Erasmus was well acquainted with the arrogance of power; indeed, he could be accused of having abetted the powerful's illusions of grandeur. For example, in outlining his preferred Education of the Christian Prince, he freely declares that a country owes everything to its good prince. However, on Erasmus' calculation, this national debt of gratitude should be accounted to someone else's credit: for making the good prince what he is, the country is indebted to his educator. This is not just a Northern bout of Italian prepotenza; rather, it reflects the realisation or belief that, to use their power properly, rulers are dependent on the teaching of the learned. This realisation is what could be dubbed the pride of pedagogy. Erasmus was certainly not alone among Renaissance scholars in being blessed with the self-confidence that such a belief instils: those who devoted their lives to contemplation of the studia humanitatis often claimed that the education they promoted had a political importance. If they themselves could not combine, as it were, poetry and power, they could at least teach others how to negotiate the active life.

Teaching in the Renaissance was not only dignified, it was also lucrative. ‘Humanists’ might be definable as those members of scholarly coteries who formed the soi-disant intellectual avant-garde of fifteenth-century Italy and sixteenth-century Europe; but the term originates in umanista – a paid teacher of a defined curriculum of subjects. At the same time, the humanists could claim to be no ordinary schoolmasters.