From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth and Sixteenth-Century Europe

From Humanism to the Humanities breaks new ground in the study of classroom theory and practice. The authors map the development of classical education in Renaissance Europe from the fifteenth-century Italian school of Guarino of Verona to the French teacher Petrous Ramus and his followers. It is the first general study of humanist education to rely neither on theoretical statements about what education ought to be like nor on the statutes of schools, but on the actual products of humanist teaching: textbooks, students’ notes and compositions, tutor’s diaries and letters. The book argues that the pupil’s view reveals a school significantly less engaged in moral and civic education and more concerned with elementary grammar and syntax than one would expect from the humanists’ theoretical pronouncements. The authors maintain that this gap between ideals and practice was inevitable, given the social and political ends that humanistic schooling most often served. The