§ 68. HUMANISM IN GERMANY. 623
The chief schools, conducted by the Brothers of the Common Life, were located at ZwoUe, Deventer, Herzogenbusch and Liege. All the leading towns had schools. ^ The attendance at Deventer ran as high as 2,20Cn MeTanchthon attended the Latin school at Pforzheim, now in Baden. Here Reuchlin found his young grand-nephew and gave him a Greek grammar, promising him a Vocabulary, provided Melanchthon would have ready some verses in Latin on his return. It is needless to say that the boy was ready and received the book. The town of Schlettstadt in Alsace was noted as a classical centre. Here Platter found Sapidus teaching, and he regarded it as the best school he had found. In 1494, there were five pedagogues in Wesel, teaching reading, writing, arithmetic and singing. One Christmas the clergy of the place entertained the pupils, giving them each cloth for a new coat and a piece of money. 2 The^nmary^r^trivial schoolsj^as they were called froni teaching the trivium^ — grammar, rhetoric and dialectic, — gradually extended their coursesjand, belora the Refownation, such schools as Liege and Schlettstadt had-^ghJLclassea,^ Greek was begun with the 4th class.
Among the noted schoolmasters was Alexandej^JIegius, who taught at Deventer for nearly a quarter of a century, till his death in 1498. At the age of 40 he was not ashamed to sit at the feet of Agricola. He made the classics central in education and banished the old text-books. Trebonius, who taught Luther at Eisenach, belonged to a class of worthy men. The penitential books of the day called upon parents to be diligent in keeping their children off the streets and sending them to school.* It remained for Luther to issue a stirring appeal to the magistrates of the Saxon towns to establish schools for both girls and boys and he called for a curriculum, which
1 Bezold, p. 204. 2 Janssen, I. 27. » Schmid, II. 112.
* It seems to have been the custom to apply the rod without mercy. Luther speaks of the number of floggings he got a day. No case is more famous than that of Hans Butzbach. As a little fellow he was accustomed to play truant. When the teacher, an Erfurt B. A., found it out, he took off the child's clothes and, binding him to a post, flogged him till the blood covered his body. His mother, hearing the cries, hurried to the school, and bursting the door open and seeing her child, fell fainting to the floor. Schmid, II. 126.
624 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1294-1517.
included not only history and Latin but vocal and instrumental music.
The chief^Humanists of Germany were Rudolph Agricola, Reuchlin and Erasmus. To the last two a separate treatment is given as the pathfinders of biblical learning, the venerahiles inceptores of modern biblical research.
Agricola, whose original name was Roelef Huisman, was bornjiearjGroningen, 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 th^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, d. at Gotha 1526, 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,
1 Bezold, p. 228.