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traditional schools and universities. Only the first was available to the vast majority, and it is impossible to define because it varied so from place to place. Two generalizations hold: popular education was confined to colloquial tongues, and it was unambitious. The teachers themselves knew no Latin; many were barely literate in their native languages. Some gave their services free, beginning with classes teaching little children their letters; others were poor women eager to make a few pennies. Pupils helped each other. The curriculum was limited to reading, writing, simple arithmetic, and the catechism. “That a relatively large number of people knew how to read, write and count,” conclude the authors of The New Cambridge Modern History, “was due to the casual and ill-organized efforts of thousands of humble individuals. Such were the uncertain foundations not only of the popularity of vernacular literature but also of technical advance and the diffusion of general knowledge.”

Apprentices were fewer. The sons of master journeymen were given special consideration; property qualifications were imposed on outsiders, and the children of peasants and laborers were excluded. In the cruder trades instruction was confined to skills which were mechanically imitated. But the better crafts went beyond that, teaching accounting, mathematics, and the writing of commercial letters. This was especially important to merchants—commerce was still regarded as a trade, though dealers were quickly forming the nucleus of the new middle class—and the sons of merchants led the way in learning foreign languages. They were already among the most attentive pupils. The growth of industry gave education a new urgency. Literacy had been an expensive indulgence in an agrarian culture, but in an urban, mercantile world it was mandatory. Higher education, based on Latin, was another world. Schools concentrated on preparing boys for it, using as fundamental texts Donatus’s grammar for instruction in Latin and Latin translations of Aristotle.

In 1502 the Holy See had ordered the burning of all books questioning papal authority. It was a futile bull—the velocity of new ideas continued to pick up momentum—and the Church decided to adopt stronger measures. In 1516, two years after Copernicus conceived his heretical solution to the riddle of the skies, the Fifth Lateran Council approved De impressione liborum, an uncompromising decree which forbade the printing of any new volume without the Vatican’s imprimatur.

As a response, that was about as fruitful as the twentieth-century encyclicals of Popes Pius XI and Paul VI rejecting birth control. De impressione liborum was, among other things, too late. The literary Renaissance, dating in England from William Caxton’s edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in 1477, had been under way for a full generation. As the old century merged with the new, the movement pushed forward, fueled by a torrent of creative energy, by the growing cultivation of individuality among the learned, and by the development of distinctive literary styles, emerging in force for the first time since the last works of Tacitus, Suetonius, and Marcus Aurelius had appeared in the second century. The authors, poets, and playwrights of the new era never scaled the heights of Renaissance artists, but they were starting from lower ground. With a few lonely exceptions—Petrarch’s De viris illustribus, Boccaccio’s Decameron—medieval Europe’s contributions to world literature had been negligible. Japan had been more productive, and the Stygian murk of the Dark Ages is reflected in the dismal fact that Christendom had then published nothing matching the eloquence of the infidel Muhammad in his seventh-century Koran.

In the years bracketing the dawn of the sixteenth century, that began to change. Indeed, considering the high incidence of illiteracy, a remarkable number of works written or published then have survived as classics. Le morte d’Arthur (1495) and Il principe (1513) are illustrative, though both authors are misunderstood by modern readers.