Abstract

Chapter 4 deals with the intentions behind the project for the democratization of knowledge. In the first part, the focus is on the Erasmian legacy in democratizers like Antonio Brucioli, Cornelio Musso and Bernardino Tomitano, who reflect on their goals of making knowledge accessible to ordinary people starting with religious texts as a means of acquiring ethical behaviour appropriate for a Christian. The second part shows how, with the same arguments, intellectuals like Alessandro Piccolomini, Benedetto Varchi, Sperone Speroni and Giovan Battista Gelli had similar intentions concerning the promotion of the process of democratization of lay knowledge. The main objective was to educate people for the realization of a human beings’s moral nature. The last section of the chapter explains the fundamental role that language played in the democratization of knowledge for these intellectuals.

Keywords: Democratization, Education, Ethics, Intentions

And to those who piously say that it is dangerous to put this light before common eyes because it contains difficult and dark things, which the simple people are not given to understand and therefore are put at risk of being led astray, I shall say first of all that they should take the matter up with the Holy Spirit, who wanted to reveal these high secrets to simple people and idiots, judging them to be more worthy because their heads were not cluttered with worldly wisdom.