Teaching Greek in Renaissance Rome: Basil Chalcondyles and His Courses on the Odyssey (original) (raw)

If our knowledge of the teaching and learning of Greek language and literature in late medieval and early modern universities is still partial and limited, it is certainly not due to a general scarcity of evidence. Quite the opposite is true: we have dozens of books and handbooks that were studied, copied, and annotated by Renaissance teachers of Greek and their students. These texts could provide precious insight into actual classroom activities and the school curriculum of that time. Unfortunately, we miss a systematic survey of these materials, which for the most part lie unexplored in our libraries: no reliable comprehensive overview of the history of Greek pedagogy in the Renaissance has yet been written. Indeed, it would be impossible to undertake such a task without accessing a substantial core of primary sources concerning a sufficiently ample set of masters, schools, and learning contexts. * Research for this paper was funded by the University of Rome "La Sapienza" within the framework of the project "Scuola educazione e cultura in Europa tra Medioevo e Rinascimento" (Progetti di ricerca di Ateneo, 2014), as well as the Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici of the University of Turin (Fondi ricerca locale, project: "Per la storia dell'educazione umanistica: quaderni di studenti e maestri di greco e latino tra xv e xvi sec."). I hereby wish to thank the librarians of the Biblioteca di Filologia Classica e Bizantina of the Sapienza University (Walter Mazzotta, Alberto Rizzo, and Laura Zadra), as well as the personnel of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan for their kind assistance. I owe to Filippomaria Pontani several improvements and insightful comments. I am also grateful to Eric Cullhed for letting me consult his proekdosis of Eustathius' commentary on the Odyssey.