The History Of Education by Ellwood P. Cubberley (epub e reader .txt) 📖

in Florence, then the wealthiest and most artistic and literary city in the world, [5] and there the new knowledge and method were warmly received. Boccaccio equaled Petrarch in his passion for the ancient writers, hunting for them wherever he thought they might be found. One of his pupils has left us a melancholy picture of the library at Monte Cassino, as Boccaccio found it at the time of his visit (R. 126). He wrote a book of popular tales and romances, filled with the modern spirit, which made him the father of Italian prose as Dante was of Italian poetry; prepared the first dictionaries of classical geography and Greek mythology; and was the first western scholar to learn Greek.

 

“In the dim light of learning’s dawn they stand, Flushed with the first glimpses of a long-lost land.”

 

A CENTURY OF RECOVERY AND RECONSTRUCTION. The work done by these two friends in discovering and editing was taken up by others, and during the century (1333-1433) dating from the first great “find” of Petrarch the principal additions to Latin literature were made. The monasteries and castles of Europe were ransacked in the hope of discovering something new, or more accurate copies of previously known books. At monasteries and churches as widely separated as Monte Cassino, near Naples: Lodi, near Milan; Milan, itself; and Vercelli, in Italy: Saint Gall and other monasteries, in Switzerland: Paris; Cluny, near the present city of Macon; Langres, near the source of the Marne; and monasteries in the Vosges Mountains, in France: Corvey, in Westphalia; and Hersfeld, Cologne, and Mainz in Germany—important finds were made. [6] Thus widely had the old Latin authors been scattered, copied, and forgotten. In a letter to a friend (R. 127 a) the enthusiast, Poggio Bracciolini, tells of finding (1416) the long-lost Institutes of Oratory of Quintilian, at Saint Gall, and of copying it for posterity. This, and the reply of his friend (R. 127

b), reveal something of the spirit and the emotions of those engaged in the recovery of Latin literature and the reconstruction of Roman history.

 

The finds, though, while important, were after all of less value than the spirit which directed the search, or the careful work which was done in collecting, comparing, questioning, inferring, criticizing, and editing corrected texts, and reconstructing old Roman life and history. [7] We have in this new work a complete break with scholastic methods, and we see in it the awakening of the modern scientific spirit. [8] It was this same critical, constructive spirit which, when applied later to Christian practices, brought on the Reformation; when applied to the problems of the universe, revealed to men the wonderful world of science; and when applied to problems of government, led to the questioning of the theory of the divine right of kings, and to the evolution of democracy. We have here a modern spirit, a craving for truth for its own sake, an awakening of the historical sense, [9] and an appreciation of beauty in literature and nature which was soon to be followed by an appreciation of beauty in art.

A worship of classical literature and classical ideas now set in, of which rich and prosperous Florence became the center, with Venice and Rome, as well as a number of the northern Italian cities, as centers of more than minor importance.

 

THE REVIVAL OF GREEK IN THE WEST. With the new interest in Latin literature it was but natural that a revival of the study of Greek should follow. While a knowledge of Greek had not absolutely died out in the West during the Middle Ages, there were very few scholars who knew anything about it, and none who could read it. [10] It was natural, too, that the revival of it should come first in Italy. Southern Italy (Magna Graecia) had remained under the Eastern Empire and Greek until its conquest by the Normans (1041-71), and to southern Italy a few Greek monks had from time to time migrated. With southern Italy, though, papal Italy and the western Christian world seem to have had little contact. In 1339, and again in 1342, a Greek monk from southern Italy visited the Pope, coming as an ambassador from Constantinople, and from him Petrarch learned the Greek alphabet. In 1353 another envoy brought Petrarch a copy of Homer. This he could not read, but in time (1367) a poor translation into Latin was effected. Boccaccio studied Greek, being the first western scholar to read Homer in the original.

 

Near the end of the fourteenth century it became known in Florence that Manuel Chrysoloras (c. 1350-1415), a Byzantine of noble birth, a teacher of rhetoric and philosophy at Constantinople, and the most accomplished Greek scholar of his age, had arrived in Venice as an envoy from the Eastern Emperor. Florentine scholars visited him, and on his return accompanied him to Constantinople to learn Greek. In 1396 Chrysoloras was invited by Florence to accept an appointment, in the university there, to the first chair of Greek letters in the West, and accepted. From 1396 to 1400 he taught Greek in the rich and stately city of Florence, at that time the intellectual and artistic center of Christendom. For a few years, beginning in 1402, he also taught Greek at the University of Pavia. He had earlier written a Catechism of Greek Grammar, and at Pavia he began a literal rendering of Plato’s Republic into Latin. From his visit dates the enthusiasm for the study of Greek in the West.

 

OTHER GREEK SCHOLARS ARRIVE IN ITALY. Chrysoloras returned to Constantinople for a time, in 1403, and Guarino of Verona, who had been one of his pupils, accompanied him and spent five years there as a member of his household. When he returned to Italy he brought with him about fifty manuscripts, and before his death he had translated a number of them into Latin. He also prepared a Greek grammar which superseded that of Chrysoloras. In 1412 he was elected to the chair at Florence formerly held by Chrysoloras, and later he established an important school at Ferrara, based largely on instruction in the Latin and Greek classics, which will be referred to again in the next chapter.

 

A rage for Greek learning and Greek books now for a time set in. Aurispa, a Sicilian, went to Constantinople, learned Greek, and returned to Italy, in 1422, with 238 Greek manuscripts. Messer Filelfo, of Padua, after seven years at Constantinople, returned, in 1427, with forty manuscripts and with the grand-niece of Chrysoloras as his wife. In 1448 Theodorus Gaza (c. 1400-75), a learned Greek from the city of Thessalonica, who had fled from his native city just before its capture by the Turks (1430), came to Ferrara as the first professor of Greek in the university there. He made many translations, prepared a very popular Greek grammar, and in 1451

became professor of philosophy at Rome.

 

Another Greek of importance was Demetrius Chalcondyles of Athens (1424-1511), who reached Italy in 1447. In 1450 he became professor of Greek at Perugia, and of his lectures there one of his enthusiastic pupils [11]

wrote:

 

A Greek has just arrived, who has begun to teach me with great pains, and I to listen to his precepts with incredible pleasure, because he is a Greek, because he is an Athenian, and because he is Demetrius. It seems to me that in him is figured all the wisdom, the civility, and the elegance of those so famous and illustrious ancients. Merely seeing him you fancy you are looking on Plato; far more when you hear him speak.

 

In 1463 Demetrius transferred to Padua as professor of Greek, and was the first professor of Greek in a western European university to be paid a fixed salary. He also taught for a time at Milan, and from 1471 to 1491

was professor of Greek at Florence.

 

A number of other learned Greeks had reached Italy prior to the fall of Constantinople (1453) before the advancing Turks, [12] and after its fall many more sought there a new home. Many of these found, on landing, that their knowledge of Greek and the possession of a few Greek books were an open sesame to the learned circles of Italy.

 

[Illustration: FIG. 70. DEMETRIUS CHALCONDYLES (1424-1511) (Drawn from a picture of a fresco by Ghirlandajo, painted in 1490, on the walls of the church of Santa Maria Novella, at Florence)]

 

ENTHUSIASM FOR THE NEW MOVEMENT; LIBRARIES AND ACADEMICS FOUNDED. The enthusiasm for the recovery and restoration of ancient literature and history which this work awakened among the younger scholars of Italy can be imagined. While most of the professors in the universities and most of the church officials at first had nothing to do with the new movement, being wedded to scholastic methods of thinking, the leaders of the new learning drew about them many of the brightest and most energetic of the young men who came to those universities which were hospitable to the new movement. [13] Greek scholars in the university towns were followed by admiring bands of younger students, [14] who soon took up the work and superseded their masters. Academies, named after the one conducted by Plato in the groves near Athens, whose purpose was to promote literary studies, were founded in all the important Italian cities (R. 129). The members usually Latinized their names, and celebrated the ancient festivals. In Venice a Greek Academy was formed in which all the proceedings were in Greek, and the members were known by Greek names. The Academia of Aldus, at Venice, of which his celebrated press was a department, became a veritable university for classical learning, and to participate in its proceedings scholars came from many lands. It was the curious and enthusiastic Italians who, more than the Greek scholars who taught them the language, opened up the literature and history of Athens to the comprehension of the western world.

 

The financial support of the movement came from the wealthy merchant princes, reigning dukes, and a few church authorities, who assisted scholars and spent money most liberally in collecting manuscripts and accumulating books. Says Symonds:

 

Never was there a time in the world’s history when money was spent more freely upon the collection and preservation of MSS., and when a more complete machinery was put in motion for the sake of securing literary treasures. Prince vied with prince, and eminent burgher with burgher, in buying books. The commercial correspondents of the Medici and other great Florentine houses, whose banks and discount offices extended over Europe and the Levant, were instructed to purchase relics of antiquity without regard for cost, and to forward them to Florence. The most acceptable present that could be sent to a king was a copy of a Roman historian. The best credentials which a young Greek arriving from Byzantium could use to gain the patronage of men like Palla degli Strozzi was a fragment of some ancient; the merchandise insuring the largest profit to a speculator who had special knowledge in such matters was old parchment covered with crabbed characters.

[15]

 

Cosimo de’ Medici (1393-1464), a banker and ruler of Florence, spent great sums in collecting and copying manuscripts. Vespasiano, a fifteenth-century bookseller of Florence, has left us an interesting picture of the work of Cosimo in founding (1444) the great Medicean library [16] at Florence (R. 130) and of the difficulties of book collecting in the days before the invention of printing.

 

[Illustration: FIG. 71. BOOKCASE AND DESK IN THE MEDICEAN LIBRARY AT

FLORENCE

(Drawn from a photograph)

This library was founded in 1444. It contains to-day about 10,000 Greek and Latin manuscripts, many of them very rare, and of a few the only copies known. The building was designed by Michael Angelo, and its construction was begun in