Renaissance Education: Medical and Mathematical Treatises from the Veneto, 1350-1600

This project explores the production and cultural impact of medical and mathematical pedagogical treatises from the Veneto in Latin and Italian. These manuscripts and early printed treatises were produced in Italy between 1350 and 1600 before eventually being sold to collections in the US. By analysing the content of scientific educational texts, this project shows how manuscripts and printed books contributed to advancing medical and mathematical studies, as well as professional practices, during a period when Italy became the most literate society in Latin Christendom. Many aspects of medical and mathematical teaching and training in Italian cities remain unexplored. To date, scholars have explored scientific teaching through fragmentary and isolated case studies. The dynamics governing the circulation of medical and mathematical texts for pedagogical use have not been fully investigated. This project, by taking advantage of Anglophone and Italian scholarship, investigates to what extent medical and mathematical education matched professional practices. By exploring a textual corpus that received little attention from linguists, historians, and teachers, it establishes for the first time a detailed analysis of medical incunabula, mathematical manuscripts, and early printed texts for pedagogical use and identifies the use professionals made of these materials to shed light on contexts of knowledge transfer. The results will help scholars studying early modern history, history of science, and history of education to assess the impact of these texts on how individuals engaged in scientific professions were trained, and in the production and circulation of scientific knowledge at a crucial time of transition between the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance. The research outcomes will appear in a scholarly monograph, descriptive catalogue entries in international repositories (MEI, Manus Online, HPB-Provenance), an open-access map, seminars, and conferences.