Novena of Saint Jerome
By Fr. Giuseppe Oddone.
Translated by Fr. Remo Zanatta and Fr.Julian Gerosa
- Jerome’s cultural education
3.1. Cultural centers frequented by Miani
In addition to life, the great gift that a Christian family makes to its children is that of cultural education.
The Miani house was close to the parish of San Vitale, a hundred meters from the flourishing monastery of the Augustinians of Santo Stefano and that of the Lateran Canons of Charity (the present Academy), and with them the family had for years been in contact for the cultural and Christian formation of its members, as we know from the family charters. The Augustinian monks certainly took care of the cultural formation of Carlo Miani, and almost certainly the formation of the other brothers. We know with certainty that in the monastery was also active at the time of Jerome a magister “puerorum”, a teacher of children who taught the first rudiments of reading and writing.
3.2. The culture of Dad Angelo
In the Miani family, in addition to the love for culture, there was a strong sense of love for the Republic of Venice and for the service to the state. Even his father Angelo, born in 1442 (when Jerome was born he was forty-four years old), was very active in the various public offices entrusted to him, the most important of which were those of captain of the galleys in the Adriatic area to combat the smuggling of salt against Venice (1482). When Jerome was born, his father was captain and podestà in Feltre (1486), and then he was the superintendent of Zante and Lepanto. Unfortunately, his father tragically ended his life in 1496 with an apparent suicide (he was found hanged under the bridge – then made of wood – of Rialto, perhaps because of an economic collapse of his business). He was buried in the nearby Church of Santo Stefano, in a family tomb. He financed the publication of the philosophical works of Aloisi of Ravenna, Augustinian monk of Santo Stefano, tutor of his son Carlo, to whom he gave an excellent humanistic education and a perfect mastery of Latin.
3.3. Schools of Venice in 1500
We know quite well the school organization, the contents, the methods of primary education in Venice. We also know broadly what the Republic required of its nobles who, at the end of the early sixteenth century, held public administrative and political offices.
Education, school, the needs of a basic culture, educational methods become part of the lives of many families, both noblemen and merchants, and ordinary people and citizens. In Venice there is a widespread and articulated basic school fabric, with a very high literacy rate, even if the numerical data remain hypothetical and uncontrollable.
The school was left to private initiative: the Venetian state did not consider subsidizing in Venice teachers who provided a good – the literary or commercial culture- for the interest of private citizens. Only later, and for certain schools, there will be an intervention of the state oriented towards specific operational sectors (the Chancery) or towards high cultural levels (Schools of Rialto and San Marco).
A swarming humanity revolves around the schools and teachers (“magister”, “rector scholarum”) and adult students are present as witnesses or executors in notarial documents. The presence of school teachers is truly impressive and it can reasonably be assumed that at the time of Jerome at least sixty teachers with their schools gave the Venetians a basic education.
3.4. The curriculum and school books
In short, we can think that for Jerome Emiliani, like many other nobles, at first, the family teaching, especially maternal religious teaching, which would have so much influence on Jerome, but also on the interests of his other children, such as Carlo and Marco; then, probably, they all attended an external school for a fee with a “magister grammaticae” and a “magister abachi”, assisted in the family by a private tutor. Family education with a private tutor and a paid school could very well be assembled together and this is the practice of many families of the Venetian aristocracy. This practice was certainly not unknown to the Miani family itself, who sent their children to school and at the same time cultivated the friendship and financing of the prior of Santo Stefano, a private tutor in the “studia humanitatis” of his brother Carlo.
The books that served for elementary learning and constituted the canonical texts were in fact the holy cross followed by the letters of the alphabet (tabula), the Psalter usually still preceded by the alphabet and by the most usual prayers, the “Pater noster”, the “Ave Maria”, the “Salve Regina”, the Donato or Latin grammar with annexes the “Disticha Catonis”, a series of moral maxims attributed to Cato the Censor.
I believe that since Jerome was the last of four children, these texts were already present in the family; otherwise they could easily be bought in the shops of Rialto. The school began around the seventh year of age and lasted several years for a complete basic training (at least until 14)
3.5. The method of reading and writing
The starting point was the teaching of the holy cross or alphabet (using images that first depicted a cross and then the letters of the alphabet), then we moved on to syllable. The first book of reading was the Psalter, which was read in Latin, even though one did not know the grammar; therefore, one arrived with the exercise of flowing the Latin text with sufficient mastery, even if one did not understand it. By following the lines with the eyes and the mouth it was possible to match the words to the sound emitted in order to reach at least a rudimentary literacy. Prayers and psalms were recited aloud and by heart. It is therefore not surprising if the first orphans of Miani sang psalms or hymns, recited the “Miserere” or the gradual psalms and on certain days the office of Our Lady. They were the first forms of acculturation learned at school.
Then, they began to read vulgar books such as Christian doctrine or other spiritual books of good and clear printing. Only after the initial learning of reading did one proceed to the exercise of writing with the teaching of the “ductus” of the individual letters on sheets without staves; it took three or four months for those who had a good pulse with continuous exercises copying texts morally edifying (they were written with a goose feather and ink of various qualities, more or less acid and corrosive).
3.6. Jerome’s handwriting
Little Miani has gone through this phase. If we examine his adult handwriting in the letters that remain to us, we notice that it is an orderly handwriting, acquired through the exercise until the assimilation of the necessary automatisms and that it stretches with rhythmic spontaneity and reveals manual dexterity and a sense of precision. The whole of a page gives the idea of stability and discipline, of accuracy and vigor in writing words from the first to the last sign. The line flows precisely with a slight tendency to rise towards the center and to rebalance towards the end. It emerges the idea of a strong-willed, organizing, enumerating and precise personality, of a leader with the will to lead. In seed, these graphic characteristics were already in the trials of his childhood.
3.7. The study of mathematics
With the learning of writing we could then begin the study of the abacus (from the name of the ancient instrument that facilitates the grouping of the figures according to their position value: units, tens, hundreds, etc.). In Venice, the abacus gradually aimed to go beyond the four operations and extended to merchant arithmetic (such as the calculation of interest and exchange rates, the division of profits and losses), to teach the use of accounting books and double-entry bookkeeping, commercial correspondence and also included notions of metronomy and geometry to facilitate the exercise of various economic activities. This was the subject that most interested patricians who planned a merchant career for their children, so that they could keep the books of family accounts in order and manage an activity related to trade or craftsmanship.
3.8. The study of Latin
After learning the first rudiments of abacus and then in conjunction with the study of mathematics, students would begin the approach to Latin grammar that opened the door of knowledge. “Ianua” (Door) was the name given to the elementary text by Elio Donato often published in the remakes of the fifteenth century. Ianua was written in Latin, a language not yet known by schoolchildren, who had to deal with the study at the cost of great difficulty and frequent punishment.
The study of Latin grammar was particularly tedious for the students of the time, as for those of today.
After learning to read the Psalter and the texts of Christian doctrine, the study of the abacus and the knowledge of Latin grammar, even if not deepened, and the exercise of translating a few pages of history, Latin poetry and moral philosophy, ended the basic training, even for the patricians.
At the point, students possessed the knowledge and understanding of the vernacular and Latin of the Vulgata Bible (Jerome Miani will show over time that he has assimilated it to perfection), of the legal texts in the contracts (Jerome himself will sign some), in the wills (the will of Jerome’s mother is written in Latin), and of the Latin of the Chancellery of Venice, with which it corresponded officially with its magistrates. They also acquired the mathematical and commercial notions necessary to administer their own patrimony.
I believe that Jerome’s basic education, as well as that of his brother Marco and Luca, has stopped at this level. The sudden death of his father in 1496, when Jerome was ten years old, had to influence the literary ambitions of the Miani brothers to a great extent. Only his brother Carlo, who was then 19 years old, showed that he had expanded his literary studies and that he had come to a certain mastery of the Latin language. After the war, he was to serve as a lawyer for many years. In fact, those who wanted to deepen their studies in the humanities or write in a richer and more elaborate Latin either studied personally under the guidance of some teacher (as in the case of his brother Carlo) or entered the public schools of humanity and rhetoric (Rialto and San Marco). In those schools, students would be engaged in a substantial reading of the classics, among whom it emerged Cicero, Virgil and Ovid, and practiced composition in Latin in both prose and poetry. Of course, the culmination of this training was represented by studies at the University of Padua.
3.9. Jerome’s apprenticeship
It remained fundamental for every profession, including the mercantile one, the training obtained through a long apprenticeship. This was carried out in the workshops and warehouses (for craftsmen and merchants) or for the higher and more remunerated professions at the offices of notaries, surgeons, architects and humanists. Not even Jerome, who worked for the family business with his mother, with Luca and with his brother Marco, five years older than him, did not escape this type of training. In his will, Marco says of Jerome, “my dear brother that I always had him for son, as he knows”; that suggests a certain complicity between the two, a commonality of life and training at work and probably also an indirect help during the war, in the harsh imprisonment following the bloody loss of Castelnuovo di Quero.
We are not aware that in his adolescent years Jerome continued or deepened his knowledge of classical Latin or Italian authors: quotations or allusions do not appear in the letters that remain to us, in which he expressed himself substantially in the Venetian dialect. In writing in the vernacular there were no precise rules of spelling and punctuation. Therefore, we should not be surprised if the punctuation in Jerome’s writing is almost non-existent and the spelling leaves much to be desired, because the writing is modelled on the sound of the word.
3.10. Organizational and communicative skills
A good cultural basis, even though generic, appears instead in the organizational and administrative skills and in the communication technique. Miani knows how to speak and write in a sublime style, to obtain adhesion and flex the will, when with pressing questions, parallelisms and anaphoras, polysyndeton and asyndeton, figures of rhythm and sound, exhorts his companions to the love of Christ, to work, to solidity in trials. It is a rhetorical technique that cannot be improvised, but that requires training, the assimilation of readings and the ability to listen to sacred and profane speakers.
Jerome did not show inferiority complexes towards other nobles for his cultural formation: he possessed the basic culture required of all those who belonged to his social class. He spent his adolescence and early youth in a serene way – perhaps even libertine, according to ancient records – until the events with the international league of Cambrai, which aimed to destroy Venice militarily and economically, did not upset the life of the Miani family. The Anonymous writes of him: He enjoyed many friendships both because he was very expansive and generous, and because of his native inclination, he was affectionate and full of benevolence. He had a cheerful, courteous, and courageous character. In terms of intelligence and culture, he could be on the same level as his peers, although in him love was greater than his cultural baggage.
The ability to love – Pascal will later say – is far superior to the ability of intelligence, because it completes, harmonizes the person, puts him in relation and makes him interact with others.