachers Gasparino Barzizza, Guarino, and Vittorino, and examines how individual classical figures such as Cicero were taught differently depending on how Italy's republican past was viewed by the elite. Grendler concludes his work with an overview of the Reformation and its effect on education. This structure allows him to address the organization of schooling, the changed view of the Latin curriculum in the Renaissance versus the Middle Ages, the introduction of a vernacular curriculum, and finally the schools of the Catholic Reformation and the beginning of the Jesuit order. By beginning with the Middle Ages and ending with the Reformation, the author establishes a coherent chronological framework that locates the period in history while allowing him to deviate from a strict chronological style in order to make his broader analytical points.

Communal Schools and the Venetian Model

One of the most distinctive facets of the Venetian view of education was the introduction of communal schools, founded by governments and parents who believed education benefited the community as a whole. This represented a shift away from the idea that education should remain in the hands of a few, or that only priests needed to be educated. As early as 1551, sestiere schools were created in the city. These institutions, for a time, offered a free education — usually to aristocratic girls whose parents could not afford to educate them independently with tutors, as they did for sons of the family, and to working-class boys whose parents could not afford to educate any of their children at all.

Grendler stresses that the reason education and educators became more valued in society was a combination of factors: the growth of the Italian aristocracy, the decline of church schools, and a revived interest in the classical, humanistic past of Greece and Rome. Before this period, education was viewed primarily as a method of preparing individuals for clerical life — something preserved within the walls of monasteries or the minds of priests. The sestiere schools demonstrated that education was now seen as a cultural and social wealth to be distributed broadly throughout society, even to women.