Tacitus' Germania and Beatus Rhenanus (1485-1587): A Study of the Editorial and Exegetical Contribution of a Sixteenth Century Scholar.

From the late fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, the Germania served German intellectuals as an indispensable text in the process of national self-discovery and self-definition. Recovered from the monastic library at Hersfeld by Poggio, Tacitus's little tract was first given prominence by Enea Silvio Piccolomini who, one year before he became Pope Plus H in 1458, used it as his source for a polemical description of ancient Germany as a barbarous place awaiting civilization by the Roman church. German humanists took up the challenge, making the Germania a subject of intense study and reflection. To do so, they needed a reliable text. An authoritative edition of the Germania therefore became a prerequisite for all further work on the historical origins of the German nation. Most capable among the early editors was the Alsatian humanist Beatus Rhenanus who moved to Basel in 1511 to participate in the printing of Erasmus's works and in the publication of classical authors, among them Tacitus, whose opera omnia edition was brought out by Froben in 1519.

James S. Hirstein's substantial monograph brings a vast array of philological and bibliographic learning to a close examination of Rhenanus's work as editor and commentator of the Germanin. As the humanist enterprise of recovering antiquity depended in the first instance on the restoration of corrupt texts, a look over Rhenanus's shoulder as he sat at his painstaking editorial task is of great interest. Having worked among Rhenanus's own books in the Bibliotheque humaniste de Selestat, Hirstein is able to fully satisfy this interest. He furnishes a minutely detailed descriptive catalogue of all manuscript groups (thirty MSS, all copied in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries) and printings (seventeen editions from 1472) in existence in 1519, when Rhenanus first turned his attention to the Germanin. While Rhenanus used no manuscripts for his editions, he did consult all the printed versions, choosing the best readings, so that his work in turn became the standard text until the publication of Justus Lipsius's edition of 1574. Hirstein compares the four editions produced in Basel (May 1519, August 1519, 1533, and 1544), noting growing accuracy in the text relative to one another and to earlier editions produced elsewhere. Much of his account of the emerging model text is based on Rhenanus's own manuscript notes, which show him struggling over difficult readings and lacunae. Equally close scrutiny is given to Rhenanus's commentaries, starting with the sketchy commentariolus of 1519, moving on to the castigationes and the sixty-page Thesaurus of Tacitus's vocabulary in the 1533 and 1544 editions, and culminating in the magisterial Rerum Germanicarum Libri Tres of 1531, which raised humanist investigations of ancient Germany to a new level by combining textual criticism with wide-ranging historical inquiry, including the use of inscriptions, archeological finds, and manuscript sources.

Part 3 of Hirstein's book, "The Germania Interpreted by Rhenanus," is likely to be of greatest interest to Renaissance scholars, who will have been alerted to this subject's importance by the late John D'Amico's excellent Theory and Practice in Renaissance Textual Criticism: Beatus Rhenanus Between Conjecture and History (1988). Hirstein's intense focus on his single subject brings out many interesting points not covered in D'Amico's book, among them crucial choices made in introducing divisions into the text, the selection of a title for the work, pointing out and resolving contradictions in the textual tradition, settling difficult problems posed by tribal names, sites, and migrations, and locating the break - defined as a media aetas - between ancient Germany and the modern country. Most revealing are the occasional tensions surfacing in Rhenanus's work between the dispassionate scholar and the German patriot. For many years he appears to have been reluctant to reject the spurious foundation figures invented by Annius of Viterbo in order to make Germans appear to be an autochthonons race. He toyed for a time with the temptation of substituting inter violentos for inter vinolentos in Germania 22.1 so as to minimize Tacitus's emphasis on the warriors' heavy drinking - a much-resented stereotype about Germans in his own day. In both instances good scholarship won out over patriotism. And Rhenanus is much more restrained than were his humanist contemporaries in expatiating on Tacitus's reference in 37.3 to the Germanorum libertas. It is fascinating to observe in Hirstein's reconstruction of the scholarly process the strains, temptations, and challenges at work, and to see the Germanin emerge from Rhenanus's hands as a source book of reliable information about the ancient tribes, rather than as a romantic myth or a moral tract. The major narrative history toward which Rhenanus's labors on the Germania seemed to direct him was never written. All his life he remained what D'Amico called him: "a master of annotation." Hirstein's book demonstrates the depth and range of this mastery.

GERALD STRAUSS Amherst, Massachusetts