One should not underestimate the pettiness of some of the motivations and immediate circumstances that led Poliziano to assert the ennobling role of the grammaticus as that of upholding, among all other professions, the enkyklios paideia. It seems evident that it was a response to his opponents' scorn for the lowly gramatista; another contributing factor in his new definition of the grammarian was the defense of his profession amid the ongoing rivalries with philosophers such as his friend Pico della Mirandola or those humanists such as Cristoforo Landino who claimed exclusive encyclopedic knowledge for philosophy or poetry respectively. But it was certainly his quarrel with the chancellor humanist Bartolomeo Scala, characterized by Peter Godman as «a feud between a bureaucrat and a professor» (295), that led Poliziano to reaffirm the importance of the grammaticus and the primacy of language and the written word; only the philologists were capable of investigating and explaining all kinds of writing, be they from poets, historians, orators, philosophers, doctors or jurists (Miscellaneorum 1.4). On the contentious clash of egos in the intellectual circles of Florence at the time of Poliziano, see Godman, 74-89, 116-31, 295-98. See also Vittore Branca, and Rico, El sueño del humanismo 87ff.

For the intellectual and social formation of the citizen in some Italian cities, see Garin, Educazione umanistica in Italia. Regarding education in Spain at this time, we still lack a historical overview that would highlight the changes in curriculum and pedagogical methods that might have taken place during the last centuries of the Middle Ages.

To be sure there were exceptions such as Aubrey F. G. Bell, who wrote El renacimiento español.

Also see Round's Libro llamado Fedrón, a study and edition of Plato's dialogue on the death of Socrates translated into Spanish by Pero Díaz from the Latin version of Leonardo Bruni.

As a fierce defender of the moral values of traditional nobility, Diego de Valera accuses his contemporaries of disgracing the order of chivalry by engaging in commercial and other vile activities. See Di Camillo, «Las teorías de la nobleza en el pensamiento ético de Mosén Diego de Valera» for a comprehensive account of the evolving concept of chivalry during the fifteenth century and an examination of de Valera in particular, see Jesús Rodríguez Velasco, El debate sobre la caballería en el siglo XV.

The proposition of arms versus letters as something more than a simple Renaissance topos is first elaborated by Castro in El pensamiento de Cervantes. The theme was analyzed at greater length by Maravall in El humanismo de las armas en Don Quixote; for a more reasoned approach of what this issue represented, see Francesco Tateo, «Le armi e le lettere».

There is no space to list all of the many works that each of these scholars has published. Suffice it to point out Cátedra's «Filología y derecho», «Sobre la biblioteca del Marqués de Santillana» and «Enrique de Villena y algunos humanistas». From Serés, La traducción en España e Italia durante el siglo XV. Morrás, in addition to her studies and editions of Cartagena's translations, has published «El debate entre Leonardo Bruni y Alonso de Cartagena». González Rolán, Saquero Suárez-Somonte and their research team are without a doubt the most assiduous and prolific scholars dealing with fifteenth-century Spanish humanism. Their Humanismo y teoría de la traducción en España e Italia en la primera mitad del siglo XV (with Antonio Moreno Hernández) alone is a monumental achievement. To Jiménez Calvente we owe her study and edition of Marineo Siculo's letters, Un siciliano en la España de los Reyes Católicos. Fernández-Gallardo is the first young historian to take upon himself the rewarding task of investigating the political and intellectual role that Cartagena played in the second quarter of fifteenth-century Castile; see his Alonso de Cartagena.

Though Vespasiano da Bisticci wrote biographical portraits of both Nuño de Guzmán and the Conte Camerlingo (Íñigo D'Ávalos), more attention has been paid to the former, even though Bisticci describes D'Ávalos as being more of an intellectual. Whereas he stresses the adventures of Nuño as a wealthy young man desirous of seeing the world who falls victim to unscrupulous Florentine merchants, D'Ávalos is characterized as having a «buonissima perizia delle lettere latine» who had built a «bellissima libraria» filled with manuscripts from the «più belli scrittori d'Italia». See da Bisticci 397-98 (for D'Ávalos) and 517-20 (Nuño de Guzmán). Alfred Morel-Fatio first called attention to Nuño in his «Les deux Omero Castillans»; his disciple Mario Schiff later presented more documentary evidence of Nuño as a full-fledged humanist in La bibliothèque du Marquis de Santillane.

Among other editions, see, for example, his monumental undertaking, with Robert B. Tate, of editing Alfonso de Palencia's Gesta hispaniensia ex annalibus suorum dierum collecta, or his translation of Francisco de Vitoria's Political Writings.

It is not a coincidence that this interpretation of humanism comes from the Anglo-American educational system, where terms like 'liberal arts' and 'humanities' are still in use to designate certain disciplines in colleges and universities. The scholar who institutionalized the legacy of the classical tradition as a field of study was J. E. Sandys; his A History of Classical Scholarship would have a considerable influence throughout Europe during the twentieth century. Among the many studies on the classical heritage of the Western literary tradition as well as of particular national cultures, see, among others, R. R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries. Similarly significant for the Spanish-speaking world has been Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition, published in 1949, which was translated into Spanish by Antonio Alatorre in 1954. With regard to Highet's work, see Lida's review article, «La tradición clásica en España», in which she takes Highet to task for ignoring Spanish literature. This article can be considered the forerunner of her posthumous book, La tradición clásica en España. An analogous school in Italy, which we will not go into here, has dealt with the presence of the classics in Western culture since the turn of the nineteenth century. Suffice to mention, among the many works of Remigio Sabbadini, Le scoperte dei codici latini e greci ne'secoli XIV e XV. Interest in classical authors was later expanded to humanist texts by Giuseppe Billanovich, who founded Italia Medioevale e Umanistica in 1958, in collaboration with Augusto Campana, Carlo Dionisotti and Paolo Sambin, whose names appear as editors. I should note, in passing, that though the journal has remained scarcely known in Spanish medieval and humanistic studies, Francisco Rico has been from the mid-sixties a very active collaborator of this annual publication.