Writing Biography is Always a Challenge. Facts have to be assembled, judgments balanced. When the subject is still alive it may be relatively easy to gather facts, but forming a valid judgment may be a difficult and delicate task. With historical persons the problems are almost invariably even greater. The facts are harder to ascertain, and judgments may be clouded by the accretions of history or legend. For some figures of the past, sources flow freely: the lives of Erasmus of Rotterdam, Martin Luther, or Philipp Melanchthon, for instance, can all be fairly well traced through their publications and voluminous correspondence. But for lesser personages of five centuries ago such materials are seldom abundant. Such is the case with the translators to be considered here, three contemporaries for whom — notwithstanding their historical importance for German studies — our only sources of biographical information are the relatively slender corpus of their works, scattered records of their studies and professional lives, fragmentary correspondence with contemporaries, and tenuous inferences about their awareness of and influence on one another. At best we can gain but tantalizing glimpses of late medieval lives. For the historian that is both the challenge and the reward.

At first it may seem improbable that these three men, exact contemporaries yet so different by profession, should have much in common: Heinrich Steinhöwel was a physician, Albrecht von Eyb a churchman and lawyer, Niklas von Wyle a municipal official and chancery scribe. Yet, taken together, they made a remarkable contribution to fifteenth-century German literature, introducing some of the best in Italian humanist writing to Germany and, by initiating debate about methods of translation and about German literary style, laying the foundations for one of the most important achievements of the early sixteenth century, Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible into German.

Heinrich Steinhöwel

Steinhöwel was born at Weil der Stadt in 1411 or 1412 — slightly before Eyb and Wyle — probably the son of the Esslingen patrician of the same name who had settled in Weil in 1407. In April 1429, aged about eighteen, he enrolled as “Henricus Stainhäwl de Wyla” at the University of Vienna, received his bachelor’s degree there in 1432, his M.A. in 1436, and taught at the university until March 1438.