In the Italian middle ages and Renaissance, the increasing specialization of education led to the emergence of types of schoolbooks which tended to become not only distinctive themselves but also to differ from university teaching manuals (linked to the studium curriculum of rhetoric, law, philosophy, medicine and theology), as well as from elementary reading texts, theoretical grammar treatises or indeed from other types of medieval and Renaissance manuscript literature. Of course, such boundaries were not rigid. For example, it was not unknown for anthologies of school authors, especially the auctores minores, to include elementary theoretical grammar tracts. Nevertheless, surviving manuscript copies, as well as other contemporary evidence such as curriculum outlines and appointment documents, bear witness to an identifiable genre of school authors.

Medieval and Renaissance Florence offers particularly fertile ground for the investigation of school manuscripts; today's great Florentine libraries – the Medicea Laurenziana, Riccardiana and Nazionale Centrale – can boast hundreds of schoolbooks among their vast manuscript collections.

The following census is based on an examination of 1,305 manuscripts carried out mainly over two years (1992–4); as a result, it has been possible to identify 324 manuscripts as suitable for inclusion as school authors used in grammar schools in the period up to the end of the fifteenth century. At the end of the handlist, there follows a summarial list of all excluded manuscripts.