The real revolutionaries in the history of Italian medieval and Renaissance school education would appear to be the Northern European grammarians and philosophers who reshaped the theory of language in the twelfth century, together with the thirteenth-century French and Italian teachers who brought this new logical approach to Latin down to the level of the classroom. Like true radicals, masters such as Alexander of Villedieu were extremists, not only opposing the heritage of theoretical grammar as inherited from Roman antiquity but also the reliance on direct study of the Latin classics that had dominated schools since the close of the Dark Ages. Inevitably, there was counterrevolution, though this was not so much the achievement of famous fifteenth-century humanist pedagogues as of their less celebrated predecessors, the grammarians of the Trecento.

The educational momentum inherited by the fifteenth-century Renaissance from the later middle ages was considerable. The system of teaching elementary reading through phonetics as applied to a written text, followed by memorization, had evolved over many centuries; the streamlining of this technique which occurred in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries made possible an explosion of literacy among the Italian urban population. The extensive penetration of the vernacular into Latin education, not as a system for learning to read, but rather as a tool to simplify the understanding of Latin texts and to ease the learning of Latin composition, facilitated the burgeoning of the Latin-educated professional classes which is such a promiment feature of Italian civic life from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries.

These achievements of the later middle ages left humanists of Italian civic life from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries.