What do we know about the education of boys and young men in Venice in this period? Who dispensed instruction, who received it, and who paid for it? What intellectual baggage did the élite of the young Venetian patricians take with them to the Studium of Padua, the sole center of advanced learning sanctioned by the Serenissima? No comprehensive answer to these questions exists, and most of the scholarly essays concerning Venetian education appeared in the learned journals of Italy many decades ago. For the benefit of future inquirers into this obscure and confusing subject it may be useful to survey the major contributions of Italian scholars from the notes of Bartolomeo Cecchetti in 1886 to the essays of the late Bruno Nardi, and to include some current additions to the subject made by Italian and American scholars incidental to more specialized studies.

The relationship between classical philosophy and Christian piety in the thought of Renaissance humanists poses certain questions that are answered periodically but which perennially recur. In part, this may be because these questions arise out of issues that go beyond the historian's craft to the most fundamental choices facing the human understanding. In part too, the enormous complexity of humanist expression makes interpretation difficult and allows the currents of historical sensibility to manifest themselves in analysis.

In the text that follows, I will seek to give examples which indicate to me that the currently general understanding of humanist piety may have led to incorrect conclusions about the stature and clarity of thought of one figure in particular, the German humanist Mutianus Rufus. It seems to me unarguable that the greater appreciation of the difficult, ambiguous, and often idiosyncratic character of humanistic writings is a genuine triumph of modern historical scholarship.

The sixteenth-century Italian academies, in the judgment of modern scholars, played a role in the intellectual life of their time and had an impact on the culture of their age to an extent not yet fully assessed. In their own day they not only carried on and developed more fully many aspects of Quattrocento scholarship, but offered scholars a forum in which to distil and crystallize novel research which otherwise would have lacked an appropriate outlet. They spread the fruits of both tradition and innovation to a large audience, and they did so by adopting the volgare as their official language. They thereby gave living proof to the theories laid down by Pietro Bembo (1470-1547) and Sperone Speroni (1500-1588) that the vernacular was just as effective a medium of poetic and scholarly discourse as the classical Latin which had been the language of choice of the earlier humanists, and which continued to be the language of the universities.

The obvious influence of Plato on Utopia and the antagonism of some humanists toward the medieval scholastics and their belief in the primacy of Aristotle seem to have resulted in the impression that Thomas More agreed with this anti-Aristotelianism and that Aristotle had little influence on Utopia. As a result, this matter has never been considered in depth, and important points about both Thomas More and Utopia have been overlooked. That More was an eclectic thinker who was a serious student of classical philosophy and that Utopia is a fine example of this eclecticism have been ignored. And in connection with this, More's knowledge of Aristotle and this philosopher's influence on Utopia have been slighted. Historians of philosophy, for example, ordinarily limit their treatment of More to pointing out the similarities between Utopia and Plato's Republic.

The following essay will address itself both to the content and the motivation of Renaissance historiography in the last decade and will be confined primarily to the work that has been done in the English language. History, as other scholarly disciplines, tends always to look inward at its own work and the publications within its particular national and language boundaries. But at the same time more inventive minds within the discipline constantly feel a dissatisfaction with provincialisms of various sorts and seek to open their thinking and their work to wider influences. Yet this may happen very slowly. For example the famous essay of Lucien Febvre, ‘Une question mal posée,’ first appeared in 1929 (Revue historique, 161), found an Italian counterpart in Delio Cantimori's Prospettive di storia ereticale italiana of 1960, and was cited for its parallels with Pre-Reformation German piety in Berndt Moellers’ ‘Frommigkeit in Deutschland um 1500’ of 1965.