A Moral Art: Grammar, Society, and Culture in Trecento Florence

Focusing on one distinctive element of the early Renaissance reading public - boys who studied Latin grammar in Florence - Paul F. Gehl sheds new light on the history of schooling in the West. Far from advancing the cause of humanism, he shows, the elementary grammar masters of fourteenth-century Florence worked against it in the name of morality.Drawing on close readings of teaching texts, on a descriptive inventory of all surviving school books used in Florence, and on additional archival sources, Gehl reconstructs the Latin school course in rich detail. He demonstrates how Florence's grammarians responded to challenges posed by vernacular literacy and humanist ideas by restricting the Latin curriculum to moral texts that had for centuries promoted Christian communitarian values. The primary reason for teaching Latin to students, he maintains, was not to increase their language skills but to enable them to make moral decisions based on the analysis of classic Christian texts. Addressing the social status and cultural role of the grammar masters, Gehl considers as well the larger symbolic value of Latin as a vehicle of high culture in a bilingual society.A major contribution to the history of early humanism, A Moral Art will be essential reading for scholars and students in the fields of medieval and Renaissance studies, Italian culture, classics, art history, intellectual history, the history of education, and the history of the book.