Vater und Sohn im 16. Jahrhundert. Der Briefwechsel des Wolfgang Reichart genannt Rychardus mit seinem Sohn Zeno (1520-1543).

Walther Ludwig, ed., Vater und Sohn im 16. Jahrhundert. Der Briefwechsel des Wolfgang Reichart genannt Rychardus mit seinem Sohn Zeno (1520-1543)

Hildesheim: Weidmann, 1999. 446 pp. n.p. ISBN: 3-615-00205-9.

Howard Hotson,Johann Heinrich Alsted (1588-1638): Between Renaissance, Reformation and Universal Reform

Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000. 271 pp. $74. ISBN: 0-19-8208286.

The Latin correspondence between the Ulm doctor Wolfgang Reichart or Rychardus and his son Zeno, edited by the Hamburg Latinist Walther Ludwig, provides fascinating glimpses into the social and mental world of the first half of the sixteenth century. It is a revealing and inexhaustible source for scholars dealing with the history of medicine, education, the universities, the church, and everyday life.

But it is also the very human story of an overpowering and ambitious father who placed high expectations in his son and the moderately talented son who often bitterly disappointed these expectations. Unlike many other humanist correspondences, this one was not meant for publication and hence possesses a greater degree of authenticity. The letters cover the years between 1520, when Rychardus sent his twelve-year-old son away from home for study, to 1543 when Zeno died. For more than twenty years father and son exchanged letters, all written in Latin, while Zeno was studying at various German and Italian universities before settling down as city doctor in the small community of Judenburg in Styria. Along the way he was awarded -- painfully slowly in his father's view -- the Baccalaureus in Tubingen and the Magister Artium in Heidelberg and finally a medical doctor degree from an unspecified Italian university. He died at age thirty-six.

This brief sketch can hardly convey either the richness of the correspondence or the ups and down, the hopes and disappointments, the joys and frustrations of their relationship. The father was a difficult man to please. In the first years of the correspondence, when Zeno was still in his middle teens, he often chided his son for his poor Latin: "If you can't write, don't write at all. I have to throw up whenever I read your letters" (181). At the same time his love for his only son shines through every single letter. He is inordinately proud when Zeno finally receives his Baccalaureus degree and has announced a home visit. Interestingly though, Rychardus does not express his affectation directly but through six Latin poems in which Zeno's pets and his horse are all eagerly awaiting their young master's return. Zeno, however, did not fulfill his father's high expectations. He drank too much, spent too much money, and kept bad company, even contracting syphilis while studying in Vienna. Nor did he share his fa ther's enthusiasm for writing Latin letters -- given his father's merciless criticism of his epistolary attempts, possibly a very understandable attitude. And when he wrote he composed shorter letters, blaming paper shortage, the imminent departure of the messenger, and lack of time. However, his need for money always prompted him to take up the pen again. Once he had received the required sum, he fell silent for a while. This often led to bitter reproaches by his father and several serious rifts. The most dramatic one occurred in May, 1527 when the twenty-year-old Zeno, just recovered from his bout of the morbus gallicus, refused to come home but instead disappeared for a considerable time in the eastern part of the empire. But again, lack of money and the desire for forgiveness caused him to seek a reconciliation with his ever-forgiving father.

From the 600 letters collected by Reichart and contained in the Hamburg manuscript corpus (Sup.ep.4[degrees], 49), Walther Ludwig has selected 235 that represent the correspondence between father and son (ninety-eight written by the father, sixty-one by Zeno, and seventy-six by other correspondents who mention Zeno). To facilitate an understanding of the Latin texts Ludwig has provided what he calls "structured paraphrases" (strukturierte Paraphrasen) in German, arguing that a complete German translation would have been too long while a brief "regest" too short. This reviewer found Ludwig's solution not only practical but also extremely helpful. Poems are translated in full. In his generous annotations, Ludwig explains allusions to literary works, historical events, and persons. An extensive bibliography and index round out this outstanding edition. In his substantive introduction Ludwig discusses the manuscript corpus and its history and sketches the biographies of father and son Reichart up to the time when the correspondence sets in. The correspondence itself is divided into sixteen sections according to the places where Zeno stayed at the time; each section begins with a short biographical summary.

Walther Ludwig has made available to scholars of various disciplines a unique documentation of a very dense correspondence. We are all indebted to him.

With Howard Hotson's book on Johann Heinrich Alsted we move from the quotidian concerns of a sixteenth-century German student to the lofty heights of a professor of philosophy and theology. Alsted (1588-1638) was a Calvinist polyhistor, encyclopedist, philosopher, and theologian who spent most of his life at the academy of Herborn, in the small county of Nassau-Dillenburg, "in the half-century after its foundation in 1584 one of the most innovative and influential Calvinist academies in Europe" (6), first as a student and later as a respected professor of philosophy and theology. In 1629 he moved to Weissenburg (Hungarian: Gyulaferhervar) in Transylvania where he died in 1638.

Hotson's aim is to write an intellectual biography of Alsted -- an enormous challenge for two reasons. First, with over seventy voluminous Latin books to his credit, Alsted was one of the most prolific writers of the seventeenth century. His Encyclopedia (published in 1630) alone consists of 5,000 columns. Secondly, Alsted liberally borrowed from a dizzying variety of sources so that his biographer calls him the "the arch-eclectic" (228) whose "wildly burgeoning eclecticism" (37) occasionally led to a "bizarre melee of miscellaneous and even mutually contradictory material" (37). He freely lifted from and was influenced by, among other intellectual movements and persons, Ramism, Aristotelianism, Lullism, the Rosicrucians, and Giordano Bruno; in addition he toyed with occultism, alchemy and astrology, and the Jewish Kabbala.

With enormous erudition and the perseverance of a detective, Hotson dissects the various intellectual strands that make up the fabric of Alsted's oeuvre, identifying authors and tracing the often curious ways in which ideas found entrance into Alsted's work. Given this "wildly syncretic mixture" of ideas (11), Hotson comes to a somewhat resigned conclusion: "To seek to define the centre of Alsted's thought more precisely.., is neither fruitful nor necessary, for his significance resides not in the dominance within his thought of one strand but in the inclusion within it of all these different, even mutually contradictory tendencies" (228). However, in all of Alsted's works Hotson sees a basic tension between his Calvinist theology and his humanist anthropology. As a Calvinist theologian he saw man as a depraved being whose salvation was an unmerited gift of God. As a humanist, on the other hand, Aisted believed in man's perfectibility. At the core of his massive Encyclopedia lies therefore the optimistic vie w that the individual can be restored to his original, pre-lapsarian, state, and be formed in the image of divine perfection.

This brief review cannot possibly do justice to the subtlety and comprehensiveness of Hotson's study. Alsted was a writer of prodigious productivity and learning. So is his modern biographer; for the present book, with its over 1,000 footnotes, will shortly be followed by two more studies: Between Ramus and Comenius: Encyclopedic Learning and Further Reform in Central Europe and Paradise Postponed: Johann Heinrich Alsted and the Birth of Calvinist Millenarianism, Those interested in Alsted and European Calvinism will be looking forward to these works.