Renaissance Humanism in Northern Europe - Leaders of Humanism

Leaders of Humanism

The leading Humanists of Germany included Rudolph Agricola, Reuchlin and Erasmus. Agricola, whose original name was Roelef Huisman, was born near Groningen, 1443, and died 1485. He enjoyed the highest reputation in his day as a scholar and received unstinted praise from Erasmus and Melanchthon. He has been regarded as doing for Humanism in Germany what was done for Italy by Petrarca, the first life of whom, in German, Agricola prepared. He was far in advance of the Italian poet in the purity of his life. After studying in Erfurt, Louvain and Cologne, Agricola went to Italy, spending some time at the universities in Pavia and Ferrara. He declined a professor’s chair in favor of an appointment at the court of Philip of the Palatinate in Heidelberg. He made Cicero and Quintilian his models. In his last years, he turned his attention to theology and studied Hebrew. Like Pico della Mirandola, he was buried in the cowl of a monastic order. The inscription on his tomb in Heidelberg stated that he had studied what is taught about God and the true faith of the Saviour in the books of Scripture.

Another Humanist was Jacob Wimpheling, 1450–1528, of Schlettstadt, who taught in Heidelberg. He was inclined to be severe on clerical abuses but, at the close of his career, wanted to substitute for the study of Virgil and Horace, Sedulius and Prudentius. The poetic Sebastian Brant, 1457–1521, the author of the Ship of Fools, began his career as a teacher of law in Basel. Mutianus Rufus, in his correspondence, went so far as to declare that Christianity is as old as the world and that Jupiter, Apollo, Ceres and Christ are only different names of the one hidden God.

A name which deserves a high place in the German literature of the last years of the Middle Ages is John Trithemius, 1462–1505, abbot of a Benedictine convent at Sponheim, which, under his guidance, gained the reputation of a learned academy. He gathered a library of 2,000 volumes and wrote a patrology, or encyclopaedia of the Fathers, and a catalogue of the renowned men of Germany. Increasing differences with the convent led to his resignation in 1506, when he decided to take up the offer of the Lord Bishop of Würzburg, Lorenz von Bibra (bishop from 1495 to 1519), to become abbot of the Schottenkloster in Würzburg. He remained there until the end of his life. Prelates and nobles visited him to consult and read the Latin and Greek authors he had collected. These men and others contributed their part to that movement of which Reuchlin and Erasmus were the chief lights and which led on easily to the Protestant Reformation.