Send us a text Leonardo Bruni was the titan of Renaissance historians and a prolific humanist. In a long letter to an aristocratic Italian woman, Battista Malatesta, he lays out his philosophy of humanistic education, which is meant to help the student achieve glory. But laziness or ineptitude, he says, threatens the student always, and will drag her down to crawl alongside other mediocrities. Bruni insists on deep reading of the greatest orators, poets, and historians, alongside biblical and...