Long before the Renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries, western Europe had other periods of classical rebirth. Knowledge of Greek and Roman learning never completely died out, but was kept alive in monasteries where texts of the classical era were studied and copied. After Charlemagne was crowned emperor in A. D. 800, he began to revive Roman literature, law, and art across western Europe. This effort at revival included copying of numerous ancient manuscripts in an elegant, rounded script (Carolingian minuscule) that later would be used by 15th-century humanists. They assumed that this manner of writing was adopted from ancient Rome, so the new texts were “reborn” in form as well as in content. Being much easier to read than the tight, spiky Gothic text of the Middle Ages, the rounded humanistic script facilitated reading. Because the new learning originated in Italy, we shall focus on that region in this subchapter, then discuss the spread of humanistic education (studia humanitatis) to other parts of western Europe.
The rise of education based on humanistic texts helped to define the very meaning of the Renaissance as a period of rebirth. Lost texts of the classics, in both Greek and Latin, rose as the proverbial phoenix did from the ashes of antiquity. It is important to remember that during the early Renaissance Latin was the preferred language for writing among the upper class. The newly edited texts of classical Latin provided new models of style and eloquence. Discoveries of works long thought to have been lost caused unprecedented excitement in learned circles. Along with the rediscovered texts was a revival of the urbane, polite society of republican Rome, as well as an affinity for the grandeur of imperial Rome. Italians assimilated these aspects of the classics most completely, to the extent that in England members of the upper class were often ridiculed for putting on “Italian” airs. Humanistic education generated not only new modes of thinking, but also new behavior and attitudes. Analogies were drawn between the state of learning in Renaissance Italy and that in ancient Rome, as Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444) explained in his Le vite di Dante e di Petrarca (The Lives of Dante and Petrarch, 1436): “The Latin language was most flourishing and reached its greatest perfection at the time of Cicero.... One can say that letters and the study of the Latin language went hand in hand with the state of the Roman republic” (Brown 1997, pp. 95-96).
Greek learning, secondary to that in Latin, was a more rarified course of study. Nevertheless those who did pursue this more difficult subject were able to shed light on the Greek basis of Roman culture. This aspect of ancient history became part of the humanistic curriculum. On the whole, advanced humanistic education took place in private schools or academies.
Handbook to Life in Renaissance Europe
11.1 Classroom scene. Woodcut in a French edition of the Romance of the Rose b;y Guillaume Lorris and Jean de Meung, 1531. (Photograph courtesy of Sotheby’s, Inc., © 2003)
Many grammar schools, however, quickly adapted precepts of the elementary humanistic curriculum. The Commune of Lucca, for example, ordered its teachers in 1499 to include in their daily lessons the following: grammar, a historian, an orator or epistles, a poet, and basic Greek. This program of study was renewed at least three times between 1499 and 1574. Whereas the newly founded universities were immediately receptive to the new classical curriculum, most of the medieval institutions resisted the intrusion of humanism until well into the 16th century.
World History
