This short book brings to light documents concerning teachers in Sansepolcro. It publishes 195 documents, dated 1361 through 1486, concerning forty-four teachers in Sansepolcro. The documents come from the communal (city government) archive of Sansepolcro housed in the Biblioteca Comunale, supplemented by notarial records from the Archivio di Stato of Florence. Lorenz Böninger did the initial archival research of locating and transcribing the documents; why isn't he listed as coeditor? Black checked the transcriptions against the originals and presents a nine-page introduction which summarizes the development of schooling in Tuscany and focuses on some of the documents. Not everything in this book is new. Some of the documents and some of Black's introduction were previously published in Robert Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany (2007), 112–16, 757–78, et passim.

The documents deal with lay teachers, all of them male, of civil schools; ecclesiastical schools and teachers in Sansepolcro are omitted because another scholar has studied them. The vast majority of the teachers taught Latin at various levels as communal masters, that is, the city of Sansepolcro paid them a stipend, which was supplemented by student fees, and sometimes by funds to rent a house in which to teach. The documents list only one abacus (commercial mathematics) teacher, who was paid by the city to be its surveyor and to teach abacus and geometry in 1394.

Many of the documents concern appointments and payments, which are useful for identifying the teachers and their tenure in Sansepolcro. Some documents present fee schedules, that is, the amounts of money that students paid for different levels of Latin instruction, information that helps to explain the stages of mastering Latin. Documents involving three teachers are of particular interest for the larger history of late medieval and Renaissance pedagogy. A 1424 inventory of the books of a teacher who taught Latin in Sansepolcro from 1396 to 1400 lists about seventy works, a very substantial collection for the times. The books and authors listed were the texts on which fourteenth-century Latin schooling was based. Documents of 1404 and 1405 bring to light another issue. A Latin teacher was apparently denounced for heresy because he taught pagan authors. He defended himself vigorously. He told the city that he taught Lucan, the tragedies of Seneca, and Boethius in accordance with the doctrines of the Catholic Church, and that he was willing to submit himself to correction and admonition by any prelate. But he did not promise to stop teaching these texts. In the introduction Black wonders if the denunciation, about which nothing is known, might have been a consequence of the preaching and writing of Giovanni Dominici (1357/58–1419), a Florentine Dominican cardinal who railed against teaching the ancient classics because they were morally corrupting.

But the classics triumphed. The 1468 inventory of the books of a Latin teacher paid by the commune who taught in Sansepolcro from 1452 to 1465 included the Satires of Juvenal, the Comedies of Terence, an oration of Cicero, and the Greek grammar (Erotemata) of Manuel Chysolaras. Black comments that this was a clear sign that humanism had arrived in Sansepolcro in the middle of the fifteenth century. This statement is another step in the evolution of Black's position. In 2001 he denied that humanism influenced Tuscan and Italian education before 1500, and he strongly criticized scholars who saw it happening earlier. In 2007 he stated that the change occurred in Florence about 1470. His current position, at least for Sansepolcro, brings him in line with this reviewer who wrote in 1989 that “By about 1450 schools in a majority of northern and north-central Italian towns taught the studia humanitatis” (Paul F. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy [1989], 404).