Scholarship on pre-university education in Italy during the Middle Ages and Renaissance has been dominated by studies of individual towns or by general syntheses of Italy as a whole; in contrast, this work offers not only an archival study of a region but also attempts to discern crucial local variations on a comparative basis. It documents mass literacy in the city of Florence; the school curriculum in the individual Florentine subject towns, as well as in the city of Florence itself; the decline of church education and the rise of lay schools; the development of communal schools in Florentine Tuscany up to 1400; and teachers, schools and pupils in the city of Florence during the fifteenth century.