Thanks especially to his Schooling in Renaissance Italy (Baltimore 1989) and The universities of the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore 2002), Paul Grendler has established a reputation as one of the leading scholars of Italian Renaissance education today. Traditionally the quarry of antiquarians and local historians, the history of education has an obvious importance for a period so closely associated with extraordinary developments in culture. In this collection of previously published essays, as in Grendler's studies more generally, it receives something of the integrated and overview treatment that it needs and deserves. In reality this volume as a whole is not entirely coherent: most studies are tightly focused on aspects of education in Italy but one or two are way off the subject, especially the (in itself valuable and interesting) collective biography of the leaders of the Venetian state in the sixteenth century. Elsewhere in this volume Grendler combines textual analyses with statistical and prosopographical methods to help give a sense of the broader social, religious and political impact of changing educational developments which, in the form of universities especially, emerge as uniquely important for the civilisations of the Renaissance and Reformation. As ever Grendler's breadth, sophistication, careful scholarship and mastery of the material are much in evidence. But as usual so are large tracts of densely factual and drily descriptive text, which might make us feel that the history of education has not come of age quite yet. Readers who have learned to fear that this theme is worthy but dull risk, alas, having their worst suspicions confirmed by studying this otherwise excellent and important collection.