Aonii Palearii Verulani Praefatio de ratione studiorum

PALEARIO'S DIDACTIC PROGRAM IN MILAN

4to (220x165 mm). [8] leaves. Collation: A-B⁴. Large printer's device on title page. On title-page verso address to the “bonarum literarum studiosis” by Francesco Moscheni. Roman and italic types. Woodcut decorative initial and ornament. Modern calf, gilt title on front panel. A very good copy with wide margins.

Rare first edition. In 1555 Paleario decided to move to Milan to cover the local chair of classical literature. In Milan he found new friends and influential protectors, such as the poet Publio Francesco Spinola and Cardinal Cristoforo Madruzzo, governor from early 1556 to June 1557. On 28 October 1555, Paleario delivered his inaugural oration De ratione studiorum in S. Maria della Scala, which, together with the dialogue Il grammatico (1557), a few occasional poems and an exercise composed by two students, is the only remaining evidence of his 12-year activity as a teacher in Milan (cf. C. Quaranta, Paleario, Aonio, in: “Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani”, Rome, 2014, vol. 80, s.v.).

“In Milan [Paleario] laid down his didactic criteria in his inaugural oration of 28 October 1555. He would have taught the combination of ‘scientia rerum' and ‘dicendi facultas'. The program would have included three authors: the Politics and possibly the logical writings of Aristotle; Cicero's orations; Xenophon (as an easier author, in preparation for the study of Aristotle). The scope of his teaching would have included an in-depth study of moral philosophy and digressions into the other disciplines, since they are all connected in the unity of knowledge. The disciplines mentioned by him are: history, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music. These significant and to some extent original criteria of pedagogy were developed in the didactic works he composed in Milan” (E. Gallina, Aonio Paleario, Vol. I: Bibliografia, biografia, opere, Sora, 1989, p. 822).

In the oration Paleario also celebrates Milan as a cultural, economic and strategical center now ruled by Philipp II, son of the Emperor Charles V, and praises the famous “gymnasium Academiae Ticinensis”, i.e. the University of Pavia (l. A4v) (cf. E. Gallina, Op. cit., pp. 565-566).

Antonio della Pagliara (or Paglia) is best known under the humanist name of Aonius Palearius. He was born in Veroli near Frosinone. From 1520 to 1529 he studied humanities at the University of Rome. Then for one year he entered the service of Ennio Filonardi, governor of Perugia. In 1530 he moved to Siena, where he found employment as a teacher. Until 1536 he lived between Siena and Padua, where he continued his studies and in 1535 made the acquaintance of Pietro Bembo. In the same period he wrote his major work, the De animorum immortalitate libri III, first published in a private undated edition around 1535, then reprinted by Gryphe in Lyons in 1536.

In Padua Paleario involved himself in religious debates and read the work of Luther and Erasmus. In 1537 he married Marietta Guidotti and settled in Colle Val d'Elsa, where he acquired a property which he made the center of a small circle attended by sympathizers of the Reformation. In 1542 he was charged with the accusation of heresy before the archbishop of Siena Francesco Bandini Piccolomini and was released through the intervention of Jacopo Sadoleto. In 1543 he defended himself writing an oration Pro se ipso, in which he praises Erasmus and many other reformers.

Because his orthodoxy remained suspect, he did not obtain the chair of Latin at the University of Siena, but in 1546 the city council of Lucca invited him there to teach humanities. He spent the following years dividing himself between Lucca and Colle, until 1555 when he decided to move to Milan. In 1559 he had to submit to another trial for heresy and in 1567, after the publication of his works in Basel (by Thomas Guarin) without the censorships required by the Church authorities, he was imprisoned and sent to Rome. Here after two years spent in the prison of Tor di Nona, refusing to abjure, he was condemned as impenitent heretic and, on 3 July 1570, he was hanged and burned in the square in front of Ponte Sant'Angelo, the same place where only three years earlier Pietro Carnesecchi had also been executed (E. Gallina, Op. cit., 1989, pp. 167-770; see also G. D'Onofrio & A. Gabriele, Aonio Paleario tra l'edito e l'inedito. Profilo biografico e documentazione notarile, Sora, 2008).

Edit 16, CNCE58244; E. Gallina, Op. cit., p. 50, no. 2.

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