Vintage canada edition, 1998 Copyright 1996 by Alberto Manguel

orationis, the Doctrinale puerorum by the Franciscan monk Alexandre de Villedieu and the Handbook of
Logic by Peter the Spaniard. Few students were rich enough to buy books, and often only the teacher
possessed these expensive volumes. He would copy the complicated rules of grammar onto the
blackboard — usually without explaining them, since, according to scholastic pedagogy, understanding
was not a requisite of knowledge. The students were then forced to learn the rules by heart. As might be
expected, the results were often disappointing. One of the students who attended the Sélestat Latin
school in the early 1450s, Jakob Wimpfeling (who was to become, like Rhenanus, one of the most noted
humanists of his age), commented years later that those who had studied under the old system “could
neither speak Latin nor compose a letter or a poem, nor even explain one of the prayers used at Mass.”
Several factors made reading difficult for a novice. As we have seen, punctuation was still erratic in the
fifteenth century, and upper-case letters were used inconsistently. Many words were abbreviated,
sometimes by the student hastening to take notes, but often as the common manner of writing out a word
— perhaps to save paper — so the reader not only had to be able to read phonetically but also had to

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recognize what the abbreviation stood for. Finally, spelling was not uniform; the same word could appear
under several different guises.
An illuminated miniature showing a teacher ready to punish his student, in a late fifteenth-century French
translation of Aristotle’s Politics. (photo credit 5.6)
Following the scholastic method, students were taught to read through orthodox commentaries that were
the equivalent of our potted lecture notes. The original texts — whether those of the Church Fathers or, to
a far lesser extent, those of the ancient pagan writers — were not to be apprehended directly by the
student but to be reached through a series of preordained steps. First came the lectio, a grammatical
analysis in which the syntactic elements of each sentence would be identified; this would lead to the
littera or literal sense of the text. Through the littera the student acquired the sensus, the meaning of the
text according to different established interpretations. The process ended with an exegesis — the
sententia — in which the opinions of approved commentators were discussed. The merit of such a reading
lay not in discovering a private significance in the text but in being able to recite and compare the
interpretations of acknowledged authorities, and thus becoming “a better man”. With these notions in
mind, the fifteenth-century professor of rhetoric Lorenzo Guidetti summed up the purpose of teaching
proper reading: “For when a good teacher undertakes to explicate any passage, the object is to train his
pupils to speak eloquently and to live virtuously. If an obscure phrase crops up which serves neither of
these ends but is readily explicable, then I am in favour of his explaining it. If its sense is not immediately
obvious, I will not consider him negligent if he fails to explicate it. But if he insists on digging out trivia
which require much time and effort to be expended in their explication, I shall call him merely pedantic.”
In 1441, Jean de Westhus, priest of the Sélestat parish and the local magistrate, decided to appoint a
graduate of Heidelberg University — Louis Dringenberg — to the post of director of the school. Inspired
by the contemporary humanist scholars who were questioning the traditional instruction in Italy and The
Netherlands, and whose extraordinary influence was gradually reaching France and Germany,
Dringenberg introduced fundamental changes. He kept the old reading manuals of Donat and Alexandre,
but made use of only certain sections of their books, which he opened for discussion in class; he explained
the rules of grammar, rather than merely forcing his students to memorize them; he discarded the
traditional commentaries and glosses, which he found did “not help students to acquire an elegant
language”, and worked instead with the classic texts of the Church Fathers themselves. By largely
disregarding the conventional stepping-stones of the scholastic annotators, and by allowing the class to
discuss the texts being taught (while still maintaining a strict guiding hand over the discussions),
Dringenberg granted his students a greater degree of reading freedom than they had ever known before.
He was not afraid of what Guidetti dismissed as “trivia”. When he died in 1477, the basis for a new
manner of teaching children to read had been firmly established in Sélestat.
Dringenberg’s successor was Crato Hofman, also a graduate of Heidelberg, a twenty-seven-year-old
scholar whose students remembered him as “joyfully strict and strictly joyful”, who was quite ready to use
the cane on anyone not sufficiently dedicated to the study of letters. If Dringenberg had concentrated his
efforts on acquainting his students with the Church Fathers’ texts, Hofman preferred the Roman and
Greek classics. One of his students noted that, like Dringenberg, “Hofman abhorred the old commentaries
and glosses”; rather than take the class through a morass of grammatical rules, he proceeded very
quickly to the reading of the texts themselves, adding to them a wealth of archeological, geographical and
historical anecdotes. Another student recalled that, after Hofman had guided them through the works of
Ovid, Cicero, Suetonius, Valerius Maximus, Antonius Sabellicus and others, they reached the university
“perfectly fluent in Latin and with a profound knowledge of grammar”. Although calligraphy, “the art of
writing beautifully”, was never neglected, the ability to read fluently, accurately and intelligently, deftly
“milking the text for every drop of sense”, was for Hofman the utmost priority.
But even in Hofman’s class, the texts were never left entirely open to the students’ chance interpretation.
On the contrary, they were systematically and rigorously dissected; from the copied words a moral was
extracted, as well as politeness, civility, faith and warnings against vices — every sort of social precept, in
fact, from table manners to the pitfalls of the seven deadly sins. “A teacher,” wrote a contemporary of
Hofman’s, “must not only teach reading and writing, but also Christian virtues and morals; he must strive
to seed the child’s soul with virtue; this is important, because, as Aristotle says, a man behaves in later
life according to the education he has received; all habits, especially good habits, having taken root in a
man during his youth, cannot afterwards be uprooted.”
The Sélestat notebooks of Rhenanus and Gisenheim begin with Sunday prayers and selections from the
Psalms which the students would copy from the blackboard on the first day of class. These they probably
already knew by heart; in copying them out mechanically — not yet knowing how to read — they would
have associated the series of words with the sound of the memorized lines, as in the “global” method for
teaching reading laid out two centuries later by Nicolas Adam in his A Trustworthy Method of Learning