The Universities of the Italian Renaissance (review) The Universities of the Italian Renaissance (review) Michael Wyatt University of Toronto Quarterly, Volume 74, Number 1, Winter 2004/2005, pp. 393-395 (Review) Published by University of Toronto Press DOI: For additional information about this article [ Access provided at 6 Apr 2021 02:06 GMT from Carnegie Mellon University ] https://doi.org/10.1353/utq.2005.0240 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/180716 https://doi.org/10.1353/utq.2005.0240 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/180716 humanities 393 university of toronto quarterly, volume 74, number 1, winter 2004/5 All these activities are represented in the careful descriptions included in this richly illustrated book. It is impossible in a review of this length to give any comprehensive idea of the sheer range of material which is covered, from emblematically-expressed doctoral theses (like the won- derfully titled Via Lactea candidus ad felicitatem trames), to laudations of bishops and dukes on their taking office, to emblematic celebrations of canonizations and ecclesiastical festivals (Francesco Intorcetta�s Emblems celebrating the intercession of St Rosalia at Palermo sound particularly attractive), to emblems displayed at the funerals or marriages of local magnates, to handbooks of rhetoric and poetics such as the widely disseminated Ratio discendi et docendi of Joseph de Jouvancy or the De l�Art des Devices of Pierre le Moyne. The letter H has inevitably brought one of the most challenging tasks of this whole project: the Pia Desideria of Herman Hugo, SJ was one of the most widely distributed, most widely translated and imitated religious books (not just emblem books) of the seventeenth century. The bibliogra- phers rise to it splendidly, in 143 dense pages which describe editions in all the major European languages, printed over the course of more than a century. Wisely, Daly and Dimler confine themselves to direct imitations of Hugo�s work. It would have been literally impossible to include all works which derive from it more remotely: there were in print in England as late as the 1880s versions of emblem books which have the Pia Desideria as their source, interestingly by that date printed especially for the Protestant Dissenting market. A true index of the spread of imagery from the Pia Desideria is that in so remote a place as the Viking cathedral of Kirkwall in the Orkney Isles, there are late seventeenth-century grave slabs, partly consisiting of grim, brusque Latin verses but bearing also relief carvings of the child-soul of Hugo�s emblem-pictures. When this series is complete, it promises to be very much more than a superbly accurate and comprehensive bibliography of Jesuit emblematics: it will be a guide to the activities of one of the crucial cultural forces not only in early modern Europe but in Asia and the Americas, it will be a history in epitome of early modern verbal and visual culture. (PETER DAVIDSON) Paul F. Grendler. The Universities of the Italian Renaissance Johns Hopkins University Press 2002. xx, 593. US $55.00 The early Italian university was a far cry from its modern counterpart. There was no library collection or, initially, any fixed university building; the faculty was relatively small; and its curriculum was narrowly focused. But as Paul Grendler�s authoritative study The Universities of the Italian xxxxxx chf 394 letters in canada 2003 university of toronto quarterly, volume 74, number 1, winter 2004/5 Renaissance shows, the template for many of the most important subse- quent innovations in Western intellectual culture was worked out in a remarkably fertile period for the Italian university between about 1450 and 1600. Grendler�s history lucidly maps out the emergence of sixteen institutions of higher education throughout the Italian peninsula and Sicily between 1150 and 1596. Universities forms a sequel to Grendler�s earlier and equally significant examination of Italian pre-university education, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300–1600. The first section of Grendler�s study explores the creation, administra- tion, and functioning of each of the Italian universities. Bologna and Padua were the largest, but several of the others compensated for their modest size with the superior quality of their faculties. A university could only take root where there was an infrastructure capable of sustaining (and dealing with) a male student population. Above and beyond educational fees, the cost of room and board was always a considerable issue for students, but the presence of extra-urban lodgers had a notable impact on the economies of their host cities, a heavy factor in the Venetian Republic�s continuing to allow German Protestants (as well as Jews and the Greek Orthodox) to study in Padua in the wake of the Reformation and after the Council of Trent. The attention Grendler devotes to faculty compensation demonstrates that the star system is no recent invention of the elite universities of the United States: while the average salary at Bologna in 1526–27 was about 306 Bolognese lire, the superstar legist Mariano Sozzini the Younger earned 5200 lire (1300 scudi) in 1552, one-sixth of the university�s budget! Grendler elsewhere discusses a Pavian document from 1547 that gives a figure of 192 lire (28 Venetian ducats) for the rent of a house and meals for five students, including salary and board for two servants � the equivalent of two-thirds of a Venetian bricklayer�s annual salary � but this is the only information in the book which renders possible a comparison of the actual value of university-related economic data for the reader unacquainted with the bewildering maze of Italian currencies in the sixteenth century; a subse- quent edition would do a great service by including some sort of contextual economic apparatus. Even when they did not begin as such, all Italian universities came to be administered by the communes in which they were located, and doctoral degrees (the norm, as the baccalaureate never gained a foothold in Italy) were granted through the territorial political authority after a course of study involving several years of regular attendance at lectures and a final comprehensive examination. Exceptions to this pattern were the doctorate in canon law, which was granted locally but authorized by the papacy (a privilege revoked after the Council of Trent); degrees granted by Counts xxxxxxxx humanities 395 university of toronto quarterly, volume 74, number 1, winter 2004/5 Palatine, a curious extension of the authority invested in them by the Holy Roman Emperor; and the degrees granted by what Grendler refers to as �partial� and �paper� universities. These unusual arrangements permitted the awarding of the doctorate upon examination, with little or no time spent in the lecture hall. Erasmus earned his much-ridiculed doctorate in Turin in this way, after a period of only a few weeks there in the summer of 1506. Grendler�s enormously useful second section, dedicated to each of the disciplines taught in the early Italian university, spells out the creative tension in curricula which had been defined by the medieval intellectual tradition�s investment in Aristotle. In every area but theology � a relatively late, and singularly static, entrant into the curricular mix � humanist developments, particularly in terms of philology, had a tremendous impact on the continuing relevance of classical texts for disciplines seeking to respond to the exigencies of contemporary discovery. (MICHAEL WYATT) John Craig. Reformation, Politics and Polemics: The Growth of Protestantism in East Anglian Market Towns, 1500–1610 Ashgate. xiv, 267. US $89.95 Was the English Reformation a popular movement eagerly embraced by a devout people tired of ecclesiastical corruption, or was it an unwelcome change forced on a loyal Catholic population for political purposes? Dichotomies so stark hardly deserve an answer, but that in brief is the debate that has raged through English Reformation studies for the past few decades. For many centuries it seemed that England�s natural Protestant- ism was the implicit and widely accepted Fortieth Article of Faith that followed on those thirty-nine doctrinal details that few paid much attention to. Yet twenty years ago, J.J. Scarisbrick, Eamon Duffy, and Christopher Haigh began publishing studies that documented the robust health of the English Catholic church before Henry VIII�s �great matter� and the continuing loyalty to it long after his death. When in doubt about the grand narrative, go local. Recent studies of the English Reformation have focused on particular communities or social groups in an effort to determine more clearly who believed what and when, in the hope that out of these local stories a new grand narrative might emerge. In Reformation, Politics and Polemics John Craig explores the religious views and practices of �ordinary� or �common� people by examining different dimensions of religious and political conflict in four East Anglian market towns (Mildenhall, Bury St Edmunds, Thetford, Hadleigh). In this case, �common� people are merchants, artisans, and small landholders. They are frequently and, Craig believes, mistakenly described xxxxxxxxx