The History Of Education by Ellwood P. Cubberley (little red riding hood read aloud .txt) 📕

[Illustration: FIG. 75. THE WORLD AS KNOWN TO CHRISTIAN EUROPE BEFORE

COLUMBUS]

Marco Polo and Sir John Mandeville made extended travels to the Orient, and returning (Polo returned, 1295) described to a wondering Europe the new lands and peoples they had seen. The Voyages of Polo and the Travels of Mandeville were widely read. By the beginning of the fourteenth century the compass had been perfected, in Naples, and a great era of exploration had been begun. In 1402 venturesome sailors, out beyond the “Pillars of Hercules,” discovered the Canary Islands; in 1419 the Madeira Islands were reached; in 1460 the Cape Verde Islands were found; in 1497 Bartholomew Diaz rounded the southern tip of Africa; and in 1497

Vasco da Gama discovered the long-hoped-for sea route to India. Five years later, sailing westward with the same end in view, Columbus discovered the American continent. Finally, in 1519-22, Magellan’s ships circumnavigated the globe, and, returning safely to Spain, proved that the world was round. In 1507 Waldenseem�ller published his Introduction to Geography, a book that was widely read, and one which laid the foundations of this modern study.

The effect of these discoveries in broadening the minds of men can be imagined. The religious theories and teachings of the Middle Ages as to the world were in large part upset. New races and new peoples had been found, a round earth instead of a flat one had been proved to exist, new continents had been discovered, and new worlds were now ready to be opened up for scientific exploration and colonization.

ABOUT 1500 A STIMULATING TIME. The latter part of the fifteenth century and the earlier part of the sixteenth was a stimulating period in the intellectual development of Christian Europe. The Turks had closed in on Constantinople (1453) and ended the Eastern Empire, and many Greek scholars had fled to the West. Though the Revival of Learning had culminated in Italy, its influence was still strongly felt in such cities as Florence and Venice, while in German lands and in England the reform movement awakened by it was at its height. Greek and Hebrew were now taught generally in the northern universities. Everywhere the old scholastic learning and methods were being overturned by the new humanism, and scholastic teachers were being displaced from their positions in the universities and schools. The new humanistic university at Wittenberg, founded in 1502, was exerting large influence among German scholars and attracting to it the brightest young minds in German lands. Erasmus was the greatest international scholar of the age, though ably seconded by distinguished humanistic scholars in Italy, France, England, the Low Countries, and German lands. The court schools of Italy (R. 135) and the municipal colleges of France (R. 136) were marking out new lines in the education of the select few. Colet was founding his reformed grammar school (1510) at Saint Paul’s, in London (R. 138), the first of a long line of English humanistic grammar schools. Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michael Angelo were adding new fame to Italy, and carrying the Renaissance movement over into that art which the world has ever since treasured and admired.

The Italian cities, particularly Genoa and Venice, had become rich from their commerce, as had many cities in northern lands. Everywhere the cities were centers for the new life in western Christendom. England was rapidly changing from an agricultural to a manufacturing nation. The serf was evolving into a free man all over western Europe. Italian navigators had discovered new sea routes and lands, and robbed the ocean of its terrors. Columbus had discovered a new world, soon to be peopled and to become the home of a new civilization. Magellan had shown that the world was round and poised in space, instead of flat and surrounded by a circumfluent ocean. The printing-press had been perfected and scattered over Europe, and was rapidly multiplying books and creating a new desire to read (R. 134). The Church was more tolerant of new ideas than it had been in the past, or soon was to be for centuries to come. All of these new influences and conditions combined to awaken thought as had not happened before since the days of ancient Rome. The world seemed about ready for rapid advances in many new directions, and great progress in learning, education, government, art, commerce, and invention seemed almost within grasp. Unfortunately the promise was not to be fulfilled, and the progress that seemed possible in 1500 was soon lost amid the bitterness and hatreds engendered by a great religious conflict, then about to break, and which was destined to leave, for centuries to come, a legacy of intolerance and suspicion in all lands.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. In what way was the fact that Dante wrote his Divine Comedy in Italian instead of Latin an evidence of large independence?

2. Was it a good thing for peace and civilization that the modern languages arose, instead of all speaking and writing Latin? Why?

3. Of what value to one is a “sense of the past behind him, and a conception of the possibilities of the future before him,” by way of giving perspective and self-confidence? Do we have many mediaeval-type people to-day?

4. Show how the work of Petrarch required a man with a strong historic sense.

5. Show the awakening of the modern scientific spirit in the critical and reconstructive work of the scholars of the Revival.

6. Of what was the exposure of the forgery of the “Donation of Constantine” a precursor?

7. Contrast the modern and the mediaeval spirit as related to learning.

8. Suppose that we should unexpectedly unearth in Mexico a vast literature of a very learned and scholarly people who once inhabited the United States, and should discover a key by which to read it. Would the interest awakened be comparable with that awakened by the revival of Greek in Italy? Why?

9. What does the fact that no copy of Quintilian’s Institutes, a very famous Roman book, was known in Europe before 1416 indicate as to the destruction of books during the early Christian period?

10. What does the fact that the Christians knew little about Greek literature or scholarship for centuries, and that the awakening was in large part brought about by the pressure of the Turks on the Eastern Empire, indicate as to intercourse among Mediterranean peoples during the Middle Ages?

11. How do you explain the fact that the recovery of the ancient learning was very largely the work of young men, and that older professors in the universities frequently held aloof from any connection with the movement?

12. Compare the financial support of the Revival in Italy with the support of universities and of scientific undertakings in America during recent times.

13. Explain the long-delayed interest in the Revival in the northern countries.

14. Trace the larger steps in the transference of Greek literature and learning from Athens, in the fifth century B.C., to its arrival at Harvard, in Massachusetts, in 1636.

15. What was the importance of the rediscovery of Hebrew?

16. Show how the invention of printing was a revolutionary force of the first magnitude.

17. Why should a license from the Church have been necessary to print a book? Have we any remaining vestiges of this church control over books?

18. Do you see any special reason why Venice should have become the early center of the book trade?

19. Show how the printing-press became “a formidable rival to the pulpit and the sermon, and one of the greatest instruments for human progress and liberty.”

20. One writer has characterized the Revival of Learning as the beginnings of the emergence of the individual from institutional control, and the substitution of the humanities for the divinities as the basis of education. Is this a good characterization of a phase of the movement?

21. Counting each edition of a printed book at only three hundred copies, how many volumes had been printed before 1500 at the places listed in footnote 3, page 257?

SELECTED READINGS

In the accompanying Book of Readings the following selections are reproduced:

125. Petrarch: On copying a Work of Cicero.

126. Benvenuto: Boccaccio’s Visit to the Library at Monte Cassino.

127. Symonds: Finding of Quintilian’s Institutes at Saint Gall.

(a) Letter of Poggio Bracciolini on the “Find.”

(b) Reply of Lionardo Bruni.

128. MS.: Reproducing Books before the Days of Printing.

129. Symonds: Italian Societies for studying the Classics.

130. Vespasiano: Founding of the Medicean Library at Florence.

131. Vespasiano: Founding of the Ducal Library at Urbino.

132. Vespasiano: Founding of the Vatican Library at Rome.

133. Green: The New Learning at Oxford.

134. Green: The New Taste for Books.

QUESTIONS ON THE READINGS

1. Is it probable that Petrarch’s explanation (125) of why many of the older Latin books were copied so infrequently, psalters being preferred instead, is correct?

2. How do you explain the later neglect of so valuable a library as that at Monte Cassino (126) or Saint Gall (127 a)?

3. Was Lionardo Bruni’s letter to Poggio (127 b) overdrawn?

4. Was there anything unnatural about the work and customs of the Italian societies for studying the classics (129)? Compare with a modern literary or scientific society, or with the National Dante Society.

5. What does the extract from Vespasiano, telling how he got books for Cosimo de’ Medici (130), indicate as to the scarcity of books in Italy toward the middle of the fifteenth century?

6. The library of the Duke of Urbino (131) was the most complete collected up to that time. List the larger classifications of the books copied, as to the lines represented in a great library of that day.

7. What does the work of Pope Nicholas V, in establishing the Vatican Library (132), indicate as to his interest in the new humanistic movement?

8. Show from the selection from Green (133) that the revival movement in England was essentially a religious revival.

9. Explain Green’s cause-and-effect theory, as given in selection 134.

SUPPLEMENTARY REFERENCES

* Adams, G. B. Civilization during the Middle Ages.

Blades, William. William Caxton.

Duff, E. G. Early Printed Books.

* Field, Lilian F. Introduction to the Study of the Renaissance.

* Howells, W. D. Venetian Days (Venetian commerce).

* Keane, John. The Evolution of Geography.

La Croix, Paul. The Arts in the Middle Ages and at the Period of the Renaissance.

* Loomis, Louise. Mediaeval Hellenism.

Oliphant, Mrs. Makers of Venice.

* Robinson, J. H., and Rolfe, H. W. Petrarch, the First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters.

Sandys, J. E. History of Classical Scholarship, vol. II.

* Sandys, J. E. Harvard Lectures on the Revival of Learning.

Scaife, W. B. Florentine Life during the Renaissance.

Sedgwick, H. D. Italy in the Thirteenth Century.

* Symonds, J. A. The Renaissance in Italy; vol. II, The Revival of Learning.

Thorndike, Lynn. History of Mediaeval Europe.

Whitcomb, M. Source Book of the Italian Renaissance.

* Walsh, Jas. J. The Thirteenth, Greatest of Centuries.