Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Editorial note regarding citations from manuscripts and publications
- A note on chronological terminology
- Introduction
- 1 Italian Renaissance education: an historiographical perspective
- 2 The elementary school curriculum in medieval and Renaissance Italy: traditional methods and developing texts
- 3 The secondary grammar curriculum
- 4 Latin authors in medieval and Renaissance Italian schools: the story of a canon
- 5 Reading Latin authors in medieval and Renaissance Italian schools
- 6 Rhetoric and style in the school grammar syllabus
- Conclusion
- Appendix I BL Harley 2653: the earliest known manuscript of Ianua
- APPENDIX II A handlist of manuscripts of Ianua
- Appendix III Manuscripts of Tebaldo's Regule
- Appendix IV Handlist of manuscripts of school authors produced in Italy and now found in Florentine libraries
- Appendix V Theoretical grammar manuscripts in Florentine libraries examined and included or eliminated as italian school grammars
- Appendix VI Authorities Cited Explicitly in Manuscripts of Major School Authors in Florentine Libraries
- Bibliography
- Index of manuscripts
- General index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Editorial note regarding citations from manuscripts and publications
- A note on chronological terminology
- Introduction
- 1 Italian Renaissance education: an historiographical perspective
- 2 The elementary school curriculum in medieval and Renaissance Italy: traditional methods and developing texts
- 3 The secondary grammar curriculum
- 4 Latin authors in medieval and Renaissance Italian schools: the story of a canon
- 5 Reading Latin authors in medieval and Renaissance Italian schools
- 6 Rhetoric and style in the school grammar syllabus
- Conclusion
- Appendix I BL Harley 2653: the earliest known manuscript of Ianua
- APPENDIX II A handlist of manuscripts of Ianua
- Appendix III Manuscripts of Tebaldo's Regule
- Appendix IV Handlist of manuscripts of school authors produced in Italy and now found in Florentine libraries
- Appendix V Theoretical grammar manuscripts in Florentine libraries examined and included or eliminated as italian school grammars
- Appendix VI Authorities Cited Explicitly in Manuscripts of Major School Authors in Florentine Libraries
- Bibliography
- Index of manuscripts
- General index
Summary
Latin education was the foundation stone of medieval and Renaissance Italian culture. The learning of the Latin language and the introduction to Latin literature were the principal preoccupations of schools throughout the middle ages and Renaissance: indeed, until the rise of abacus or commercial arithmetic schools in the thirteenth and especially fourteenth centuries, and before the introduction of Greek into the school curriculum in the fifteenth century, no subject other than Latin was studied at the lower stages of the educational hierarchy.
Given the fundamental importance of the subject, it may seem puzzling that there has been no comprehensive historical study of the Latin curriculum in medieval and Renaissance Italy. This has perhaps been due to the fact that the Latin syllabus has been shared among several modern academic disciplines. The most important work has been done by philologists, such as Remigio Sabbadini and Vittorio Rossi and their more recent Italian successors, for example, Gian Carlo Alessio, Rino Avesani, Giuseppe Billanovich or Silvia Rizzo. Their principal concern has, of course, been philological rather than historical: focusing on individual works and individual teachers, they have gone far in building up a picture of pre-humanist and humanist education; but because their discipline ultimately concentrates on the particular rather than the general, philologists have not aimed to reconstruct the story of the curriculum's development over a long period.
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- Information
- Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance ItalyTradition and Innovation in Latin Schools from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century, pp. 1 - 11Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001
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