The invention of the writing subject in school: The studia humanitatis in the 15th-century Renaissance

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article seeks to discuss the relations between reading and writing against the historical backdrop of the initial affirmation of the studia humanitatis in fifteenth-century renaissance Italy and its initial movement towards the North of Europe. It focuses first on the theory of education and learning expressed in the Treatises of four Italian humanists. These treatises were structured based on the coeval experiments undertaken by extremely famous teachers such as the Byzantine diplomat Chrysoloras (1355–1415), who is generally credited with having initiated humanist pedagogy, Gasparino Barzizza (1360–1430), in the cities of Padua and Pavia, Vittorino da Feltre (1370–1446), in Mantua, and above all, Guarino Guarini da Verona (1374–1460), in Ferrara. The action of these last three teachers led to the consolidation of the introduction into the syllabus of a large number of Latin authors, through which the study of the Greek language and literature was endowed with greater legitimacy. It also tracks the proposals of Valla (1407–1457) and Rodolph Agricola (1444–1485). The options regarding the studies and the methodologies used spread to many schools, which we today call secondary schools and universities. Although this reality is restricted in time and space, the article has the broader goal of contributing to a deeper understanding of a school culture that promotes the real development of creative writing skills among its pupils, and which therefore opposes the civilisational principle that identifies the school model in the contemporary epoch as advocating the possibility to teach everything to everybody and always based on a textbook compiled for use by the pupils.