[23] At Florence about three hundred editions are said to have been printed before 1500; at Bologna, 298; at Milan, 625; and at Rome, 925.
[24] The following numbers of different editions are said to have been printed at the northern cities before 1500: Paris, 751; Cologne, 530; Strassburg, 526; Nuremberg, 382; Leipzig, 351; Basel, 320; Augsburg, 256; Louvain, 116; Mayence, 134; Deventer, 169; London, 130; Oxford, 7; Saint Albans, 4.
[25] By 1500 it is said that a book could be purchased for the equivalent of fifty cents which a half century before would have cost fifty dollars.
CHAPTER XI
[1] Much as universities have contributed to intellectual progress, hostility to new types of thinking and to new subjects of study has been, through all time, a characteristic of many of their members, and often it has required much pressure from progressive forces on the outside to overcome their opposition to new lines of scholarship and public service.
[2] For a list of these treatises, see Monroe's Cyclopedia of Education, vol. v, p. 154.
[3] The distinguished author, Montaigne, was mayor in 1580.
[4] This order had begun as an institution for the instruction of the poor, emphasizing the use of the Bible and the vernacular, but when the new learning came in from Italy, classical learning was added and the instruction of the brotherhood became largely humanistic.
[5] The influence of the old Greek classical terms in this connection is interesting, and is another evidence of the permanence of Greek ideas. Sturm here adopted the Italian nomenclature, Vittorino da Feltre having called his school a Gymnasium Palatinum, or Palace School. Guarino wrote of gymnasia Italorum. Both derived the term from the Gymnasia of ancient Greece, just as the academies of the Italian cities took their name from the Academy of Plato at Athens (p. 44). Another famous Greek school was the Lyceum, founded by Aristotle (p. 44). All these names came in during the Revival of Learning in Italy, and were applied to the new classical schools at a time when every term, and even the names of men, were given classical form. As a result the Italian secondary schools of to-day are known as ginnasio, and the German classical secondary schools as gymnasia. The French took their term from the Lyceum, hence the French lycées. The English named their classical schools after the chief subject of study, hence the English grammar schools. In 1638 Milton visited Italy, and was much entertained in Florence by members of the academy and university there. In 1644 he published his Tractate on Education, in which he outlined his plan for a series of classical academies for England. Milton was a church reformer, as were the Puritans, and the Puritans, in settling America, brought over first the term grammar school, and later the term academy to England.
[6] Melanchthon, in his famous Saxony plan of 1528, had provided for but three classes (R. 161). The class-for-each-year idea was new in German lands.