Art. 6. THE EPISTOLÆ OBSCURORUM VIRORUM. 1. Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum: The Latin Text with an English Rendering, Notes, and an Historical Introduction. By Francis Griffin Stokes. London: Chatto and Windus, 1909.

2. Die Verfasser der Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum (Quellen und Forschungen zur Sprach- und Kulturgeschichte der Germanischen Völker, xciii). By Walther Brecht. Strassburg: Trübner, 1904.

3. Ulrichi Hutteni Eq. Operum Supplementum. Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum cum inlustrantibus adversariisque scriptis. Coll. rec. adnot. Edvardus Böcking. Two vols. Leipzig: Teubner, 1864–9.

WHAT, we wonder, would the writers-both the real and the pretended-of the Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum' have said to the publication of an English version of these famous productions? The sapient monks and theologians who figured as the signatories of the original letters, the unlearned scribes who wrote down Sallust a poet and believed that Suetonius composed Cæsar's 'Commentaries,' since Cæsar himself could not have found time to learn Latin, would hardly have credited such a linguistic achievement, or, like one of them, Petrus de Wormatia, who did not wish, in addition to the Latin Homer, to see the other Homer in Greek of which he had remotely heard, would have preferred not to be troubled with it. The real authors of the 'Epistolæ,' the scholars militant whose ruthless satire raised such a pother over the heads of the anti-Reuchlinists that this charge of light horse virtually, though not actually, closed the battle, could not but have been pleased by such a mark of recognition, especially as the very first edition of the first volume of the Letters had (probably through Richard Croke, then lecturing on Greek at Leipzig) been received with applause in England. But it may be questioned whether they would have thought the compliment as happy as it was well meant. Mr Stokes, an accomplished scholar, has (as his preface shows) insight and sense of humour enough to have made him fully aware of the difficulties of the task which he imposed upon himself. But he was determined to face Vol. 216.-No. 430.

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them on the strength of his belief that, far from 'the humour and satiric force of the Epistolæ' depending 'mainly on the droll vileness of their Latinity'. . . 'the edge of the satire could not wholly be blunted even by the crudest translation.' Even, however, if this were so, the shallowness, the density, and the vindictive insolence which were the real subject of the satire cannot, with out a deplorable loss of effect, be separated from the pedantry, the banality, and the gross rudeness of the form in which they were intentionally clothed.

·

The genius of translation, and not the least of English translation, is protean, and has exercised itself, not without some success, upon the genial extravagance of Rabelais and the subtle irony of Montaigne. But we doubt whether it could in any case succeed in assimilating to the texture of any modern language but the German vernacular of the Obscure Ones the blend' between this and 'culinary' Latin that makes up much of their unconscious fun. In a German version (though we believe such an attempt has been made) the joke would be spoilt in a different way. It may be possible to translate their expletives and their queer asseverations and phrases; but how reproduce in our tongue the laughable effect of the use of unus as an indefinite article ('et dedit ei unum Knipp,' i, 5); or the use of semel in the vague fashion of the German mal (einmal); or the rendering of dass, in whatever way the conjunction is employed, by quod; or the employment of mittere as a quasi-auxiliary like the German lassen or the Anglo-Irish let? The formulas of academical speech, of logical disputation in particular, are more easily transferred, and are, for instance, so introduced, in ridicule of themselves, in the Elizabethan drama. On the other hand, the element of obscenity is almost an integral one in the comic literature of the Renaissance, as it had been in that of the Middle Ages; and in the Epistolæ it asserts itself with the cynical relish of monastic whisperings and the boisterous unconcern of students' talk. Mr Stokes, who professes himself unable to be very angry with his 'saucy simpletons,' is at pains to paraphrase or otherwise water down 'instances' of

*Vel est damnum quod vivo' (i, 26); vel non sum ex legittimo thoro natus' (i, 42); 'valeatis per tot annos quot vixit Matusalem' (ii, 14).

this description, with the result of utterly puzzling the reader who refrains from turning to the original.

Finally, he should have remembered that the Obscure Ones, though in one sense, no doubt, they are innocent of style, yet, in another, have a style of their own. It consisted of a conjunction of what he calls the 'pseudovernacular' Latin of their day with the pedantic usage of the Schools, the facetiously-coloured Latinity of the academical 'quodlibets' and of other comic literature of the age, and the sober but inelegant Latin of the Vulgate. All this is flavoured with an extra dose of bad grammar (ista poetæ) and impossible syntax (' dedi unum carlinum pro '), and soused in the flat pedestrianism of speech common to the vulgar of all times and tongues, especially when they write letters. Mr Stokes renders this peculiar compound in what may be described as the English of our own day, interspersed at random with Elizabethan or other earlier fragments of speech, with a word or two of Latin or German and (as of course was in the circumstances unavoidable) with passages from our English Bible, which by their nobility contrast strangely with their nondescript surroundings. On the other hand, we should be sorry not to acknowledge that these letters are throughout translated with a clear insight into the significance of every part of the text, while some of them are reproduced with much spirit; as, for instance, the well-known exordium which contains a protracted play on the word scribere. Even among the verse translations, which with their macaronic mixture generally fail to convey much notion of the formless Knittelverse of the originals-' what have I to do with feet,' asks Wilhelmus Storch of Deventer (ii, 27); 'I am not a heathen poet but a theological'-the elegy beginning Old Finck is dead' (ii, 54) deserves some praise, albeit 'right Corsic' is a rather dark rendering of 'Corsica vina.'

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Mr Stokes has added to the original text, which precedes in this handsome volume his English version of the 'Epistolæ,' a series of notes 'mainly intended for readers who have made no special study of the period involved,' and taken largely from the extra volumes of what he rightly describes as Böcking's 'monumental edition of

* i, 15. The device is repeated with the catchword 'stimulus' in i, 32,

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est German University to feel the Italian humanis was Erfurt, where stpoets' who jestesed the lump of si teaching may be traced back to the the fifteenth century. Erfurt, whose religious movement ben by Huss had marked as to give rise to the proverbia - Praga,' did not ultimately pass beyon thy with the ideas of the Reformers ading antipathy to Rome and her adherents and, the University, by the last decade c ... and the opening years of the sixteent ad become an avowed home of humanist is growing reputation was established on ...more enduring basis in Erfurt's greate

it may be reckoned from about 1505 to abo dentified with the name of Mutianus Ruf tach, the tranquil Cazen of Gotha, to who tu the case) a body of scholars in the neig iversity, in many instances more active a than himself, looked up as their intellect was in Mutian's circle, there can be no dou conception of the Epistele Obscurorum Viroru rise, though, as will be seen, it was not if that either the first or the second series of ↑ ...as actually indited. Sin, round whom the contention blazed, was cast in an heroic mould; on the other ha was he one of those men of letters (or scier addicted to posing as martyrs to the ca e pretended, of freedom or light or progr Best of all was Heidelberg, where Peter Luder let his ligh * 1436 to 1460, when he quitted his native Palatinate t Erfurt and Leipzig.

But there are crises in literary, as well as
history, the significance of which needs no v
wall, and in which the name of a man a
becomes the fit symbol of a struggle for the
conflict between Reuchlin and the Reuch a
one side, and the Cologne Dominicans, wit
less agent and their unlucky mouthpiece
was thus something more than a controvERYT
on the part and on behalf of a leading scholar a
the man of three-or, as he himself loved
-tongues, against the upholders of wha
ry and dead in the learning and teach
porary Germany. The principle of
enunciated by Reuchlin, was recognised to be
every friend of freedom and of that S VLI
fundation of freedom; and posterity,

of such men as Lessing and Goethe,
interpretation of the struggle and its

the

It was, of course, his Hebrew studies and mra ally his interest in the Cabbalah-the

e

mentaries which from about the last quarI J
tentury AD. began to discuss the doctrinal

Testament-which involved Reuenin a quarrel concerning the books of the Jewe the famous controversy of which the they cannot be said to have materially se, form an enduring literary monument frequently narrated, and is summarisen is duction by Mr Stokes. The monstrous demand 1Johannes Pfefferkorn, a Jewish convert a re Mr Stokes, rather oddly, calls him renegade Jadespegel 1501 that the Jews should be e their books as the chief cause of their pererat been accompanied by further proposals of person and was ultimately extended to a cry for aer on from the Empire, where, it must he remener dey were without legal rights E. in the place, everything turned upon the Jewish Ate obtaining in Agrast 1509, an Imperial mandare interna all the Jews in the Empire to give up to him. presence of the priest and two official laymen, ki

books direret against the Christian faith or 'Fin.

counter to their own law, Pfefferkorn had attemore