Philipp Melanchthon - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

He was born Philipp Schwartzerdt (of which "Melanchthon" is a Greek translation) on 16 February 1497, at Bretten, near Karlsruhe, where his father Georg Schwarzerdt was armorer to Philip, Count Palatine of the Rhine. His birthplace and almost the whole city of Bretten was burned in 1689 by French troops during the War of the Palatinate Succession. The town's Melanchthonhaus was built on its site in 1897.

In 1507 he was sent to the Latin school at Pforzheim, where the rector, Georg Simler of Wimpfen, introduced him to the Latin and Greek poets and Aristotle. He was influenced by his great-uncle Johann Reuchlin, brother of his maternal grandmother, a representative humanist. It was Reuchlin who suggested the change from Schwartzerdt (literally black earth), into the Greek equivalent Melanchthon (Μελάγχθων).

Still young, he entered in 1509 the University of Heidelberg where he studied philosophy, rhetoric, and astronomy/astrology, and was known as a good Greek scholar. On being refused the degree of master in 1512 on account of his youth, he went to Tübingen, where he continued humanistic studies, but also worked on jurisprudence, mathematics, and medicine. While there, he was taught the technical aspects of astrology by Johannes Stöffler.

Having taken the degree of master in 1516, he began to study theology. Under the influence of men like Reuchlin and Erasmus he became convinced that true Christianity was something different from scholastic theology as it was taught at the university. He became a conventor (repentant) in the contubernium and instructed younger scholars. He also lectured on oratory, on Virgil and Livy.

His first publications were an edition of Terence (1516) and his Greek grammar (1518), but he had written previously the preface to the Epistolae clarorum virorum of Reuchlin (1514).