Turning new leaves: Renaissance studies in Germany, 1995.

The German scholarship on the Renaissance that has come to my attention this year lends itself, with one exception, to the conclusions I reached last year: that it emerges from the fields of classics, literature, philology, and art history rather than history; that implicitly if not explicitly it is still oriented toward Jacob Burckhardt; that the pursuit of humanism lies at its heart; that it reflects the high value placed in the German-speaking lands on the minute, exhaustive scrutiny of both primary and secondary literature; and that it is unconcerned with contemporary theoretical discussion. I am happy to say that the major difference this year is that women authors are more in evidence, although it appears that only one of them holds a professorship.

Three works are specifically on humanists and humanism. In Humanismus in Umbrien und Rom: Lilius Tifernas, Kanzler und Gelehrter des Quattrocento, Ursula Jaitner-Hahner gives us a biography (22-155) of an "average" humanist (Durchschnittshumanist), Egidius Libellus alias Lilius (ca. 1418-1486), of Citta di Castello (Tifernatis in Latin), as well as a detailed analysis (158-243) of all Lilius's learned works. Volume 2 contains the texts of his surviving letters and brief writings, such as the prologues to his six-volume translation of Philo. The large center section of volume 2 is made up of the endnotes to volume 1. This is clearly a paradigmatic German achievement, and the price is likewise monumental.

Jaitner-Hahner admits that Lilius was not a brilliant man. One might wonder why he warranted this microscopic study. But in fact, the examination of his life shows how the humanistic agenda attracted members of Lilius's class and how they came to participate in it and embody its ideals. From an early age Lilius was drawn to classical Latin, earning the nickname of Tibullus. He managed to visit the Greek-speaking East for about three years, spent partly in the company of Cardinal Bessarion. He studied ancient Greek intensively and brought a Philo codex back to Italy. Probably through Bessarion, he gained invaluable connections in Rome, and for virtually the remainder of his days he expected that these ties to the curia would produce an office of higher rank and more lucrative reward than they ever did. For two decades in the middle of his life he served his native city, becoming chancellor at the age of 25. He took the doctorate of laws. He maintained contact with Ficino's circle. He taught at the University of Perugia and at the court of Urbino. Finally, Pope Sixtus IV made him a castellan in Ceprano, where he had the leisure to complete his signal scholarly endeavor, the translation of Philo of Alexandria. With this study, one more comparatively minor Renaissance player steps out of the shadows into the light of greater accessibility. This detailed research should make it easier to reconstruct the reception of Philo in the West.

The ten essays in Rudolf Agricola 1444-1485, Protagonist des nordeuropaischen Humanismus scrutinize individual aspects of the career and opus of the well known and seminal northern humanist. They are all by German and Dutch scholars from the disciplines of classics, classical philology, Germanic studies, theology, and library science. Both Germany and the Netherlands claim Agricola, for he worked in Groningen and, just before his death, at the University of Heidelberg, where despite the brevity of his stay, he affected students and colleagues and left a veritable mystique behind. But the decisive period in the formation of this man was the near-decade that he spent in Italy. Multi-talented, he supported himself in part by playing the organ; he was also a gifted painter.

Several contributors make available obscure works and/or translations of them into German. Werner Straube reproduces in its entirety the biography of Agricola by his close friend Johannes von Plieningen (11-48). While it is in the laudatory tradition of Suetonius, it also relates such human details as that Agricola bit his fingernails. Erik Leibenguth and Robert Seidel translate into German sixteen letters from Agricola to his closest friends and Johannes Reuchlin, and one letter from Reuchlin to Agricola (181-291). Hermann Wiegand translates two of Agricola's longer poems, one to Rudolf von Langen, the other an epicedium to Moritz Graf Spiegelberg (261-91). Angelika Dorfler-Dierken and Wolfgang Schiebel provide the Latin text and a German translation of the humanist's long poem in honor of Saint Anne, the composition of which represents, according to the authors, all by itself an advance in the rising devotion to the mother of Mary that reached its peak at the end of the fifteenth century (293-354).

Other essays take up particular aspects of Agricola's achievement, such as his speech, "In laudem philosophiae" (Wim van Dooren, 67-82); his De inventione dialectice (Lothar Mundt, 83-146) and its use in German arts curricula during the sixteenth century; his commentary on Cicero's De lege Manilia (Lutz Claren and Joachim Huber, 147-80); his treatise on education, De formando studio (Jurgen Busch, 355-85); and his inspiration of Conrad Celtis, who returned to Heidelberg in 1495 to found a sodality (Wilhelm Kuhlmann, 387-412). Fokke Akkerman attempts to reconstruct the identity of like-minded men in the "Friesian area," including, after Jozef Ijsewijn, the German territories of Ostfriesland and Westphalia (49-66). Despite being colored by deep admiration of Agricola, these essays are uniformly meritorious and add to our knowledge of the rise of humanism in the North.

The third book on humanism is Humanismus in Olmutz by Peter Worster. This is an effort at reconstituting the circles of educated, humanistically oriented men in Moravia, of which Olmutz was the largest city and its diocesan center. This has taken a good measure of detective work and speculation, for the sources are scanty. Worster is one of those who regard humanism as precisely an educational program, which produces some fuzziness around the edges of these circles, which are made up to a significant degree by the numerous clerical members of the cathedral chapter and two other chapters. Their agendas were a mixture of old-fashioned ecclesiasticism and humanism, a distinction that is evidently invisible to Worster. He attributes Renaissance motives, for example, to Bishop Stanislaus Thurzo (r. 1497-1540) for trying (not always successfully) to keep a printer in Olmutz, but the titles that issued from these presses were as often traditional (Jakob Ziegler, "Disputationes contra errores Waldensium") as in the new vein (Beatus Rhenanus's edition of Tertullian). Worster regards the writing of poems and treatises in praise of one's city or principality as an activity characteristic of humanists everywhere, and he devotes much space (98-139) to encomia for Moravian cities, which took their proximate inspiration from Aeneas Sylvius's 1438 praise of Basel.

Most useful, however, is the attempt to show how the elite and learned men of Moravia became acquainted with the Renaissance movement. Up till the mid-sixteenth century, Moravians took their higher education in order of preference at Cracow, Vienna, and in Italy. Regular connections with Italy in the early fifteenth century bore fruit in Moravia. Andreas Nicolai von Wittingau was acquainted with Coluccio Salutati, and Johann von Neumarkt gathered a group of men around him who collected manuscripts, including some works of Petrarch. Conrad Celtis called in Olmutz on one of his tours of Europe and may have given local intellectuals the idea of founding the admittedly somewhat later Sodalitas Marcomannica. Worster delineates four categories of literati in and around Olmutz in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries: (1) a broader circle of about 118 university-trained men; (2) 28 men named in the works of Stephanus Taurinus, Georg Sibutus, and Simon Ennius; (3) 13 individuals who are known to have been among the friends of Celtis; and (4) the dozen members of the Sodalitas Marcomannica.

Remarkably, Cologne would seem to contrast starkly with Olmutz during the very same period - if, that is, we did not already know quite a lot about humanist strains in the metropolis on the Rhine. Wolfgang Schmidt's Stifter und Auftraggeber im spatmittelalterlichen Koln, a University of Trier dissertation, looks specifically at the wealthy Rinck family's endowment of works of art in the churches of Cologne and its hinterland. Combining history and art history, Schmidt begins with Johann Rinck I, who took citizenship in Cologne in 1432 and donated somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 florins in works of art to the churches. Schmidt tries to identify what each family member gave and to relate to the concerns of the donor the thematic content of the art, the church for which it was commissioned, and its placement. Each donor had his favorite institutions. Peter Rinck, the best known member of the family, studied at several universities, including, beyond Germany, Paris and Pavia, and earned the doctorate in both laws. He felt called to the religious life and became a Carthusian novice but had to return to the world because of ill health. His attachment to the Carthusians is revealed in his patronage. Schmidt looks closely at the famous Thomas Altar and the Altar of the Cross that Rinck commissioned (photographs are included). Other family members graced the parish church nearest their homes with their gifts.

Hermann Rinck II is known to have been acquainted with humanist clerics Ortwin Gratius, Hermann Busch, and Johann Cochlaeus, among others. Yet however much the Rincks may have participated in humanism in Cologne, they donated to the churches works of old-fashioned belief in the pious expectation that these would help effect their salvation. They and their families are depicted in formulaic ranks. Simultaneously, in the service of their reputation they self-consciously competed with other patricians in securing art of enduring significance. Both of these motives are rooted in late medieval piety and civic culture. The Renaissance side of these men is not revealed in this work, except perhaps incidentally, in the Latin epitaph that honored the memory of Adolf Rinck in 1541, in the growing preference for portraits, and in the shifting styles of dress. How much Renaissance artistic elements were owing to the patrons' tastes and how much to artists' inclinations (including those of Albrecht Durer and Adam Kraft) is left ultimately to the reader.

Andreas Emmerling-Skala's vast Bacchus in der Renaissance is another paradigmatic German work both for the discipline from which it comes, classical philology, and for its definitive familiarity with the sources. Newt Gingrich - and, in his day, William Proxmire - might regard this study as a cautionary example, for it was published with a subsidy from the land of Baden-Wurttemberg. It fits into a scholarly subgenre reaching back at least to the 1930s that traces the post-antique fate of various classical gods and heroes.

Early Christians found the fertility god Dionysos/Liber/Bacchus, the offspring of Zeus and Semele, unappealing, even dangerous, with his orgiastic aspect; the cult of this deity promoted sexual license, drunkenness, and frenzy - that is, the abandonment of moral restraint. But in the Renaissance these negative features faded, and Bacchus evolved into a god of nature and good times, a symbol of the hedonistic way of life pursued by the aristocracy. He was no longer the condemnable medieval personification of excess. In tracing these developments, the author consults, besides the pictorial arts (Mantegna, Michelangelo, Veronese), parts of treatises (Boccaccio, Joannes Goropius Becanus), poetry (Ariosto, Lorenzo de' Medici, Marcus Antonius Flaminius), and fifteenth-century lexicons, often compiled for schoolboys. The images were never unanimous, of course, and included the myth that Bacchus had conquered India before Alexander the Great, as well as the more common one that he had invented the art of winemaking. Emmerling-Skala studies in detail the introduction of Greek texts into Italy, especially that of Diodorus Siculus's Bibliotheca historica. But he ranges around Europe for his material and amasses far more of it, and a far more differentiated range of opinion, than I can indicate here.

The second volume is in large part an encyclopedia of the men who wrote about Bacchus between antiquity and the sixteenth century, including where possible brief verbatim citations from their works and a listing of secondary literature. Next comes a longer bibliography of modern works, and, finally, 103 photographs.

Heinrich Plett's Renaissance-Poetik, Renaissance Poetics is made up of nineteen essays in German, French, or English by authors of several nationalities. All deal with poetics, the rules governing poetic composition, which rose to prominence as part of the Renaissance. According to Plett, in the Middle Ages poetry fell in the category of grammar or of rhetoric and was more tolerated than admired, but it garnered a position of respect within the studia humanitatis. The treatises of Horace and Aristotle were revived, and the sub-genres of poetry began to multiply. August Buck (23-26) asserts the primacy of Italy in these changes, noting the subsequent authority of the prescriptive writings of men like Bartolomeo Ricci, Bartolommeo [sic] della Fonte, and Marco Girolamo Vida. Rainer Stillers (37-52) says that the Counter-Reformation Church contrasted truth with poetic falsehood. But poetic theorists insisted that poetry was able to present allegorical or "veiled" (verhullt) truth.

Thomas Leinkauf looks at the philological history of "the beautiful" (53-74). He distinguishes between two Renaissance approaches, the philosophical (Cusa, Ficino, Pico, Giorgi, Bruno and others) and the artistic-theoretical (Alberti, da Vinci, Durer, Dolce, Lomazzo, Zuccari). Karl Kohut (75-93) disputes the view that Spanish humanism did not cultivate poetry and finds four strains of poetological reflection in the fifteenth century that matured in the sixteenth century. "One can say, in fact, that Nebrija's Grammar founded the national poetic tradition" (80). Bernhard Asmuth (94113) identifies five epochs of German poetry; the one associated with humanism reached from Celtis to Martin Opitz. Wolfgang Muller (133-46) sees two concepts of style in poetry, one that is built around rhetorical standards and the other deliberately reflecting the unique characteristics of the author.

Heinrich Plett (147-76) insists that poetic texts must include intertextuality, that which is conveyed by means of non-verbal and non-poetic configurations of signs. With reference to England, he means as much dramatized as written forms of poetry, such as the madrigal, masque, and opera. In practice there is much mixing of types, a theme taken up again by Barbara Bauer (197-238). Bauer notes that the Jesuits did not comply with ancient theories but actively mixed forms such as tragedy and comedy according to their edificatory purposes. They added scenery, ballet, choir and instrumental music to enhance their message. Bauer finds that a theoretical corpus developed in support of mixed media, with Martin Delrio (1551-1608) a key figure - a man who was also, she recalls, the most important Jesuit theoretician of the witch persecutions. Several other articles here are on very narrow topics.

Two other volumes exemplify the vogue that early modern studies enjoy in German-speaking lands today. But "early modern studies" often does not refer to the Renaissance as such. Hours in a Library, Mitteilungen is a hodgepodge of unrelated essays whose subjects sweep from the logical structure of Nicholas of Cusa's mysticism (Christian Mann, 144-70) to Giambattista Vico (Michael Gans, 119-43), and geographically from the Colosseum (Wolfgang Liebenwein, 7-22) to the wilderness of colonial New England (Martin Christadler, 185-204). The purpose of the volume, according to a one-page anonymous foreword, is to put the University of Frankfurt's Center for the Research of the Early Modern Period on the map. This is a center that could be of great future interest to Renaissance Quarterly readers. On 21 January 1994, Die Zeit misleadingly heralded its arrival as a "Renaissance institute" and included a photo of the lovely villa in which it is housed. But the center's truer nature stood revealed in the list of opening speakers: Niklas Luhmann, Carlo Ginzburg, Francis Haskell, Keith Thomas, Stephen Greenblatt, Natalie Zemon Davis, Moshe Barasch, and Reinhard Koselleck. Its own leaflet proclaimed its desire "to combine several critical stances and methodologies, from Critical Theory to Cultural Materialism, Feminism, and forms of historical criticism such as the nouvelle histoire, New Historicism, and the history of science" and added, "The Center is looking for an active exchange with leading scholars in the field of Renaissance Studies.'" Obviously German scholars themselves are going to have to forge their own new definition of Renaissance, but this announcement foretells a departure from the conservative approaches of the past.

Hours in a Library is probably the pilot project in a distinguished future series of publications on the early modern period, but as such it shows the signs of its initial inexperience. The varying quality of the contributions and their lack of stylistic similarity add to the reader's perplexity. Michael Stolleis's four-and-a-half-page rumination about social discipline (113 - 18) is practically unannotated, whereas Lieselotte Saurma-Jeltsch's long study (70-111) of artistic changes in illuminated manuscripts just prior to the advent of printing contains footnotes and numerous illustrations. The little volume intends to be interdisciplinary but is actually multi-disciplinary: the contributors' fields are art history, literature, sociology, economic history, legal history, philosophy, American studies, and English, and in general the authors do not traverse each other's frontiers.

These articles may hold special appeal for Renaissance buffs: Liebenwein's "Quamdiu stat Colisaeus . . . Das Kolosseum als Bild der Welt" (7-22); Gerhard Dilcher's "Mittelalterliche Stadtkommune, Rechtsgesellschaft und Individualisierungsprozess" (17184); and Rudolf Stichweh's "Fremde im Europa der Fruhen Neuzeit" (205-21). Liebenwein traces the idea of the colosseum - initially of the actual Colosseum in Rome and the uses to which it was put, then of Antonio Averlino's (called Filarete) colosseum of the mind: a house of virtue, with baths and bordellos in the basement and astrology on the top floor. Pieter Brueghel may have thought of the Colosseum as he painted his Tower of Babel, and Giulio Camillo may have envisioned it as his theater of memory. Without mentioning Burckhardt, Dilcher seeks the origin of the individual. He finds it in Germany as well as in Italy, beginning in the twelfth century with the founding of burgher communes as corporations of individual men, and women too; the spread of Roman civil law had a reinforcing effect upon human separateness. Following Max Weber, the author states that Christianity, which stressed personal salvation, came together with city and law to create the fertile environment for this supposedly Renaissance phenomenon. Stichweh tries to build a model that differentiates among the stranger (Jews, for example), the peripheral person (beggars), and the vagabond (Gypsies) in early modern Europe. But numerous intersecting variations will occur to the social historian recently in the archives.

Like the previous title, Privatisierung der Triebe? Sexualitat in der Fruhen Neuzeit is the first volume to emerge from a new center, the Institute for Research on the Early Modern Period, located in Vienna. The three editors are co-founders of the center, a private enterprise. These Austrians (all historians) detect a difference between the concepts of Renaissance and early modern Europe; their goal is to promote interdisciplinary research on the epoch between 1400 and 1800. This book has a unified theme, sexuality. The fourteen essays are the results of a conference held in 1991. I shall confine my attention to the several that deal with the Renaissance - writ as large as possible.

Karl Vocelka (31-45) agrees with Norbert Elias that noble courts - here the Habsburg imperial court - did attempt to civilize their subjects in part through regulating their sexual behavior. To this end they employed religion and the Church. Joseph Patrouch (151-65) concurs, though in the context of nobles' administration of justice. This pattern is already well known to Reformation scholars. Malcolm Jones, in a long, illustrated, English-language contribution (187-304), expresses confidence that representations of the human sex organs continue to play "their immemorial, apotropaic role" (187). Art includes literature, for he ranges from Chaucer to Thomas Sanchez and Shakespeare for quips and quotes. Monica Kurzel-Runtscheiner (333-48), whose forthcoming book on the courtesans of Rome will probably supplant Umberto Gnoli's of 1941, asserts that the institution of courtesanship benefitted such a large section (about ten percent) of the Roman populace that this form of prostitution was "a pronounced phenomenon of the masses" (333).

Daniela Hammer-Tugendhat (367-446) writes about the nude in the art of Titian. She begins with the 1976 shift in the interpretation of Titian's paintings: formerly they were seen as filled with esoteric, Neoplatonic intention, but now they are thought essentially to have catered to the erotic tastes - often low-brow tastes - of the customer. Bob Scribner has made a similar observation about Lucas Cranach's nudes. Titian's antique subject matter reflected the Renaissance shift from the courtly garden of love to the Arcadian dreamland. The author finds that during the Renaissance, the sexual differences between men and women increased conceptually, and men came to project their baser drives upon women, those creatures of untamed nature. I myself would prefer to see this as the attempted extension of medieval clerical ideology into all of society in the sixteenth century. The monk's anxiety in the presence of fleshly women now possessed secular men, who decorated their houses with luscious Lucretias and Susannas. These two feminine images were all the more erotically satisfying because of their concern to preserve male honor.

Reinhard Hahn ends this collection with an essay on sexuality in the poems of Hans Sachs (479-501), a topic almost completely neglected until now. Sachs's many poems of excremental-erotic, genital, and antisemitic character have been left out of anthologies and so present a purified image of the poet. Sachs deliberately modified well-known stories of a sexual nature and altered their graphic content to suit the rigid moral environment of post-Reformation Nuremberg. But his audiences understood the references to the unexpurgated originals.

Monica Kurzel-Runtscheiner's Glanzvolles Elend is made up of a brief biography of Duchess Jacobe von Julich-Cleves-Berg (1558-1597) (7-21), a description of her personal wealth, and a transcription of the inventory of 1585, with insertions from that of 1593. This book is at once heartrending and informative. Jacobe was the daughter of Margrave Philibert of Baden-Baden and Mechthild of Bavaria. She was orphaned at eleven and went to live with her uncle Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria in Munich. She was compelled to marry the mentally ill Duke Johann Wilhelm of Julich-Cleves-Berg, but neither her dowry nor an equivalent amount due her from the groom's family (Widerlage) was ever paid. This plus the couple's childlessness left her impoverished and embattled, the object of intrigue. She was groundlessly accused of adultery, imprisoned, denied access to her husband, and finally murdered in her bed. No investigation was carried out, and she was hastily interred. For political reasons she made a careful inventory of her trousseau, and her heirs made another at her demise. By her death, however, the duchess had had to sell valuable items in order to survive. Kurzel-Runtscheiner discovered a third inventory, which contains additional information about many items.

In the end, scholars will find this author's descriptions the least valuable portion of her book. Kurzel-Runtscheiner does not probe as deeply as she might. She explains the elements of Jacobe's apparel and other accoutrements and stresses the economic importance, especially for women, of these forms of wealth. Social historians might ask the meaning, for instance, of the images of monkeys, death's heads, biers, peasants, and rats on several of her earrings. Here we have some material for a disquisition on the symbolism of noblewomen's earrings. Further use will be made of this fascinating text.

It is ironic that Jacobe spent fifteen years at one of the most brilliant Renaissance courts in Germany, yet as far as her inventory reveals she was culturally unscathed. She owned hardly any books. She possessed a drinking vessel emblazoned with a golden Neptune on a horse, but this may have been a wedding gift from a Renaissance prince, commissioned in the style of the day, without any special attraction for her. Her grandmother gave her a crystal ball containing the figure of Orpheus surrounded by animals, but we have no evidence that she valued it as a thing of beauty. It is hard to think of Jacobe as having had a Renaissance of any sort.

It is evident in several of these works that in German-speaking lands the Renaissance is no longer sealed off from the ideas and methods that have altered old subject matter and produced new objects of investigation. And it is heartening that public as well as private funding agencies continue to lend their support to research and publication in the arts and humanities. In this respect, we Americans can cast an envious glance across the Atlantic.

PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY

1 Many thanks to Dr. Gillian Bepler of the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfen-buttel for sending me this statement.