In the early 1300s about twenty universities were offering instruction and granting degrees in Europe, and the number of functioning universities approached seventy by the year 1500. Meanwhile, the study of logic and scholastic method—expressed in technical language, refined through disputation, and practiced particularly in the crowning philosophy of metaphysics—crowded out more and more of the longstanding liberal arts. Due to this scholastic influence as well as to the concomitant desire of students to advance to the graduate faculties as rapidly as possible, the course of study became narrower and shorter.
Against this “modern” devotion to employing a putatively neutral and rational method and pursuing advanced inquiry, a number of scholars in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy (where mercantile and urban life was most developed) proposed and disseminated a different ideal of culture and, thus, of liberal education. These scholars focused their studies upon the literary and artistic heritage of the ancient world and lamented its neglect by the schoolmen in the universities, as seen in selections #24 and #25 by Francesco Petrarca and Pier Paolo Vergerio below.1 These scholars also declared that classical letters were relevant to contemporary concerns, and thus envisioned a renaissance, or rebirth, of ancient culture. The ideal of this Renaissance movement was expressed by the term humanitas, or “humanism,”2 which meant a combination of cultural refinement and virtuous citizenship or statesmanship.
Being concerned with the formation of a person, humanism necessarily addressed the content and methods of education, which the humanists denoted as studia humanitatis, or “humanistic studies.” These included primarily the study of classical writings in Greek and, especially, in Latin drawn from the fields of grammar, poetry, history, ethics, and rhetoric.3 Rhetoric was, in fact, the culminating study in humanist education “because oratory (the art rhetoric teaches) is the basis of all civilized discourse. This is Cicero’s position, as it is Quintilian’s. It is not that of late medieval education. . . . [The humanist] aligns his educational approach squarely with the Roman orators, and breaks decisively with scholastic training in . . . the formal language-game of the disputation. The ability to perform outstandingly in ‘declamation’ shows that the student has absorbed his moral as well as his intellectual lessons, has acquired a set of values as well as a set of argument techniques. It marks a man out as having ‘leadership quality.’ ”4
The imitation of classical authors in these fields was thus believed to inculcate “humanism,” the cultural ideal comprising the artistic and literary standards of elegant style and the guidelines of virtuous life defined according to the mores of the political, social, and economic elite of the Renaissance period. Plato was the classical author consulted most often when metaphysical or technical philosophical issues could not be avoided. Seneca the Younger was preferred in ethics, though not his epigrammatic style of writing. Quintilian, whose Education of the Orator was recovered from a monastic library in 1416, was the pedagogical touchstone. Above all, Cicero—nearly an Apostle, as Petrarca states below—served as an authority in all fields, but especially rhetoric. It is noteworthy that Petrarca wrote the following essay praising Cicero even before the recovery of the full text of On the Orator in 1422 that further elevated Cicero’s authority.
Humanist scholars often claimed to form “men of affairs” and served as diplomats and advisors, while writing treatises offering guidance to kings and princes on how to manage the growing power of states. Given this, the humanistic liberal education was rarely offered to women. Yet, Renaissance humanists wrote in opposition to their exclusion, and the development of printing allowed women to circulate their writing without depending on the sponsorship of male patrons. In addition, the acceptance of vernacular language as a medium of learning meant that women did not need a thorough Latin education to participate in learned discourse. Nevertheless, only a few women received education, even in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy, in which about one in eight women were literate, and the majority of these came from the upper and middle classes and studied the vernacular curriculum. About two percent of all women pursued humanistic studies and generally did so either with male tutors in the home or as visiting residents in a female monastery.5 These two patterns are revealed below in selection #27 by Laura Cereta.
The resistance to liberally educating women stemmed directly from the public function of this education. Since women should not become statesmen, diplomats, civil servants, lawyers, or clergymen, they should not pursue liberal education, the reasoning went. The facts that Queen Elizabeth I (1548–1550) received such training and that Christine de Pizan and Laura Cereta associated their arguments for liberally educating women with a “city” or “republic” of women demonstrate that liberal education was viewed as preparation for a public role.
Meanwhile, the Protestant secession from the Catholic church ignited religious warfare on many fronts. This complicated sectarian conflict and its relationship to the Renaissance have been analyzed in a complex body of scholarship that is no less tortuous than the literature analyzing the nature of the Renaissance itself (or even whether there was one.) But what is clear is that the emphasis upon education stemming from the humanists’ concern for personal formation was heightened by the interest of religious partisans in controlling education.6
The institutional expression of this interest appeared in the development of pre-university education and in the founding of colleges throughout Europe. In some cases these colleges were established at universities and served merely as safe residences for foreign students; in other cases such colleges also assumed the function of teaching informally the humanistic studies that were excluded from the formal university curriculum;7 and in other cases, where no university existed, colleges were founded as independent institutions offering bachelor’s and even master’s degrees in liberal arts. In all three cases, colleges sometimes assumed the additional role of offering education preparatory for the liberal arts course.
The proliferation of colleges and their diverse roles are reflected in selection #26, drawn from the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus. That selection also demonstrates the conflation of the scholastic curriculum and humanistic studies that came to constitute liberal education in most Protestant and Catholic colleges. Whether in the Spanish of Ignatius Loyola or the Latin of his translators, the terms “arts” or “liberal arts” referred to this conflation. In the Jesuit scheme, the lower or bachelor level incorporated the “humanistic letters” or “humanistic studies” of grammar, poetry, history, and rhetoric, while the higher or master’s level, which was sometimes called the “faculty of philosophy,” addressed logic, some mathematics, and natural, moral, and metaphysical philosophies. Of course, the emphasis on and ordering among the various fields of study—as well as the classical authorities—varied according to the religious allegiances and orientation of the particular college or university. Metaphysics often disappeared altogether. Nevertheless, “a curriculum revolution”8 had occurred in liberal education as a result of the rebirth of classical letters. The following selections convey the nature of that revolution in its various dimensions.