This volume provides new translations, commissioned for the I Tatti Renaissance Library, of four of the most important theoretical statements that emerged from the early humanists efforts to reform medieval education."

"The Renaissance is usually portrayed as a period dominated by the extraordinary achievements of great men: rulers, philosophers, poets, painters, architects and scientists. Leading scholar Margaret King recasts the Renaissance as a more complex cultural movement rooted in a unique urban society that was itself the product of many factors and interactions: commerce, papal and imperial ambitions, artistic patronage, scientific discovery, aristocratic and popular violence, legal precedents, peasant migrations, famine, plague, invasion and other social factors. Together with literary and artistic achievements, therefore, today's Renaissance history includes the study of power, wealth, gender, class, honour, shame, ritual and other categories of historical investigation opened up in recent years. Tracing the diffusion of the Renaissance from Italy to the rest of Europe, Professor King marries the best work of the last generation of scholars with the findings of the most recent research, including her own. Ultimately, she points to the multiple ways in which this seminal epoch influenced the later development of Western culture and society."--Jacket.

Based on the study of over 500 surviving manuscript school books, this comprehensive 2001 study of the curriculum of school education in medieval and Renaissance Italy contains some surprising conclusions. Robert Black's analysis finds that continuity and conservatism, not innovation, characterize medieval and Renaissance teaching. The study of classical texts in medieval Italian schools reached its height in the twelfth century; this was followed by a collapse in the thirteenth century, an effect on school teaching of the growth of university education. This collapse was only gradually reversed in the two centuries that followed: it was not until the later 1400s that humanists began to have a significant impact on education. Scholars of European history, of Renaissance studies, and of the history of education will find that this deeply researched and broad-ranging book challenges much inherited wisdom about education, humanism and the history of ideas.

In pedagogical manuals strongly reminiscent of gardening guides, the scholar was seen as both a pliant vine and a force of nature.

This book offers a critical introduction to the core technologies underlying the Internet from a humanistic perspective. It provides a cultural critique of computing technologies, by exploring the history of computing and examining issues related to writing, representing, archiving and searching. The book raises awareness of, and calls for, the digital humanities to address the challenges posed by the linguistic and cultural divides in computing, the clash between communication and control, and the biases inherent in networked technologies. A common problem with publications in the Digital Humanities is the dominance of the Anglo-American perspective. While seeking to take a broader view, the book attempts to show how cultural bias can become an obstacle to innovation both in the methodology and practice of the Digital Humanities. Its central point is that no technological instrument is culturally unbiased, and that all too often the geography that underlies technology coincides with the social and economic interests of its producers. The alternative proposed in the book is one of a world in which variation, contamination and decentralization are essential instruments for the production and transmission of digital knowledge. It is thus necessary not only to have spaces where DH scholars can interact (such as international conferences, THATCamps, forums and mailing lists), but also a genuine sharing of technological know-how and experience. "This is a truly exceptional work on the subject of the digital....Students and scholars new to the field of digital humanities will find in this book a gentle introduction to the field, which I cannot but think would be good and perhaps even inspirational for them....Its history of the development of machines and programs and communities bent on using computers to advance science and research merely sets the stage for an insightful analysis of the role of the digital in the way both scholars and everyday people communicate and conceive of themselves and "others" in written forms - from treatises to credit card transactions." Peter Shillingsburg The Digital Humanist is not simply a translation of the Italian book L'umanista digitale (il Mulino 2010), but a new version tailored to an international audience through the improvement and expansion of the sections on social, cultural and ethical problems of the most widely used methodologies, resources and applications. TABLE OF CONTENTS // Preface: Digital Humanities at a Political Turn? by Geoffrey Rockwell / PART I: The Socio-Historical Roots - Chap. 1: Technology and the Humanities: A History of Interaction - Chap. 2: Internet, or The Humanistic Machine / PART II: Theoretical and Practical Dimensions - Chap. 3: Writing and Content Production - Chap. 4: Representing and Archiving - Chap. 5: Searching and Organizing / Conclusions: DH in a Global Perspective

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1897 edition. Excerpt: ... INTRODUCTION. THE present volume is offered as an introduction to the study of the education of the first period of Renaissance, the century which followed the death of Petrarch. The work falls into three divisions. The first treats of the career of the characteristic Humanist School-master, Vittorino da Feltre. The second consists of four noteworthy treatises on education produced during this period, not now readily accessible to students. These are here presented in English versions. In the third section I have aimed at setting forth a general review of education as conceived by humanist scholars. The subject is of interest in more than one direction. It bears immediately upon the broader conceptions which we form of the civilisation and ideals of the Renaissance in its earlier and less self-conscious stage; inasmuch as the edu-"l cational aim of any age, if scientifically thought out, must express, with some precision, the moral and intellectual temper of thfe time. In the next place, though less directly, light is thrown by such enquiry as the present upon the development of classical scholarship. Its relation to the history of educational ideals and methods needs no insistence. In limiting the present Study to the period of the early Renaisnce I have not been guided by considerations of space alone. Recent critics of Humanism, both in England and Germany, appear to me to have overlooked the distinctive character of this period of 'Origins.' Whether as regards i spirit or practice, the Mantuan school of Vittorino can by no possibility be classed under one head with the school of Sturm at Strassburg. In this difference is implied a constant process in which the ideal of the greater Humanists was slowly narrowed and hardened till it...