spread particularly by the friars, whose studia covered much of Europe, including the Italian towns, and with whose influence the popularization of religious concepts and religious education gained major impetus which was to continue right to the end of the Middle Ages.
These two strands, the chivalric and the religious, were fundamental, and continued to be of great significance in the Renaissance. The Italian towns, however, added a third element, a secular culture of a different kind. The need for professional expertise--for administrators, lawyers, doctors, and commercial training--led to a growth in secular education, present in Italian towns virtually from their beginnings, but now to expand enormously. Private and communally funded schools grew up alongside cathedral and church schools and were considerably more important than them. Reading and writing schools, 'abacus' schools, and grammar schools all burgeoned, and fed into the universities which, from the early thirteenth century onwards, were set up by towns all over northern and central Italy, teaching in particular medicine and above all law. The need for lawyers was fundamental to the defence of a town's rights and to the administration of justice, and lawyers were a highly esteemed group. Even more fundamental was the need for notaries. Ubiquitous figures in late medieval towns, and for that matter in the countryside, they oiled the wheels of administration and of private and commercial transaction; virtually all legal documents had to be drawn up or at least 'rogated' by them. The education of notaries was also crucial, although we know less about it; but we do know that the thirteenth century saw a great development of the ars notarie alongside formal legal training, principally at Bologna.
Finally, the towns needed rhetoricians. These are harder to slot into 'professional' divisions, which are in any case artificial and capable of much overlap. But alongside the ars notarie developed the ars dictaminis and the ars rhetorica, the medieval arts of writing and rhetoric, basic educational building-blocks, and these were widely influential. Rhetorical skills were developed particularly in Tuscany, where a high proportion of
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