excerpt CULTURAL ENCOUNTER AND IDENTITY IN THE NEO-LATIN WORLD EDITED BY CAMILLA HORSTER AND MARIANNE PADE EDIZIONI QUASAR ROMA MMXX excerpt Analecta Romana Instituti Danici – Supplementum LIV Accademia di Danimarca, via Omero, 18, I – 00197 Rome © 2020 Edizioni Quasar di Severino Tognon srl, Roma ISBN 978-88-5491-033-1 This publication was supported by the Carlsberg Foundation, the Danish Council for Independent Research and C.F. Rasks Legat. Cover: Albrecht Dürer’s 1502 woodcut illustrates the idea of the translatio studii that is so central to this volume. It shows Philosophia sitting on a throne, surrounded by medallions with portraits of wise men from many ages and parts of the world: Ptolemy, Plato, Cicero and Vergil (in one) and Albert the Great. The poem above her says: “The Greeks call me sophia, the Romans sapientia,/ the Egyptians and the Chaldaeans invented me, the Greeks wrote me down,/ the Romans translated (or transmitted) and the Germans developed me” (from Conrad Celtis, Amores, Nurenberg, 1502, f. avir; source Wikimedia commons). Printed in Italy by Logo s.r.l., Borgoricco (PD) excerpt Contents Preface ....................................................................... 7 Translatio studii: imitation and transformations of Italian humanist culture SUSANNA DE BEER, Conrad Celtis’s Visions of Rome Relocation, Contestation and Imitation of the Italian Renaissance in German Humanism ...................................... 13 ANNET DEN HAAN, Sources, pools and runnels: The humanist reception of the Ordinary Gloss and Lyra’s Postils............................................................... 33 MARIANNE PADE, Melanchthon and Thucydides: The reception of the Peloponnesian War in a Reformation context ............................................................ 47 TRINE ARLUND HASS, Playing your Part: Bucolic Traditions and Positions in Hans Lauridsen Amerinus’s Ecloga de pacis foedere (1573) ........................................... 63 PER SIGURD T. STYVE, Renaissance Images of Multiple Temporalities...................... 83 LÆRKE MARIA ANDERSEN FUNDER, Meeting expectations and revealing aspirations: Ole Worm and the emergent genre of museum catalogues ...................................... 103 Teaching and development of Humanist Latin CLEMENTINA MARSICO, Continuity and change in the Neo-Latin grammars of the European vernaculars (French, Castilian, German, and English) ................................ 123 MORTEN FINK-JENSEN, Education, Humanism, and the Reformation in Denmark............ 139 JOHANN RAMMINGER, The Latin of the German Reformation and the Heritage of Quattrocento Humanism.................................................................... 155 CAMILLA PLESNER HORSTER, Humanist Latin for a new purpose: The indication of indirect discourse from Italy to Denmark .................................................. 179 Competing Nations MARC LAUREYS, Assessing the influence of Biondo Flavio’s historical geography: the case of the Low Countries ................................................................. 203 excerpt 6 CONTENTS KAREN SKOVGAARD-PETERSEN, Stephanius’s Notæ uberiores in Historiam Danicam Saxonis Grammatici (1645): a humanist commentary on a medieval history of Denmark ........... 219 PETER ZEEBERG, Collections of Latin inscriptions from the milieu around Henrich Rantzau .. 231 OUTI MERISALO, Urbes antiquissimae: Renaissance influences in descriptions of towns and cities of seventeenth-eighteenth-century Magnus Ducatus Finlandiae .................... 241 Index ........................................................................ 249 Contributors .................................................................. 261 excerpt The Latin of the German Reformation and the Heritage of Quattrocento Humanism JOHANN RAMMINGER οὐδεν τοῦ λόγου προὐργιαίτερον – nothing is more important than language (Melanchthon 1520; MBW 79) Abstract ing (some of) them, whereas for confessional The norms of Latin developed by Italian human- writers, the relationship to the classical authors ists in the Quattrocento came to be the frame- came second, after a concern for universal com- work sustaining the Latin of the German Refor- municability: Latin was on its way to becoming mation. Even in the midst of their rejection of the unifying koinê of interfaith and internation- the Church of Rome, Protestant writers unwav- al communication, understood (in Melanch- eringly recognised the importance of the earlier thon’s words) “everywhere and by all,” allowing Italian environment for the development of the the expression of a common ‘European mindset’ German intellectual – and linguistic – landscape connecting a continent that was split politically which led up to the Reformation. Where the hu- and ideologically. manists had philologically restored ancient texts that were valued in their own right, confession- Theoretical premises al writers used the philological methods of the Bernd Moeller famously wrote in 1959: “Without Quattrocento to penetrate to the ‘real’ meaning humanism, no reformation.”1 This often quoted of sacred texts which had been buried under an statement covers a multitude of points of contact avalanche of meaningless new interpretive ter- between the two, among which the following minology that prevented the faithful from gain- will focus on one: the application of philological ing insights important for their salvation. Just – or more precisely lexical – parameters of Latin like the humanists before them, Protestant con- developed in Italian Quattrocento humanism in fessional writers were averse to the linguistic the textual culture of the German Reformation.2 innovations of medieval scholastic philosophy; We will look at how the humanist project of con- they used the same reasoning to identify and trolled language change (with Classical Latin as roll back language changes that were not part of the point of reference) continued in the texts of ‘classical’ Latin. Nevertheless confessional Latin the German Reformation. teems with innovative lexical features. One area Mapping the path of the reception of human- of innovation was the names of the new confes- ist ideas by Reformation authors, I would like sions themselves, often coined by adversaries so to emphasise two complementary aspects of the as to delegitimise their adherents. Thus, confes- transfer from Italy to Germany and from hu- sional Latin came to diverge significantly from manism to Reformation. The first regards the its humanist ancestor: humanists measured the long-term reception of Italian humanism, be- attractiveness of their Latin in relationship to ginning in the 1450s, which thoroughly modi- the classical authors, emulating them or reject- fied the intellectual landscape in Germany. Even 1. Moeller 1959, 59. 2004, 34–66. 2. I am much indebted to Cummings 2002 and McGrath excerpt 156 JOHANN RAMMINGER if full-blown German humanism under Maxi- since the 1980s been discussed under the par- milian I insisted that its intellectual profile was adigm of “confessionalisation.”4 In its “strong” distinct from its Italian forbears (see Susanna version, confessionalisation theory insisted on de Beer’s contribution in this volume), there was a close connection between the development at least one area where continuity was not ques- of religious and political authority and empha- tioned: the application of the philological meth- sised the “imposition of social discipline” in the ods developed by the Italian humanists con- process. From the 1990s onwards, confession- cerning language analysis and textual work on alisation theory came under criticism, as at- sources. Eventually, as many German human- tention was drawn to social phenomena which ists of the early sixteenth century were touched either had not or could not become confession- by the increasing confessional saturation of the alised at all.5 This gave rise to a “weak theory intellectual climate, they brought their meth- of confessionalisation” which “simply defines odologies to bear on the new problems. On the confessionalisation as the process of rivalry Protestant side alone, writers as diverse as the and emulation by which the religions […] built praeceptor Germaniae Melanchthon, the Swiss group cohesion and identity.”6 Besides Church reformer Vadian, or the Anabaptist Johannes and state authorities, it allowed for a wider va- Denk all had a humanist education (some, like riety of community structures as bearers of the the poet laureate Vadian, had even had a nota- development. Importantly, it recognised the role ble humanist career); they were imbued with of the individual in the process (in the form the tenets of Italian humanism, filtered through of “self-confessionalisation”).7 It will be this the societal and intellectual framework of Ger- “weak” form of the theory that will form the ba- man humanism. sis of the following. Secondly, despite the proclaimed translatio There have been disagreements about the artium from Italy to Germany – the German time frame of the “Age of Confessionalisation” claim, that is, that the liberal arts had migrat- (especially about its end, which does not con- ed from Italy to Germany – and the flaunted cern us here). Most research takes the Peace of new independence, German intellectuals from Augsburg (1555) as the starting point.8 Wolfgang the early sixteenth century onwards remained Reinhard, one of the fathers of confessionalisa- in contact with the Italian scene: new Italian tion theory, went as far back as the 1520s, la- writings could