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Nicodemus Frischlin's Julius Redivivus and Its Reflections on the Past

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2019

Samuel M. Wheelis
Samuel M. Wheelis*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Extract

Henri Hauser has stated clearly the central historical contribution of the sixteenth century. Stressing that the century saw many new developments as an age of discovery and invention, he goes on to write: ‘D'autre part la révolution intellectuelle du XVIe siècle est, au moins dans son aspect extérieur, un retour à l'antiquité. Retour à la nature, sans doute, mais telle que l'ont vue at interprétée les anciens. Le xvie siecle nous apparaît d'abord comme tourne moins vers l'avenir que vers le passé, vers deux passés qui lui semblent également vénérables, l'antiquité paienne et l'antiquité judéochretienne, l'lliade et l'Évangile. Renaissance et Réforme sont au debut deux mouvements parallèles et de même sens, l'un pour retrouver sous les gloses la réalité de Thumanisme antique, l'autre pour restituer en sa purete le christianisme primitif. Là où nous serions tentés de voir une revolution il y aurait, en réalité, deux restaurations.’

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in the Renaissance , Volume 20 , 1973 , pp. 106 - 117
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 01

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References

1 La modemitè du XVI’ siècle (Paris, 1940), p. 18.

2 Operum Poeticorum, pars scenica (n.p., ‘Excudebat Bernhardus Iobin’, 1592). All quotes from Julius Redivluus are from this edition. My linear notation corresponds to Julius Redivivus, ed. Walther Jannell (Berlin, 1912).

3 See especially Lewis W. Spitz, The Religious Renaissance of the German Humanists (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), pp. 136 ff.

4 Lewis W. Spitz, ‘Humanism in the Reformation’, Renaissance Studies in Honor of Hans Baron, ed. Anthony Molho and John A. Tedeschi (DeKalb, 111., 1971), p. 660.

5 David Friedrich Strauss, Leben und Schriften des Dichters und Philologen Nicodemus Frischlin (Frankfurt a.M., 1856), p. 16. Hereafter cited as Strauss.

6 Strauss, pp. 442-443.

7 See Carl Krause, Helius Eobanus Hessus: Sein Leben und seine Werke (Nieuwkoop, 1963), 2 vols. This useful study is a reprint of the Gotha, 1879, edition. Further, see Frank L. Borchardt, German Antiquity in Renaissance Myth (Baltimore, 1971) for a recent treatment of a theme relevant to this paper.

8 Hans Baron, ‘The Querelle of the Ancients and the Moderns as a Problem for Renaissance Scholarship’, Journal of the History of Ideas, xx Qanuary 1959), 3-22.

9 See Lewis W. Spitz, Conrad Celtis, the German Arch-Humanist (Cambridge, Mass., 1957). P- 95-

10 Strauss, p. 141.

11 It should be noted that Frischlin was the subject of great controversy concerning his social views. Strauss (pp. 168-223) tells the story of his extremely damaging conflict with the lesser nobility due to the unauthorized (and spuriously translated) publication of a certain Oratio de Vita Rustica which Frischlin had originally, and perhaps innocently, intended as an introduction to a commentary on Virgil's Georgics and Bucolics.

12 Quoted in Strauss, p. 142.

13 Werke (Weimar, 1914), L, 384. Or, see Luther's Works, American ed., XXXIV (Philadelphia, 1960), 275-278 (translated and with an introduction by L. W. Spitz).

14 Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalier (Bern, 1967), pp. 470-471; trans. Willard R. Trask (New York, 1953), pp. 476-477.

15 With his evocation of the memento mori theme, Frischlin both foreshadows its popularity in the seventeenth century and reflects the medieval tradition. But most later poets were to combine two themes seldom connected earlier. The corollary of memento mori becomes carpe diem. So, too, with Frischlin; for he last presents Eobanus, Caesar, and Cicero heading in the direction of the local Rathskeller, while Hermannus fumes alone about the state of Germany, afflicted as it is by decadent foreign influences.

16 See Pro Archia, xi: ‘Nullam enim virtus aliam mercedem laborum periculorumque desiderat praeter hanc laudis et gloriae; qua quidem detracta, judices, quid est, quod in hoc tarn exiguo vitae curriculo et tarn brevi tantis nos in laboribus exerceamus? 'Certe, si nihil animus praesentiret in posterum, et si, quibus regionibus vitae spatium circumscriptum est, eisdem omnes cogitationes terminaret suas, nee tantis se laboribus frangeret neque tot cutis vigiliisque angeretur nee totiens de ipsa vita dimicaret. Nunc insidet quaedam in optimo quoque virtus, quae noctes ac dies animum gloriae stimulis concitat atque admonet non cum vitae tempore esse dimittendam commenmorationem nominis nostri, sed cum ornni posteritate adaequandam.’;

17 Frischlin knew his Cicero quite well. It should also be noted that lines from Caesar's writings show up in his speeches in the play as well. That Frischlin knew Cicero's defense of the forgotten Greek poet, Archias, and that he worked parts of Cicero's argument into Julius Redivivus is evident when one compares the texts:

Julius Redivivus (11.1424-1425): ‘Tarn, si maiorum fructum gloriae putas ex versibus/ Graecis, quam Romanis te percepturum, etiam Graecos dabo.’ Pro Archia, x: ‘Nam si quis minorem gloriae fructum putat ex Graecis versibus percipi quam ex Latinis, vehementer errat … ’.

18 See Strauss, pp. 516-517.