Vittorino da Feltre and other Humanist Educators
Review by Eric Maurer
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases
Woodward, W.H. Vittorino da Feltre and other Humanist Educators. University of Toronto Press, 1996.
Vittorino da Feltre and other Humanist Educators is a gold mine of good practice for educators seeking a union of classical enthusiasm with Christianity. If one thinks that the bar for achievement has been lowered since the 19th century, they should look at the bar for students in the 15th. Humbled to the point of feeling inadequate, I marveled at what Vittorino da Feltre, Guarino Veronese, and others accomplished with their students. Guided by the advice of Plutarch’s essay the Education of Children, and Quintillian’s Institutes, these Renaissance educators understood the Greek adage that a great beginning is half of the whole. “We shall not have attained wisdom in our later years unless in our earliest we have sincerely entered on its search,” Vergerius writes in his essay, De Ingenuis Moribus.
The education of Cecelia Gonzaga, princess of Mantua, is the best testament to the genius of this curriculum (“racecourse”). By age 7, she knew all of the Greek and Latin paradigms. At age 10, when her teacher Vittorino presented her with a copy of a Greek New Testament, she was 2nd only to her teacher in Greek in her whole city. Required by her teacher to attend daily Mass, say the Divine Office, to attend frequent confession, and given letters of St. John Chrysostom when she was considering religious life, Cecelia also flourished morally. Resisting her father’s royal wedding arrangement, with the help of Vittorino who took her to Rome to meet Pope Eugenius IV, Lady Paola entered religious life, eventually becoming Mother Superior of her convent.
The emphasis on character education is a theme throughout this book. Students were required to memorize sententiae antiquae, wise aphorisms by classic thinkers, daily. Rather than navel gazing on one’s self, the idea was to imitate the best. Vergerius writes,
“Perhaps, however, we gain surer stimulus from contemplating others than from the reflection of our own selves: as Scipio, Fabius, and Caesar kept before their eyes the images of Alexander or other heroes of the past.” Yet for our students, clearer than any text is the example they see before them in adults. “Let, then, the examples of living men, known and respected for their worth, be held up for a boy’s imitation. And, moreover, let those of us who are older not forget so to live that our actions may be a worthy model for the youth who look up to us for guidance and example.”
This example was clear to see for the students of Vittorino and Guarino, both in their faith life, and their intellectual life. Known by his students, as divitiarum contemptor (“hater of riches”) Vittorino “kept a high standard of personal purity and of religion” and even mortgaged his home to provide scholarships for students that could not afford and education. Guarino, the greatest Greek scholar of his age, traveled to Constantinople to study this language intensely, and brought his expertise back to Italy. At the ripe age of 50, Vittorino took up the study of Greek under Guarino, tutoring Guarino in exchange for advanced tutoring in Latin. This collaboration went further, as Guarino entrusted his son to be educated by Vittorino at his famous school, La Giocosa (“Joyous House.”) Many of the students of each of these most famous of teachers went on to religious life, became official translators for the Pope, or were the first paleographers to translate the classic literature being rediscovered in Monastic libraries. Their gratitude was evident at Vittorino’s crowded funeral where they gathered to mourn “the truest friend and most powerful influence for good which their lives had ever known.”
Among the many essays on education, my favorite was by Battista Guarino, the son Guarino Veronese, who had been entrusted to study with Vittorino. “Whilst in Nature we find some animals which are content to feed upon flowers, like bees; others on leaves, like goats; others again on roots, like swine; the appetite of the Scholar demands the best of each and every kind of mental food.” A true battle of inches, he continues, “Hesiod long ago pointed to the lesson that the heap after all is only an accumulation of tiny pebbles. So to rescue even a few minutes each day of definite study of a particular author is always a gain.” Alluding to Psalm 1, he continues that a teacher prepares his students “that their leaves may not fall of and that all they may do may prosper.” Fostering a love of God’s laws, the unchangeable laws of Nature, the beauty and logic of Geometry, and a duty to share this light of truth among men, is the final cause of classical education. In school, students are like Jason’s chosen heroes, the Argonauts, who sought the Golden Fleece, studying this golden curriculum. Upon graduation these moral scholars will be like Odysseus’ men, hidden in the Trojan Horse, their job to open the worldly gates of society to truth, beauty, and goodness, as they let their light shine among men aiding God’s first command, “Let there be light,” acting as leaven to the world. Indeed, the students of these great teachers did just that, as they became the leading saints and scholars of their day.
All of this was intentional. The very word classicus, means best of kind. “For boys must from the earliest be made familiar only with the best, if we look for them to develop a sound judgement in their later years,” writes Aeneas Sylvius in his essay De Liberorum Educatione. May we as parents, educators and administrators not look to the present to define classical education, but look to the examples of the Renaissance as we set a course to dust off and restore education to what it once was. I can recommend no greater book than the W.H Woodward’s Vittorino da Feltre and other Humanist Educators to begin doing so.
Eric Maurer holds a BA in classical liberal art from Thomas Aquinas College and a MA in Greek and Roman Languages and Literature from Brandeis University. A co-founder of the Lyceum School in Cleveland, Ohio, Mr. Maurer taught at a classical high school, a behavioral school, an inner-city public school, and at a boys choir school, where he was a 2020 recipient of the Archdiocese of Boston’s Excellence in Education Awards. Now the Director of Classical Engagement at Regina Angelorum Academy, in Ardmore, PA, Eric runs a great books discussion group (Plato for Parents) throughout the school year and teaches Algebra I, American History 8, American Literature 8, Latin 7, Latin 8, Science 7, and Science 8. Mr. Maurer lives with his amazing wife Robin in Royersford, PA.