Middle Ages and Renaissance 235
phy, and the editing of Greek and Hebrew texts. And the
recovery of the great corpus of Greek literature in turn af-
fected the whole concept of education. Humanists promoted
Plato to an equality with Aristotle, and as the clarity of
Greek thought and the splendor of Greek civilization came
home to them, they sought the secret of Greek education.
An Italian humanist, Vergerio of Padua, came pretty close
to it when he redefined a liberal education as one which “calls
forth, trains, and develops those highest gifts of body and
of mind which ennoble men, and which are rightly judged
to rank next in dignity to Virtue only.”
Coincident with the Renaissance, the spread of interna-
tional commerce and banking, the rise of merchant princes,
the growth of leisure, created a demand for a different sort
of education from the medieval Seven Arts and Three Phi-
losophies—for an education suitable for a gentleman and
man of action. The medieval curriculum, with its overem-
phasis on Logic and Philosophy, and its neglect of Natural
Science and of the Classics except some of the more obvious
Latin authors, was no use to the rising merchants, who
wished to make educated gentlemen of their sons. Courtly
academies, such as Baldassare Castiglione described in his
Book of the Courtier, were established, where the spirit of
Christian devotion, the study of ancient classics, and physical
exercises, were harmoniously combined. And just as, in the
eighteenth century, the requirements of diplomacy and
scholarship forced the universities to recognize modern lan-
guages, and as in the nineteenth century, the founding of
technical schools and scientific institutes forced the universi-
ties to include experimental science in their curricula, so in
the sixteenth century the demand of the privileged classes for
ancient classics, history, and bonae Htterae (belles-lettres,
or polite learning, as Erasmus called it), forced those sub-