The Two Latin Cultures and the Foundation of Renaissance Humanism in Medieval Italy

"… Ronald Witt has composed a compelling, panoramic, and masterful prequel to his earlier study, In the Footsteps of the Ancients."
Elizabeth M. McCahill, Renaissance Quarterly

"This large and complex book makes a powerful case for Italy as the precursor of the modern, educated Western world. To facilitate navigation, Witt provides lengthy footnotes … a vast bibliography, and a detailed and useful index."
Charles G. Nauert, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History

"A work of this scope and breadth leads one to inquire into the author's historical method. Witt employs, it seems to me, a careful logic rounded by skepticism. His book showcases an experienced, thoughtful historian at his craft, constantly alert to the limitations of his sources even as he derives the principles and themes that guide his argument forward."
Timothy Kircher, Reviews in History

"This will be an essential work for historians of medieval culture and not just in Italy, for in addition to sifting the wheat from the abundant chaff of earlier research, Witt's deep familiarity with the original sources permits him to arrive at a comprehensive picture of Italian culture and education from the eight to the thirteenth centuries."
The Catholic Historical Review

"We have long needed a magisterial work to navigate the artificial barrier between "medieval" and "Renaissance" histories of intellectual, literary, institutional, and political life … Here it is."
Richard J. Oosterhoff, Fides et Historia

"… written for anyone who ever wondered not only who was teaching what to whom in northern Italy between the ninth and the thirteenth centuries but how and why."
Kathy Eden, Common Knowledge

"This is a book that no one with an interest in the intellectual history of medieval Italy can possibly afford to ignore; it is a book furthermore that is a landmark in the discussion of the origins of the Renaissance, and will surely remain an essential point of reference, not only for the remarkable synthesis that it offers, but for the way in which it puts its material at the reader’s disposal in a bibliography and outstanding analytical index that between them account for one fifth of the volume. Such technical generosity allied to the scholarly generosity of spirit that infuses every phase of the argument is rare indeed, and can only be the mark of wisdom as Socrates described it."
Nicholas Mann, Nexus Institute (https://www.nexus-instituut.nl/en/nexus-review)