Primary Contributors:

Amy Nelson Burnett, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

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Beatus Rhenanus (1485–1547)

Beatus Rhenanus (Batt Bild) was born in Sélestat (Schlettstadt) in Alsace on 22 August 1485. His father, the butcher Anton Bild, was called Rhinawer after the city of his birth, and from this Beatus adopted the Latin name Rhenanus. He attended the renowned Latin school in Sélestat, where he first met Bruno and Basilius Amerbach, sons of the Basel printer Johann Amerbach. In 1503 Rhenanus joined the Amerbach brothers in Paris, where he studied with Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples. He also learned Greek and aided Lefèvre in editing several classical and patristic texts.

After receiving his M.A. in 1507, Rhenanus returned to Alsace and began working with the Strasbourg printer Mathias Schürer to produce classical and contemporary humanist texts. In 1511 he moved to Basel to study Greek with the Dominican scholar Johannes Cuno, who was assisting Amerbach in preparing an edition of St Jerome’s works. Rhenanus became an integral member of the editorial team working for Amerbach and his successor Johann Froben. Froben’s unauthorized reprint of Erasmus’s Adagia in 1513 attracted the attention of the renowned humanist. In August 1514, Erasmus arrived in Basel and, in the following twenty months, he oversaw the publication of some of his most influential works, particularly his edition of the Greek New Testament with Latin translation and annotations. Rhenanus was an active member of the humanist sodality that gathered around Erasmus at Froben’s printing house and that remained active even after Erasmus returned to the Low Countries in May 1516. Over the next five years Rhenanus was Erasmus’s main correspondent in Basel, and he oversaw publication of the first major collection of Erasmus’s letters. The two scholars continued to work together after Erasmus returned to Basel at the end of 1521. Rhenanus also promoted the reprinting in Basel of several of Luther’s early works, but, from 1523, disturbed by the political unrest that led to the Peasants’ War, he distanced himself from the evangelical movement. Even during his years in Basel, Rhenanus would return to Sélestat for several months at a time, and in 1526 he settled there permanently. He continued to work with Froben and his heirs, publishing both his own works and editions of classical and patristic authors. He died in Strasbourg on 20 July, 1547, while travelling home from Wildbad.

Rhenanus played a central role at the Froben press, contributing to the production of well over a hundred works. In addition to his involvement in the Opera of St Jerome, he edited a series of patristic texts, including those of Gregory of Nyssa, Prudentius, Tertullian, Origen, and the church historian Eusebius. He was particularly interested in history, and he not only edited the works of the Roman historians Velleius Paterculus, Tacitus, and Livy but also published his own Rerum Germanicarum libri tres in 1541. He collaborated with Bonifacius Amerbach and Hieronymus Froben on Erasmus’s Opera Omnia, and he wrote the biography of Erasmus that prefaced this edition. His correspondents included the most prominent humanists of the Upper Rhine, the imperial cities of southern Germany, and Switzerland. On his death he left his library, consisting of over 1,300 books and manuscripts, to the city of Sélestat, where it forms the core of the present-day Bibliothèque Humaniste.

Partners and Additional Contributors

Preparation of these metadata was supported by a UCARE grant from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Key Bibliographic Source(s)

Hartmann, Alfred, and Beat Rudolf Jenny, eds, Die Amerbachkorrespondenz (Basel: Universitätsbibliothek, 1942–2010).

Horawitz, Adalbert, and Karl Hartfelder, eds, Briefwechsel des Beatus Rhenanus (Leipzig: Teubner, 1886; repr. Hildesheim: Olms, 1966).

Hirstein, James S., et al., eds, Epistulae Beati Rhenani: la correspondance latine et grecque de Beatus Rhenanjs de Sélestat: edition critique raisoné, avec traduction et commentaire (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013–).

Walter, Robert, ed., Beatus Rhenanus: citoyen de Sélestat, ami d’Erasme (1485–1547): anthologie de sa correspondance (Strasbourg: Oberlin, 1986).

Contents

The edition of Rhenanus’s correspondence published in the nineteenth century contained 448 letters with minimal annotation and without summaries. Although the edition is largely complete, the editors missed a few published letters, as well as some correspondence now included in the critical edition of the correspondence of the Amerbach family. A selection of Rhenanus’s correspondence, with French translation, was published in 1986. A modern critical edition of Rhenanus’s correspondence is currently being produced by a team led by James S. Hirstein; only the first volume (letters dating to the end of 1517) has appeared to date.

Provenance

This list of 488 letters is based the two editions of Rhenanus’s correspondence published by Horawitz and Hartfelder in the nineteenth century and by Hirstein, et al., in 2013. The letters were written between 1506 and 1546, but almost one-third of them date from between 1518 and 1521. Rhenanus’s two most frequent correspondents were Bonifacius Amerbach, the youngest son of the printer Johann Amerbach, who became professor of law in Basel, and the Ravensburg humanist Michael Hummelberg, a friend from student days in Paris who died in 1527. During the early years of the Reformation, Rhenanus also corresponded with both Martin Bucer and Ulrich Zwingli. Most of the extant letters sent to Rhenanus are preserved in the Bibliothèque Humaniste de Sélestat. Of the 171 surviving letters written or co-written by Rhenanus, 67 were published as prefaces, dedications, forewords, or other paratextual material in the sixteenth century. The letters are written in Latin, but in many of them Rhenanus also included Greek words or phrases.

Scope of Catalogue

Many of the letters to Rhenanus were written in response to (now lost) letters of Rhenanus. Jean Rott listed the lost letters exchanged between Rhenanus and Bucer in the first volume of the Correspondance de Martin Bucer (Leiden: Brill, 1979), and so those letters are included in this list, but other lost letters are not.

Further resources

Bibliography

D’Amico, John F., ‘Beatus Rhenanus, Tertullian and the Reformation: A Humanist’s Critique of Scholasticism’. Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 71 (1980), pp. 37–62.

D’Amico, John F., Roman and German Humanism 1450–1550: Collected Studies, ed. Paul F. Grendler (Aldershot: Variorum, 1993).

D’Amico, John F., Theory and Practice in Renaissance Textual Criticism: Beatus Rhenanus between Conjecture and History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

Fraenkel, Pierre, ‘Beatus Rhenanus, Oecolampade, Théodore de Bèze et quelque-unes de leurs sources anciennes’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 41 (1979), pp. 63–82.

Hieronymus, Frank, ‘Beatus Rhenanus und das Buch. Biblio-biographische Flickstücke’, Annuaire de la Société des amis de la Bibliothèque Humaniste de Sélestat, 36 (1986), pp. 63–114.

Hirstein, James S., ed., Beatus Rhenanus (1485–1547), lecteur et éditeur des textes anciens. Actes du Colloque international tenu à Strasbourg et à Sélestat du 13 au 15 novembre 1998 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000).

Hirstein, James S., ed., Beatus Rhenanus (1485–1547) et une reforme de l’eglise: engagement et changement. Actes du colloque international tenu à Strasbourg et à Sélestat du 5 au 6 juin 2015, vol. 4: Studia humanitatis Rhenana (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018).

Hirstein, James S., ‘Corrections autographes de Martin Luther. Le Tractatus de libertate Christiana d’après les éditions de 1520 et de 1521: des suggestions d’émendation’, Revue d’Histoire et de Philosophie Religieuses, 95 (2015), pp. 129–63.

Hirstein, James S., ‘La bibliothèque de Beatus Rhenanus: une vue d’ensemble des livres imprimés’, in Rudolf De Smet., ed., Les humanistes et leur bibliothèque/Humanists and their Libraries: Actes du Colloque international Bruxelles, 26–28 août 1999 (Louvain, 2002), pp. 113–42.

Hirstein, James S., ‘Tacitus’ Germania and Beatus Rhenanus (1485–1587): A Study of Editorial and Exegetical Contribution of a Sixteenth Century Scholar’, Studien zur klassischen Philologie, 91 (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 1995).

Muhlack, Ulrich, ‘Beatus Rhenanus, Jakob Wimpfeling und die humanistische Geschichtsschreibung in Deutschland’, Annuaire des amis de la Bibliothèque humaniste de Sélestat, 35 (1985), pp. 193–208.

Rott, Jean, ‘Beatus Rhenanus et Martin Bucer: l’humaniste chrétien et le réformateur’, Annuaire de la Société des amis de la Bibliothèque Humaniste de Sélestat, 35 (1985), pp. 62–72.

Scarpatetti, Beat von, ‘Beatus Rhenanus’, in ed. Peter G. Bietenholz and Thomas B. Deutscher, Contemporaries of Erasmus: A Biographical Register of the Renaissance and Reformation, vol. 1: A–E (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985–1987), pp. 104–09.

Sebastiani, Valentina, Johann Froben, Printer of Basel: A Biographical Profile and Catalogue of his Editions, Library of the written word: The handpress world, 50 (Leiden: Brill, 2018).

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