The History Of Education - Ellwood P. Cubberley (classic novels for teens .TXT) 📗

Could I wear a sadden’d heart?”

[2] “In the Middle Ages man as an individual had been held of very little account. He was only part of a great machine. He acted only through some corporation—the commune, guild, the order. He had but little self-confidence, and very little consciousness of his ability single-handed to do great things or overcome great difficulties. Life was so hard and narrow that he had no sense of the joy of living, and no feeling for the beauty of the world around him, and, as if this world were not dark enough, the terrors of another world beyond were very near and real.”

(Adams, G. B., Civilization during the Middle Ages, 2d ed., p. 363.) [3] Adams, G. B., Civilization during the Middle Ages, 2d. ed., p. 364.

[4] Petrarch refused to have the works of the Scholastics in his library.

Though a university man, he was out of sympathy with the university methods of his time.

[5] “Florence was essentially the city of intelligence in early modern times. Other nations have surpassed the Italians in their genius … but nowhere else except at Athens has the whole population of a city been so permeated with ideas, so highly intellectual by nature, so keen in perception, so witty and so subtle, as at Florence.” (Symonds, J. A., The Renaissance in Italy.)

[6] Sandys, J. E., in his Harvard Lectures on the Revival of Learning, pp. 35-41, gives a list of the more important later finds, which see.

[7] Of the Florentine scholars one of the most famous was Niccol� Niccoli (1363-1436), of whom Sandys says: “Famous for his beautiful penmanship, he was much more than a copyist. He collected manuscripts, compared and collated their various readings, struck out the more obvious corruptions, restored the true text, broke it up into convenient paragraphs, added suitable summaries at the head of each, and did much toward laying the foundation of textual criticism.” (Sandys, J. E., Harvard Lectures on the Revival of Learning, p. 39.)

[8] For example, Laurentius Valla (1407-57) of Pavia, exceeded Niccoli in ability in textual criticism. He extended this method to the New Testament and, at the request of King Alphonso, of Naples, subjected the so-called “Donation of Constantine,” a document upon which the Papacy based in part its claims to temporal power, to the tests of textual criticism and showed its historical impossibility. This, indeed, was a new and daring spirit in the mediaeval world, but it represented the spirit and method of the modern scholar.

[9] For example, Ciriaco, of Ancona (1391-1450), has been called “the Schliemann of his time.” He spent his life in travel and in copying and editing inscriptions. After exploring Italy, he visited the Greek isles, Constantinople, Ephesos, Crete, and Damascus. One of his contemporaries, Flavio Blondo, of Forli (1388-1463), published a four-volume work on the antiquities and history of Rome and Italy. These two men helped to found the new science of classical archaeology.

[10] Classical scholars assert that Greek became extinct in the Italy of the Roman Church in 690 A.D. Greek was taught at Canterbury in the days of the learned Theodore, of Tarsus (R. 59 a), who died in 690. Irish monks, who carried Greek from Gaul to Ireland in the fifth century, brought it back in the seventh century to Saint Gall, founded by them in 614. “John the Scot,” an Irish monk who was master of the Palace School under Charles the Bald (c. 845-55), is said to have been able to read Greek. Roger Bacon, the Oxford monk (1214-94), also knew a little Greek. William of Moerbeke, in 1260, was able to translate the Rhetoric and Politics of Aristotle for Thomas Aquinas. Greek monks were still found in the extreme south of Italy at the time of the Renaissance, and Greek has remained a living language in a few villages there up to the present time.

[11] Gian Antonio Campano; trans. by J. A. Symonds, The Renaissance in Italy, vol. II, p. 249.

[12] For long it was thought that the revival of the study of Greek in the West dated from the fall of Constantinople, in 1453, but this idea has been exploded by classical scholars. The events we have enumerated in this chapter show this, and at least five of the important Greek scholars who taught in Italy came before that date. As the Turks closed in on this wonderful eastern city, for so long the home of Greek learning and culture, many other Greek scholars fled westward. The principal Greek authors had, however, been translated into Latin before then.

[13] Some of the Italian universities participated but little in the new movement. Bologna and Pavia, in particular, held to their primacy in law and were but little affected by the revival.

[14] Bessarion (c. 1403-72), at one time Archbishop of Nicaea and afterwards a cardinal at Rome, is said to have been surrounded by a crowd of Greek and Latin scholars whenever he went out, and who escorted him every morning from his palace to the Vatican. He was a great patron of learned Greeks who fled to Italy. On his death he gave his entire library of Greek manuscripts to Venice, and this collection formed the foundation of the celebrated library of Saint Mark’s.

[15] Symonds, J. A., The Renaissance in Italy, vol. II, p. 139.

[16] In 1436, Niccol� de Niccoli, a copyist of Florence, died, leaving his collection of eight hundred manuscripts to the Medicean Library for the use of the public, meaning thereby any scholar. This is said to have been the first public-library collection in western Europe.

[17] Nicholas as a monk had had his enthusiasm for the new movement awakened, and had gone deeply into debt for manuscripts. He was helped by Cosimo de’ Medici. When he became Pope (1447-55) he collected scholars about him, built up the university at Rome, laid the foundations of the great Vatican Library, and made Rome a great literary center. After the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent at Florence, in 1492, the glory that had been Florence passed to Rome, and it in turn became the cultural center of Christendom.

[18] Much earlier, another Oxford man had returned from study under Guarino at Ferrara—William Gray (1449)—but he seems to have made no impression. A few other scholars went before Linacre and Grocyn and Colet, but these men were the first to attract attention on their return.

[19] Agricola’s real name was Roelof Huysman, meaning “Roelof the husbandman.” In keeping with a common practice of the time he Latinized his name, taking the equivalent Roman word.

[20] This was bound in two volumes, and in 1911 a copy of it was sold at a sale of old books, in New York City, for $50,000.

[21] A second edition of this Psalter was printed two years later, and contains at the end, in Latin, a statement which Robinson translates as follows: “The present volume of the Psalms, which is adorned with handsome capitals and is clearly divided by means of rubrics, was produced not by writing with a pen, but by an ingenious invention of printed characters: and was completed to the glory of God and the honor of Saint James by John Fust, a citizen of Mayence, and Peter Schoifher of Gernsheim, in the year of our Lord 1459, on the 29th of August.”

[22] The usual early edition was three hundred copies.

[23] At Florence about three hundred editions are said to have been printed before 1500; at Bologna, 298; at Milan, 625; and at Rome, 925.

[24] The following numbers of different editions are said to have been printed at the northern cities before 1500: Paris, 751; Cologne, 530; Strassburg, 526; Nuremberg, 382; Leipzig, 351; Basel, 320; Augsburg, 256; Louvain, 116; Mayence, 134; Deventer, 169; London, 130; Oxford, 7; Saint Albans, 4.

[25] By 1500 it is said that a book could be purchased for the equivalent of fifty cents which a half century before would have cost fifty dollars.