Humanist Educational Treatises

This volume provides new translations, commissioned for the I Tatti Renaissance Library, of four of the most important theoretical statements that emerged from the early humanists efforts to reform medieval education."

"The Renaissance is usually portrayed as a period dominated by the extraordinary achievements of great men: rulers, philosophers, poets, painters, architects and scientists. Leading scholar Margaret King recasts the Renaissance as a more complex cultural movement rooted in a unique urban society that was itself the product of many factors and interactions: commerce, papal and imperial ambitions, artistic patronage, scientific discovery, aristocratic and popular violence, legal precedents, peasant migrations, famine, plague, invasion and other social factors. Together with literary and artistic achievements, therefore, today's Renaissance history includes the study of power, wealth, gender, class, honour, shame, ritual and other categories of historical investigation opened up in recent years. Tracing the diffusion of the Renaissance from Italy to the rest of Europe, Professor King marries the best work of the last generation of scholars with the findings of the most recent research, including her own. Ultimately, she points to the multiple ways in which this seminal epoch influenced the later development of Western culture and society."--Jacket.

In pedagogical manuals strongly reminiscent of gardening guides, the scholar was seen as both a pliant vine and a force of nature.

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1897 edition. Excerpt: ... INTRODUCTION. THE present volume is offered as an introduction to the study of the education of the first period of Renaissance, the century which followed the death of Petrarch. The work falls into three divisions. The first treats of the career of the characteristic Humanist School-master, Vittorino da Feltre. The second consists of four noteworthy treatises on education produced during this period, not now readily accessible to students. These are here presented in English versions. In the third section I have aimed at setting forth a general review of education as conceived by humanist scholars. The subject is of interest in more than one direction. It bears immediately upon the broader conceptions which we form of the civilisation and ideals of the Renaissance in its earlier and less self-conscious stage; inasmuch as the edu-"l cational aim of any age, if scientifically thought out, must express, with some precision, the moral and intellectual temper of thfe time. In the next place, though less directly, light is thrown by such enquiry as the present upon the development of classical scholarship. Its relation to the history of educational ideals and methods needs no insistence. In limiting the present Study to the period of the early Renaisnce I have not been guided by considerations of space alone. Recent critics of Humanism, both in England and Germany, appear to me to have overlooked the distinctive character of this period of 'Origins.' Whether as regards i spirit or practice, the Mantuan school of Vittorino can by no possibility be classed under one head with the school of Sturm at Strassburg. In this difference is implied a constant process in which the ideal of the greater Humanists was slowly narrowed and hardened till it...

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

Based on the study of over 500 surviving manuscript school books, this comprehensive 2001 study of the curriculum of school education in medieval and Renaissance Italy contains some surprising conclusions. Robert Black's analysis finds that continuity and conservatism, not innovation, characterize medieval and Renaissance teaching. The study of classical texts in medieval Italian schools reached its height in the twelfth century; this was followed by a collapse in the thirteenth century, an effect on school teaching of the growth of university education. This collapse was only gradually reversed in the two centuries that followed: it was not until the later 1400s that humanists began to have a significant impact on education. Scholars of European history, of Renaissance studies, and of the history of education will find that this deeply researched and broad-ranging book challenges much inherited wisdom about education, humanism and the history of ideas.

An edited volume aiming to recover a Christian humanist ethos. It provides a historical overview and individual examples of past Christian humanisms.