'The humanist idea of education is among the permanently influential legacies of the Italian Renaissance. Four short Latin treatises published between 1400 and 1460 define it admirably: Pier Paolo Vergerio's De ingenuis moribus et liberalibus adolescentiae studiis; Leonardo Bruni's De studiis et literis; the De liberorum educatione of Aeneas Sylvius, who later became Pope Pius II; and Battista Guarino's De ordine docendi et studendi. Translated into English by William Harrison Woodward and framed, on the one hand, by his description of the famous school founded by Vittorino da Feltre in...