This chapter proceeds from the observation that urban culture in the Low Countries is mostly considered as having been receptive to neo-Latin influences from the humanists while at the same time very dynamic with regard to the development of literature and scholarship in the vernacular. The latter is seen as not only as a matter of ‘trickle-down processes’ but also of developments in which the gap between a learned (Latin) culture and the world of administration and production was closed from the bottom up. The period known as the Renaissance and the rise of humanism is not described as a fault line but is situated in a broader tradition of the development of knowledge in the towns of the Low Countries. This is explained and illustrated in sections on reading, writing and arithmetic; teaching and discipline; learning on the shop floor; the role of handbooks and ‘artes-literature’; and such higher education institutions as the ‘Latin’ schools and the universities. In short, while embedding knowledge, training and education firmly in the urban social fabric, the chapter addresses the cross-fertilisation between the world of the mind and the world of practical action.