Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany

Giovanni Villani, in an often quoted passage of his Cronica, mentioned the approximate number of students in Florence who, in the 1330s, were enrolled in various kinds of schools. Historians have often returned to his numbers, pondering their trustworthiness, and the cultural consequences of his description. Following a series of more or less plausible extrapolations, Paul Grendler suggested that ‘Florence had a male schooling rate of 67 to 83 percent’. Others have reached comparable conclusions. Everyone interested in the question has justly considered this to have been a very high rate of literacy. In the first chapter of his massive book (itself the first volume of a projected two-volume work), Robert Black, deploying 230 often lengthy footnotes to support a text of 42 pages (themselves overflowing with long quotations mostly drawn from unpublished manuscript sources) reaches the conclusion that the ‘potential adult male literacy rate’ was a shade under 70 per cent. (On p. 35 he first gives the figure as 69.3 and in the very next line as 69.4 per cent). The details that cascade from the pages of this chapter (and of the following four) are impressive; they are also overwhelming. Black's and his assistants’ philological bravura reminds one of scholars of past epochs (from Muratori to Verde). He seems obsessed with a search for precision, with getting the particularities of every situation just right, with gathering every possible reference in support of a small or large point, as if the proof of his argument could be established—once and for all—by the mountain of his references. If, indeed, God rests in the details, Black, with this book, will surely gain salvation. One entirely typical example gives an idea of his approach: in support of his observation that most women's fiscal declarations (Portate) in 1427 were written by others, he fills eight pages (pp. 5–13), which contain a total of 18 lines of his own text, while the rest of these pages are filled with 72 footnotes (notes 23–94). The pattern is faithfully followed in the remaining chapters: 609 notes in Chapter Two (The School Curriculum in Florentine Tuscany); 354 notes in Chapter Three (The Decline of Church Education and the Rise of Lay Schools in Tuscany); only 268 notes in Chapter Four (The Rise of Communal Schools in Florentine Tuscany: 1262–1400); 530 notes in Chapter Five (Teachers, Schools and Pupils in Florence During the Fifteenth Century); there follow nearly 300 pages of documentary appendices. What can one say about Black's approach except that he is exhaustive, systematic, encyclopaedic? Every conceivable topic related to the history of pre-university education is raised, with massive evidence marshalled from a huge variety of sources (although, perhaps understandably, not from contemporary judicial records, nor from a systematic examination of the notarial registers)

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