The Quantification of Talents: Education, Galenic Humoralism, and Classification of Wits in Early Modern Culture

The interest of contemporary critics in the political side of Renaissance and Reformation educational thought has kept the body in the background in the discourse on education. Both the relationship between mentor and pupil in the building of civic humanism and the powerful machine of popular Protestant schooling looked like emphasizing the intellectual aspects of learning and dismissing the emotional and bodily side. Nevertheless, the direct reading of sources gives a different image of the educational discourse, in which the body is indirectly but pervasively considered in humanist treatises and later gains centre stage with a revival of Galenic humoralism in its connection with talents and educability, especially in the well-known work of Juan Huarte de San Juan. In treatises and scholarship, the body is subjected to a more scientific approach and especially to a progressively more quantifying perspective. This essay offers an overview of this process of quantification of the body in the educational realm.