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The World o f the Polyhistors:

Humanism and Encyclopedism

A N T H O N Y G R A F T O N

IN 1713 and 1715 Johann Burkhard M encke subjected the scholars o f

the H oly Rom an Em pire to a searching examination. Th ey failed

it. His tw o speeches “ O n the Charlatanry o f the Learned”— best

sellers whe reve r they w ere n ot banned— ridiculed the minds and the

mores o f the polyhistors w ith equal zest. Me nck e anatomized their love

for overblown titles:

Tod ay . . . you see many demanding to be called Clarissimus who are abso-

lutely un known outside the walls o f their city; Magnificus, who have scarcely

any dign ity at home; Consullissimus, w ho have little or no advice to give: and

Excellentissimus, w ho do not know as much about anything worth know ing

as the veriest tyro.1

H e savaged the equally fatuous titles that they assigned to their books—

for exam ple, “ Public Law ; that is, a Medical Treatise on Headache.” H e

demolished their ridiculous efforts to capture all knowledge in single

encyclopedias or treatises— “ Golden Keys, Roy al M eth od s, . . . Oceanic

M acroM icroCo sm icos, . . . and other such grandiose w ork s that are

p u t ou t to ensnare buy ers.” 2 H e heaped special scorn on their be lie f thattheir scholarship could recov er an ancient, perfect philosophy , en coded

b y d ie wis e priests o f ancient E g y p t in th eir m ys terious hie rogly phs:

Some mischievous youths o f Rom e, hearing that a building was to be erected

on a certain site, resolved to put [Athanasius] Kircher’s ingen uity to the test.

So they secretly buried there a rough stone on which they had designed some

appealing voluptuous figures. W he n the foundation o f the new structure was

being dug, the stone was found . . . A t once an interpreter was sought, and

Kircher was chosen. As soon as he saw the stone, he began to leap and dance

1. J. B . M encke, Th e Charlatanry o f the Learned, tr. F. E. Litz, ed. H. L. Men cken (N ew

Y o rk , 1937), 61 62.

2. Ibid., 6869.

31



for jo y — and to g ive a beautiful interpretation o f the circles, the crosses, and

all the other meaningless signs.3

So much for the efforts at deciphering hieroglyphs that had fascinated

humanists from C yria c o f Ancon a to N icolas Caussin. So m uch for the

b elie f in a prisca theologia that had deluded NeoPlatonists from Ficino

to Fludd.4

A n early philosophe, Mencke found the erudite compilers who had

loaded seventeenthcentury bookshelves to breaking point with their

hug e folios to be figures o f fun rather than types o f learning. A nd m any

contem poraries shared his view s. V ernacular writers join ed him in sati-rizing the pedantry o f the old scholarship— one o f the best was Rabener,

w h o w rote a mockd issertation entirely in footn ote s.5 Educational re-

formers join ed him in attacking the sterility o f the old curriculum— one

o f the most effective was C hristian Thom asius, w h o tried to rcplace

scholastic with m odern philosop hy and Latin w ith G erman in university

teaching.5 Such critics o f the old system seem sympathetic figures even

no w , and they have had at least their fair share o f attention from mo dern

scholars. B ut the objects o f their abuse, the men whose ideals and prac-tices dominated the schools, academies, and universities o f the old E m -

pire from the midsixteenth to the mideighteenth century— these men

have had not o nly little sym pathy but little attention o f any kind. T o

the exploration o f the obscure, forbidd ing territory that was theirs w e

now turn.

It is not surprising that the wo rld o f the polyhistors has attracted few

explorers in recent times. Its inhabitants wrote at fantastic length in

barbarous Latin about tedious and terrifyin g subjects. Caspar Barth ’s Adversaria was one o f their most quoted and bestrespected products. O f

it A . E . H ousman w rote : “ to read 3000 tall columns o f close print b y a

thirdrate scholar is no proper occup ation for m ortals.” 7 W ha t could be

3. Ibid., 8586.

4. For the history o f the former be lief see E. Iversen, The Myth o f Egypt and its Hiero-

glyphs in European Tradition (Copenhagen, 1961); for that o f the latter D . P. Walke r,

The Ancient Theology (London, 1972).

5. Hinkmar von Repkows Noten ohne Text (1745). O n this and similar literature see W . Martens, “ V on Thomasius bis Lichtenberg: Zur Gelehrtensatire der Aufk la nm g,”

Lessing Yearbook 10 (1978): 734.

6. See R. Spaethling, “ O n Christian Thomasius and his Alleged Offspring: The Ger-

man Enlightenment,” ibid. 3 (1971): 194213.

7. M . Manilii Astronomicon liber primus, ed. A. E. Housman, 2d ed. (Cambridge,

1937), xv.

32 The World o f the Polyhistors



Anthony Grafton 33

m ore dismal than 3,000 colum ns to o crabb ed even fo r the chalcenteric

Housm an? Y e t B arth, a great manu script hunter and pioneering student

o f m ediev al Latin, has mo re to offer m od em classicists, at least, than

does Dan iel Geo rg M orh of, w ith w ho m he shared intellectual preemi-

nence in the seventeenthcentury Em pire.8 Tr ue , a fe w hard y souls have

tried to w or k ou t the lay o f this unpromising land. Erich Tr un z sur-

v ey e d th e poly his tors’ w h o le territ ory in one brisk essay fif ty years ago ,

achieving clarity and broad cove rage but losing detail and local color in

the process.9 M or e re cen dy , so m e literary and intellectual historians

have travelled on foot through individual provinces, enriching Trunz’s

sketchy ge ograp hy w ith r ich i f isolated chorographies.10 A nd W ilhe lm

K iihlm an n has distilled an im po sing synthesis fro m these m ono grap hs

and dozens o f prim ary sources.11 B u t all too m any regions lie untrav-

elled and uncultivated. T h e n ew survey that fol low s, thoug h produced

after some long tramps through the respublica litterarum, is offered w ith

many reservations.

T h e general shape o f the map w e need to dra w seems as clear as its

details are elusive. For i f the polyhistors bew ilder a ny m od em scholar

b y th e breadth o f th eir interests, alm ost all o f th eir in te llectu al activitie s

nonetheless fall within a welldefined area, bound ed b y the tw o enter

8. F or the linking o f Barth w ith M or ho f see J. A . Fabricius’s praefatio to D . G . M o r h o f

Polyhistor literarius, phtlosophtcus et practicus, 4th ed. (Lubeck, 1747; reprint Aalen, 1970),

1: ix: “ M ultum semper debere me professus sum, ac profiteor libenter duum viris eruditis

G erm anis nostris C A S P A R I B A R T H I O , & D A N I E L I G E O R G I O M O R H O F I O . . ”

In the absence o f a m ode m appreciation o f Barth’s w ork , one m ay consult Fabricius’s

(ibid.); he makes clear that Barth’s example o f comm and o f “ilium orbem scicntiarum”

inspired him to b ecom e the greatest bibliographer o f his (or any other) era.

9. E. Trunz, “Der deutsche Spathumanismus um 1600 als Standeskultur,” in Deutsche

Barockforschung, ed. R. Alewyn, 3d ed. (Cologne and Berlin, 1968), 14781 (originally

published in 1932); o f m ore recent gen eral essays the most stimulating are perhaps

C . W iedemann, ‘ ‘Polyhistors Gluck und Endc: Vo n D . G . M orh of zum jungen Lessing/*

Festschrift Gottfried Weber (Bad Homburg v.d.H., Berlin, and Zurich, 1967), 21535;

R. J. W . Evans, “ Rantzau and Welser: Aspects o f Later German Humanism,” History o f

European Ideas 5 (1984): 25772.

10. Som e particularly useful mono graphs include: T . Bleicher, Homer in der deutschen

Literatur(14501740) (Stuttgart, 1972); N . H a m m c n t c i n , J « 5 ( G o t t i n g e n , 1972);

G. Homi g , D ie Anfdnge der historischkritischen Theologie (Gottingen, 1961); A . Klem pt,

D ie Sdkularisierung der universalhistorischen Auffassung (Gottingen, Berlin, and Frankfurt,i960); G. Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modem State (Cambridge, 1982).

11 . W . Ki ihlmann, Gelehrtenrepublik und Furstenstaat (Tubingen, 1982); the footnotes

and bibliography o f this massive boo k stimulate and inform even wh en it does not

com man d assent; all future wo rk in the field must begin from it. See also the comple-

men tary case study by Kiihlmann and W . Schafer, Friihbarocke Stadtkultur am Oberrhein:

Studien zum literarischen WerdegangJ, M . Moscheroschs (16011669) (Berlin, 1983).



prises mentioned in the title o f this essay. Humanism and en cyclopedism ,

eloquence and erudition— these we re the pursuits that the polyhistorsmade their own.

Hu man ism is not difficult to define. For the intellectuals o f the Em pire

it retained until deep in the eighteenth century the original form that

Erasmus and his contemporaries had give n it. It meant the cluster o f

disciplines that trained a scholar to interpret and produce literary texts

in Latin. A b o ve all, it meant rhetoric— the art o f arts and science o f

sciences, wh ich too k as its lofty goa l the production o f the eloquent and

effective citizen, the vir bonus peritus dicendi, and imposed as its humbletask the mem orization o f hundreds o f examples, aphorisms, and tropes,

the copia rerum ac verborum.12 Latin schools, academies, and universities

throughout Germany forced their inhabitants to speak and argue in

Latin on everything from m etono m y to M ersenne.13 M ore ambitiously,

the y offered the art o f rhetoric, w ith its clearly defined goals and

methods, its fiv e m ajor subdivisions and its three (or four) general types

o f speeches, as the model for any other discipline that aspired to b e a

liberal art. The intellectual who wished to praise painting claimed thatit too c ould “ kindle its audiences to seek glo ry and virtue” ; that it too

had to seek subjects out, arrange them attractively, adorn them appro-

priately, and giv e them life w ith “ m otion and gesture” ; that it too had

to rest on k no w led ge o f the ideas and m aterial realities o f the ancient

w o rld .14 Th e painter, in short, had to be a vir bonus peritus pingendi\ and

other disciplines from theology to sculpture were envisioned in analo-

gous terms.

For the m ost part rhetoric was far mo re a m atter o f practice than o ftheo ry. T he learned m an had to b e ju st as deft in 1700 as his forbears had

been a centu ry and a h a lf before at speaking Latin on public occasions,

w rit in g Latin about offic ial business, com posin g poems in Latin on de-

mand and treatises in Latin o n subjects the ancients had never im agined

— like the compass, the barometer, and the properties o f Iceland spar.

12. For the tradition o f humanist rhetoric see H . H . Gray, “ Renaissance Humanism:

the Pursuit o(Eloquence,** Journal ofthe History o f Ideas 24 (1963); reprinted in Renaissance

Essays, ed. P. O . Kristeller and P. P. W iene r (N ew Y or k and Evanston, 1968), 199216;

for its German form see above all Kuhlmarui, Gelehrtenrepublik, pt. I.

13. F .J. Stopp, The Emblems o fthe AltdorfAcademy (London, 1974) provides interesting

samples and analyses o f schoolboy oratory.

14. G. J. Vossius, D e quatuor artibus popularibus (Amsterdam, 1660), 67, 7174. Cf.

A . Ellenius, D e arte pingettdi (Uppsala, i960).

34 The World of the Polyhistors



Such skil ls we re n ot easy to a ttain.15 M ure t and de T h ou , the masters to

w h o m th e poly histors lo o k e d back, achie ved th eir elo quence b y dir ectstudy o f the ancients . B ut the you ng Germ an student in search o f a

career in the Gelehrtenstand had too l ittle leisure to dev ote him self to

digesting the classics themselves. H ence the presses we re ke p t busy w ith

the oldfashioned but still useful shortcuts to eloquence that Renais-

sance humanists had devised, and w ith n ew er additions to the stock o f

teaching aids, distinguished less b y hig h ideals or d eep learning than by

their austerely practical character.

O ne typical collection o f rhetoric texts, aimed at the learned you ng o fthe 1650s, begins w ith that shortest o f all shortcuts to loqu acity in

Latin, Erasmus’s D e copia. T h e bo ok is just ly famou s for i ts exuberant

pursuit o f synonym s and metaphors, i ts table o f 150 wa ys to say “ Th ank

y o u fo r th e le tter” in g o o d Latin:

Tuis literis nulla res unquam accidit mihi festivior: nihil unquam vidi tuis

literis lubentius: haud est quicquam, quod gaudentiore acceperim animo,

quam proximas Fausti mei litcras: quo m e credis affluxisse gaudio, cu m tuum

animum tuis in literis agnoscerem? cu m tabellarius tuam mihi traderet epistolam, statim animus mihi laetitia ineffabili prurire co e p it . . .16

I f Erasmus’s mastery o f classical literature and sheer jo y in the accum u-

lation o f w ord s som etimes suffused his d ry instructions w ith a curiously

poetic character, his seventeenthcentury successors had far lower ends

in vie w and applied far low er means to attain them. T h e w or k that

follow s Erasmus in the corpus I describe bears the title “ M arro w o f the

transitions mo st used in orations.” 17 W ritten for the Gym nasium stu-

dents o f Livon ia, it offers no t guidance in independent comp osition bu t

model exordia, transitions, and conclusions, in which the student had

only to fill in the blanks as his occasion dictated:

T ho ug h our ancestors ordained m any splendid things, none o f these was

more splendid, more useful, more prudent, more carefully adapted to pre-

serve scholarship, more efiiciendy designed to promo te the studiousness o f

15. Sec the useful study by M . Benner and E. Te ngstrom, On the Interpretation of

Learned NeoLa tin (Goteborg, 1977), and E. Tengstrom, A Latin Funeral Oration from

Early iSth Century Sweden (Go teborg, 1983), wh ich illuminate die German as w ell as the

Swedish scene.

16. Erasmus, D e utraque verborum ac rerum copia lib. II , I.31 (Amsterdam, 1645), 62.

17 . H. Amingk, Medulla variorum earumque in orationibm usitatissimarum connexionum

(Altcnburgi, 1652).

Anthony Grafton 35



the you ng, more brilliantly appropriate to preserving the authority o f ranks

and orders in society and enlarging the prestige o f letters, than .1S

W h a t could be m ore practica l than this? O r fu rther fr om Erasm us’ s

spirit?

The search for eloquentia occupied a prominent place even in the

interests o f m ature scholars. S eth C alvisius, professor o f music at Leip zig

and a highly proficient chronologer in his own right, corresponded

extensively ab out the latter field w ith the greatest expert in the w orld ,

Joseph S caliger. T h e drafts o f his letters, preserved in Go ttinge n, record

no t me rely some heated arguments about the dating and order o f thekin gs o f ancient Israel, but also a passionate search for the p rop er Latin

adjcctives a nd turns o f phrase. Ea ch pa ragra ph is a little setpiece:

Y o ur Elettchus [o f Christopher Clavius] has also reached m e . . . I read it with

great pleasure, because you lay him out and overw helm him w ith such mani-

fest [lined out: arguments] proofs and such vigorous [later amended to:

severe and vigorous] prose that he seems quite defeated. Therefore, though he

wro te against me, I think I should remain silent now, lest I seem to insult a

dead dog and write an Iliad after Homer.19

C lav iu s’s selfconscious effort to a ccumu late laud atory terms and paral-

lel clauses, his ov eruse o f classical prove rbs, his v er y emphasis on

Scaliger’s virtu osity as a stylist— all these traits o f the m ature scholar

w ere acq uired at the schoolb oy’s desk, and firm ly in ternalized.

Y e t even this appare ntly atavistic obsession w ith go o d Latin had its

uses in the seventeenth century. It meant that Latin rem ained upto date

and accessible— and thus preserved it as a means o f w inn ing advance-

m ent (and, o f course, o f keeping those unfitted b y b irth and position

from winning advancement in their turn). It inspired some polyhistors

to m ake real additions to the expressive possibilities o f Latin (as they d id

w ith those strange com positions, h a lf poem and h a lf inscription, that

w ere th e fash ionab le w a y to w rit e political la m poons in th e 1660s, and

the textbo ok for w hich was w ritten b y a Jena professor o f eloquence in

18. Ibid., 11.

19. Calvisius to J. J. Scaliger, n.d.; Go ttingen, Nicdersachsische Staats und Un iversitatsbibliothek, MS philos. 103, vol. 3, p. 95 (draft); cop y ibid., vol. 2, p. 31 : “ Elenchus

etiam tuus ad me per vc ni t. . . Magna eum cum voluptate legi quod adeo evidentissiinis

(lined through: argumentis] dcmonstrationibus et oratione [lined through: nervosa]

gravi et nervosa eum ita prostemis et obruis ut depositus fere videatur. Ideo quamvis in

me scripsit, quiescendum tamen mihi jam puto, ne mortuo cani videar insultare et post

Homerum Iliada scribere.”




1670).20 A n d it m ade the rulers o f the Kleinstaat far mo re cosmopolitan

than they would have been had they not had immediate access to the

normal language o f European science and learning. W e customarilytake our cue from Descartes and Thomasius and denounce the schools’

obsession with blowing artificial life into a dead language. In doing so

w e fo rget that there was no alternative save French— and that to accept

that w ou ld have m ade Germ any a cultural pro vince o f France instead o f

an independent mem ber state o f w ha t Germans a lways insisted on seeing

as a Europew ide, Latinspeaking Repu blic o f Letters. T o that extent

the pursuit o f eloquence was still a coherent and plausible as we ll as a

pragmatic and useful enterprise.Encyclopedism is harder than humanism to define. It refers not only

to the specific effort to organize knowledge in systematic compendia

but also to the m ore general intellectual aspirations o f the polyhistors—

aspirations so sweeping as to bo gg le the m ode m m ind.21 Th e polyh istor

w as a figure very alien to us, w it h our closefitting specialties and our

contented refusal to ha ve anything to do w ith our intellectual neighbors

(except the occasional pleasure o f den ying the value o f their pursuits).

He wanted to cover every base on the intellectual field. His ideal wasembod ied in the great polym aths o f the years around 1600, like Claudius

Salmasius, “ a man fro m w h om one cou ld cut three specialists.” T h e

scholar had to k no w the structure and relations o f all disciplines, the

titles and contents o f all books, the character traits and oddities o f all

significant earlier scholars. G iven the proliferation o f books since 1450

and o f ne w kn ow led ge since the Renaissance the ideal had become

desperately hard to realize by the time that M o rh o f gave it an appro-

priately ambitious name and an appropriately chaotic handbook withhis Polyhistor o f 1697.

T h e polyhistors hit on a v ariety o f expedients for setting in order and

passing on the universal knowledge they needed. They did produce

some genuine encyclopedias— like Alsted’s, w hich ramm ed together

introdu ctory wo rks from a variety o f disciplines, and Z w in ge r’s, which

amassed passages on all subjects from over 500 authors on over 5,000

folio pages.22 T h ey charted the relations o f the disciplines to one a n

20. J. Sparrow, Visible Words (Cambridge, 1969). Kiihlmann provides an exhaustive

treatment o f the modernization o f Latin rhetoric in Gelehrtenrepublik, pt. I, chap. v.

21. See in general L. E. Loemker, Struggle for Synthesis (Cambridge, Mass., 1972),

chap. 2.

22. W . O ng , “ Comm onplace Rhapsody: Ravisius Texto r, Zw ing er and Shakespeare,”

Classical Influences on European Culture, A .D . 15001700, ed. R. R. Bolgar (Cambridge,

1976), 11118.

Anthony Grafton 37



other, laying these out in tables that always differed from one another

and gen erally revealed no great measure o f internal coherence.23 T he y

tried to for ce the basic content o f individual disciplines and the basic

rules fo r studying a ny subject into concise introducto ry textbooks. A

standard c ollection o f tracts by G. J. Vossius and others covers these

topics (I keep the original o rder): a survey o f the legitimate disciplines,

chronology, history, imitation in oratory and poetry, history again,

public speaking, ancient shorthand, letterwriting, punctuation, the or-

ganization o f libraries, the study o f law , the study o f law again, the

m ethod o f study in all fields, theolo gy, th eolo gy again, H eb rew and

Aram aic , law again, med icine, natural philosophy, music, and ethics—

all in 720 small pages.24 It is m ore orde rly than some o f its com petitors.

Cle arly such compendia neither reflected an y clear idea o f the hier-

archy o f the liberal arts, professions, and philosophies nor offered any

serious grasp o f their content, m ethods, and data. Th e object o f the

exercise was at best the lexical one traditional since Martianus Capella

and Isidore o f Seville: to acquaint the student w ith the names and ter-

m inologies o f disciplines so that he could recogn ize them w hen he en-

countered them in his reading.25 A t w ors t it degenerated into mere

quack ery. T h e ears o f the seventeenthcentury student rang w ith pro m -

ises to teach him “ Latin in eigh t months, Gre ek in tw en ty days, astron-

o m y in eight o r ten days, philosop hy and m usic in a m onth or less.” 26

Bartholomaeus Ernestus promised his readers that his methods would

enable them “ T o teach an art and language in an orderly w ay and learn

it at a m odera tely high level, b y means o f reasonable diligence, in 8 or

14. days” ; that he cou ld train “ city d w eller and peasant to be able to fill

som e 100 sheets with co rrect Latin verses.” 27 Ev en Andreas Gryph ius, a

genuinely learned man as well as a gifted poet, can hardly have been

com petent to deal w ith all the topics encompassed by the “ Co llegiu m

Metaphysicum, G eographicum & Trigonom etricum , Logicum, Physi

ognom icum & Tragicum ” — “ Course on metaphysics, geography, and

trigonom etry, logic, physiognomies, and tragedy” — that he gave at

23. See, e.g., P. R. Sellin, “T he Last o f the Renaissance Monsters. . . in AtigloDutdi

Cross Currents in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Los Angeles, 1976), [i][39].24. G. J. Vossius et al., Dissertationes de studiis bene tnstituendis (Utrecht, 1658).

25. See H. I. Marrou, A History o f Education in Antiquity, tr. G. Lamb (New York,

1956), pt. Ill, chap. 5; A . T . Grafton and L. Jardine, “ Humanism and the School o f

Guarino: A Problem o f Evaluation,” Past & Present, no. 96 (1982): 7073.

26. H. Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure (Minneapolis, 1982), 106.

27. Schurzfleischiana (Wittenberg, 1741), 15.




Leiden— no t to m ention his further lectures on peripatetic and m od em

philosophy, Roman antiquities, and astronomy.28 And even Leibniz,

certain ly n o charlatan, chased all his life an ideal as alluring and unattain-

able as Co m enius’s: the creation o f a survey o f all kn ow ledge , derived

from the best books and encoded in a universal language.29

The polyhistors, though quixotic, were not in all respects divorced

from the reality around them. M uch o f their effort was carefully di-

rected at meeting specifically modem needs. For example, they took

account in ev erything they did o f the revolution in the dissemination o f

kno w ledg e broug ht about by printing. U nlike most earlier encyclope-

dists, they did no t have to try to p reserve all o f learning between tw o

covers, since the printers ensured that every necessary book and many

others existed in thousands o f copies. O n the other hand they did feel an

irresistible pressure to su rve y the literature o f ev ery field as w ell as its

structure, since the ve ry richness o f the available offerings m eant that

readers and students needed gu idance in the choice o f books.

Gabriel Na ude sh ow ed ho w to m eet this need. His sprawling work s

on h ow to organize a library and on the bibliography o f politics pro-

vid ed a rich m ix o f book ch at, bib liophily, and illconsid ered advic e for

the student. Here are his instructions on where to look for competent

help in reading Aristotle’s Politics:

Thomas Aquina s. . . was followed by Nicole Oresme . . . [His] books are

n ow very hard to find and accordingly much esteemed by connoisseurs, since

they were printed 120 years ago at Paris in Lombardic scr ipt. . . the special

commentators Camerarius and Giphanius rarely put a foot w rong ; and more

or less consonant with them are Antonius Scainus . . . and that very eloquent

Jesuit Tarquinius Gallutius, who interpreted the first five books o f the Politics

so learnedly as to be far more o f a polymath than the rest. B ut he w ho

chooses Daniel Heinsius’s paraphrase with the commentaries o f Zw ing er and

Vettori as the basis o f his studies— he, I think, will have done well as regards

both ease o f learning and the utility o f his studies.30

N au de ’s ideal scholar was the late sixteenthcentury humanist and law -

y er Jean B od in , “ w h o vanquished the difficulties o f alm ost all languages

and sciences, built the theatre o f nature on n ew principles, and system

28. B . Siegmund von Stosch, “ Dan ck und DenckScule des Andreae Gryphii (1665),”

Texte + Kritik, 7/8 (n.d.): 6.

29. See the sympathetic account b y L. M . N ewm an, Leibniz (16461716) and the Gentian

Library Scene, Library Assoc. Pamphlet No. 28,1966.

30. G. Naude, “Bibliographia politics,” in H. Grotius et al., Dissertationes de studiis

instituendis (Amsterdam, 1645), 2526.

Anthony Grafton 39



atized the kinds, laws, institutions, secrets, virtues, and vices o f all the

w o rld ’s past and present kin gdom s.” 31 A n d his ideal public was in the

universities o f contem porary Germ any, where Hermann C on ring and

others reprinted his books and expanded on them in lectures.

Such courses in general literature becam e the rule throu gh out Protes-

tant Germ any . T h e teacher w ou ld p rint and distribute an outline o f his

system o f kn ow ledg e o r have his students bu y the printed catalogue o f a

great private library. He would then expatiate, offering information

abo ut the best editions o f texts and textb ook s, d escribing the styles and

virtues o f ancient and m odern authors, and enlivenin g the hour w ith

curious anecdotes about the lives and fortunes o f men o f letters. T he

student would scurry to keep up, often copying the teachers’ words

verbatim page after page.

T h e results hav e a certain pathos. O ften their leve l o f analysis is

terrifyingly meager and superficial:

Plato. His style is not philosophical but swollen and declamatory, and fur-

thermore allegorical and hieroglyphical. But his Republic and Laws have a

more philosophical style. Aristotle excelled at this, and sticks to the austereand accurate philosophical style.32

So m uch fo r the great debate between Platonists and Aristotelians. Y e t

at the same time teachers could m ake the m ost extravagan t demands on

their students’ willingness and a bility to bu y, bo rro w , or steal expensive

books:

In the history o f antiquities we indicate the following: Franciscus Ferrarius De

veterum acclamationibus libri VII, Milan 1627; on the ancients’ rings see

Ioannes Kirchmannus, Lubeck 1623, Fortun. Licetus, Udine 1646, Georgius

Longus on the ancients’ signet rings, Milan 1645; on the ancients’ bracelets

see Thomas Bartholinus, Amsterdam 1676; on the Roman toga Hieronymus

Borsius, Amsterdam 1671; on the ancient and mystic boot Benedictus Bal

duinus, Paris 161 j ; on the ancients’ crowns Carolus Paschalius . . .33

Fe w university libraries wo uld have offered this we alth o f ore to a

student’s spade, even i f they had been open to students (or to any one

for m ore than a few hours a w eek ). A nd few inhabitants o f an ordinary

city c ould ha ve hoped to taste mo re than a spoonful or tw o o f this

pullulating stew o f erudition.

31. Ibid., 23.

32. Schurzjkischiana, 102.

33. Ibid., 1718.




The intent was clear; just as textbooks acquainted their readers with

the basic terms o f the arts, so lectures on literature acquainted their

hearers w ith the basic titles and authors, g ivin g a vision o f the wh ole

compass o f learning that must have been at once inspiring and deeply

frustrating. Y e t they did offer the student some sense o f the European

w orld o f learning, as one w hic h he could enter b y reading even i f he

lacked the means to travel to such capital cities o f the Respublica littera

rum as Leiden or Paris. And they were literally all that Germans could

afford, given the pov erty o f the coun try and the high price o f books.

Hence this oral and disorderly m ode o f imparting information remained

standard th rou gh the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. J. M . Gesner,

F. A . W o lf, and Au gust B ock h, no w remembered as the reformers o f

classical scholarship and teaching, offered to students who had never

seen the boo ks in question exactly this traditional form o f schematic

bibliogra phical co m m ent— and found auditors lo yal en ough to copy

out and publish what they had to say.34 In this and other respects the

polyhistors laid the foundations o f the new historical curriculum that

replaced theirs— and that is often seen, unfairly, as the antithesis o f all

that they held dear.35

W e find it easier to laugh at the p olyhistors than to understand them .

O u r ideal o f scholarship is no longer encapsulated b y M o rh o f’s hero

Julius Caesar Bottifanga, w h o k ne w all the arts and sciences, played —

and built— all the musical instruments, and embroidered m ore d eftly

than any w om an .36 W e find it easy to see that Peter Lam beck c ould

never h ave finished the w or k a sketch o f wh ich he published in the

1650s:

A literary history, containing a general narrative o f the origin, rise, transfor-

mation, fall, and restoration o f all the languages, sciences, faculties, and liberal

arts, in chronological order through all the centuries, with a special account

of famous men and women.37

Y e t w e should not m ock the polyhistors w it hout acknow ledgin g their

merits. Their broad interests did not lead only to chaotic or superficial

w ork . In history , fo r example, th ey en larged both the range o f subjects

34. For a late specimen o f this literature see A. Bo ckh, Encyklopadie und Methodologie

der philologischen Wissensthafien, ed. E Bratuschcck (Leipzig, 1877).

35. C f. A . Grafton, “ Polyhistor into Philolog . . . ,” History o f Universities 3 (1983):

159 92

36. Morhof, Polyhistor, 1:2.

37. Ibid., 10.

Anthony Grafton 41



and the range o f nations that the discipline studied. Universal history as

treated by sixteenthcentury teachers had confined itself to a political

narrative o f the fortunes o f the four biblical monarchies. But universal

history as treated by Georg Homius in his Area Noae included Egyp-

tians, Chinese and American Indians as well as Assyrians, Greeks and

Romans, and dealt at length with religious ritual, literature, and art as

well as w ith the deeds and deaths o f kings. The result was a history

curriculum far richer than anything a Renaissance university had pro-

vided. Hom ius’s w ork lacked the sharp concentration on d rawing m oral

and political lessons from the past that had given shape to late Renais-

sance historiography. But in its cosmopolitan breadth and richness it

look ed forw ard to the innovative historical school o f eighteenthcen-

tury Gottingen.38

T he general borders o f the coun try that the polyhistors inhabited are

now clear. T h ey were citizens less o f a terrestrial Em pire than o f an

imaginary Republic— the Respublica litterarum. Th ey w ere m ore at home

in its artificially preserved Latin than in their native German. They

prized the alba amicorum and letters from distinguished strangers that

were its badges o f citizenship as highly as their local distinctions. And

their desperate efforts to preserve its traditions o f universal curiosity and

eloquent rhetoric linked them to spiritual compatriots throughout Eu-

rope. In Scotland and Poland, Holland and Italy, many intellectuals

resisted the transformation o f the Latinspeaking Respublica litterarum

into a Frenchspeaking Republique des lettres, the turn from a humanism

bou nd to the past to a philoso phy intent u pon the future. Th ey kept one

another informed o f literary and scientific news by the oldfashioned

means o f formal Latin correspondence; they helped one another gain

access to the old materials from wh ich n ew wo rks o f erudition were to

be constructed; they form ed societies to distribute the best new Latin

books from northern Europe in the south, and vice versa. The Germans

w ho shared these tastes and interests saw themselves as threatened by the

ne w French ideal o f the cultivated but unscholarly honnete homme. But

they did not stand alone against the French. M agliabech i and Muratori,

Burman and Ruddiman shared their tastes and interests.

The problems that remain are easy to state i f difficult to answer. H ow

far were German polyhistors peculiarly German? An d h ow far did they

38. G. Homius, Area Node (Leiden and Rotterdam, 1666); see Klempt, Die Sakuhrisie

rung, pt. II, chap. C; E. Hassinger, Empmsdtrationaler Historismus (Bern and Munich,

1978), 12736, offers important qualifications, but is a trifle too ungenerous.




— could they— respond to the challenge o f the N ew Philosophy by

updating their own tools and interests?

T h e best w a y to answer the first question is to exc hange the telescopic

lens w e have been using for a microsco pic one. A single case study in

Polyhistorie will add some color, relief, and detail to our outline map.

A nd a singu larly curious specimen is available to be its object: Conrad

Samuel Schurzfleisch (16411708), the mo st distinguished W itten be rg

professor o f the generation after the Th irty Years’ W ar . Schurzfleisch

deserves attention less for the lasting distinction o f his thou gh t than for

the richness o f the evidence he left behind and the vividness wit h w hich

it reveals the impact o f Kleinstaat habits o f life and thou ght on a cosmo-

politan and idealistic man. W e have several hundred pages o f his letters,

several hundred mo re o f his Latin orations, and tw o collections o f

his informal lectures on general literature— one euphonious ly entitled

Schurzfleischiana, and uneuphoniously couched in a hideous m ixture o f

Latin and Germa n that bears the clear hallmark o f informal delivery .

Taken together, these enable us to see the polyhistor, as it were, in his

shirtsleeves— and thus to identify som e hig hly localized elements in a

cosmopolitan style o f life and thought.

In many respects, to be sure, Schurzfleisch was a traditional figure

whose duplicates could be found across Europe. H e lo ved to whip his

Latin rhetoric up to a fine frenzy o f highsou nding phrases quite devo id

o f sense:

[Frisia (he wrote to a young lady whose Latin prose and German modesty he

admired)]: You have joined the ranks o f the learned Heroides . . . You have

imitated the imperial virago Alexia Comnena. You have equalled Hroswitha,once the ornament o f all Saxony. Y ou have vanquished the rest, or at least

made the decision a close one. There w as nothing left for you save to transfer

those incomparable virtues to the wedding bed, and spread [them] among

your children and grandchildren . . ,39

H e took pride in his mastery o f the traditional but taxing craft o f

w rit in g pure Latin: “ I w ould find it difficult to maintain a consistent

style had I not w ork ed hard at it wh en I was y ou ng .” 40 H e ga ve his

students careful instruction in the avoidance o f solecisms— even thosethat had the sanction o f great humanist names behind them: “ A m on g

39. C . S. Schurzfleisch, Orationes pcmegyricae et allocutiones uarii argumenti (Wittenberg,

1697), 1:126.

40. Schurzfleischiana, 213.

Anthony Grafton 43



word s w e must distinguish those that are Roman from those that are

used in a Roman way . . . they commonly say that deputare someone

means the same as delegare, abschicken; even de T hou used it in this sense,

‘He was deputatus by him ,’ when the Latin w ay to say it is ‘delegatus.’ For

example, i f our academy sends someone to Dres den . . . , then don’t say,

he was deputatus, but he was delegatus.” 41 He agonized over those appar-

ent correspondences between vernacular and Latin words that often trap

students o f composition. N o student o f Schurzfleisch’s left W ittenberg

thinking that Latin circulus was the proper term for a Kreis o f the Holy

Roman Empire.42

Schurzfleisch treated the pursuit o f Latin eloquence as an enterprise

whose moral w orth was too obvious to need defense, and whose prac-

tical value was enormous. Its possessor could win high position and

w id e reputation in the m an y parts o f Europe where really good meta-

phors still mattered:

In Germany the humanities are taken very seriously, as in Sweden and Den-

mark. I praise the King o f France too. The Saxon court is especially dextrous

in German style, and has men highly skilled in Latin style as well. This theyesteem highly in the (Saxon) court at Weimar. Even in Vienna they pick up

Latin and German writings from our Elector like a Gospel, and they say

there, “ Herr Secretair, lemts auch”— “ Mr Secretary, you too should learn

how to do this.”43

Schurzfleisch looked back to the happy days before his time, when

really great scholars like Scaliger and Casaubon had flourished, as super-

ior to his own time in learning and literacy. He deeply admired the

earlier humanists’ ready w it and comm and o f Latin: T his was w hat hadenabled Frischlin to cap a faltering Latinist’s effort at extemporaneous

verse address, “ Tu, Frischline, vates” with the perfect complem ent—

“ T u m ihi lambe nates.” “ He was so witt y,” Schurzfleisch sighed. Y et he

saw no reason to think that the earlier humanists’ values and interests

need be abandoned. N o one had told him that the age o f Latin eloquence

was over.

Schurzfleisch’s curiosity was as boundless as his definition o f correct

Latin was strict. H e read with pleasure the great compendia o f seven-teenthcentury lore like Bochart’s Phaleg et Canaan and Huet’s Demon-

strate evangelica. He discussed for his students questions as varied as the

41. Ibid., 207.

42. Ibid., 151.

43. Ibid., 221.




dating o f m edieval diplomas and the proba bility that men had drunk

w in e before the f lo od. H e to ok as m uch interest in Leibniz ’s discoveries

in algebra as he did in Scaliger’s principles o f ch ron olog y. H e m et even

the most bumptious manifestos o f the N ew Philosophy w ith calm

charity, assimilating the new data and methods that they offered and

igno ring or rejecting their critique o f the aggregate o f oldfashioned

scholarly disciplines w ith w hic h he occupied h imself. N o passage in

seventeenthcentury literature is a more memorable assault on human-

ism than the early sections o f Descartes’ Discourse on Method, in which

w e learn that the study o f rhetoric, history , and traditional philoso phy

had served o nly to teach Descartes the limitations o f his range o f expe-

rience and the bankru ptcy o f the traditional curriculum . N o reaction to

Descartes could seem more bizarre than Schurzfleisch’s:

I tell all students to concentrate on that study for which they feel a special

aptitude . . . Thus Descartes began as a rhetorician, but, ceasing to make

progress, applied his mind to the study o f physics.44

Schurzfleisch’s ver y calmness— his willingness to accept the ne w Carte-

sian science without becoming hysterical about the challenge it posedhim— marks him out a German, for wh om the N ew Philosophy meant

the renovation, no t the destruction, o f the old encyclopedia.

A less pleasing set o f stigmata is also visible on closer inspection.

Schurzfleisch and his brethren w ere after all men o f the Germ an Klein

staat, their vision o f the world narrowed b y a cramped and ossified

Protestantism. T he tolerance they sho wed fo r philosophical speculation

did n ot extend to matters o f m orality and behavior. A nd that explains

w h y even the broadm inded classicist Schurzfleisch could not recom -

mend all the classics to his pupils wit h an easy m ind. He felt impelled to

w arn them that

Tibullus wrote a pretty elegy, and purely, but with too many foulnesses

mixed in; but Catullus is an archpig and buffoon, w ho offers wagonloads o f

obscenities for sale 45

True , he w as no t so intolerant o f all the controversial pagans. H e carried

his Epicurus w ith him everyw here, finding him a rewarding and spiri-tual philosopher.46 But when sex became the topic Schurzfleisch shud-

dered and withdrew . This lover o f go od Latin found o nly one justifica

44. Ibid., 157.

45. Ibid., 18182.

46. Ibid., 180.

Anthony Grafton 45



tion for the study o f Catullus— “ one can learn from him the m any

rituals o f the ancients.” 47 A n d this pedantic wa rn ing in turn warns us

no t to overestimate the hum anity and openmindedness o f the polyhis-

tors. On social and sexual matters they were as smallminded as their

neighbors— and thus goo d citizens o f the old Emp ire.

This map o f the polyhistors’ w orld must remain sketchy and incom -

plete. To perfect it we would need to weave synchronic threads that do

no t no w exist across the diachronic ones that w e have traced here— to

sho w h o w individual sectors o f the polyhistors’ culture shifted ov er time

and across distances. It would be most revealing, for example, to draw

the co m plex and jag ge d path b y w hich the discipline o f hermeneutics

evolved from the time o f M artin Luther to that o f Johann Salomo

Sender tw o centuries later. This w ou ld reveal ho w German professors

o f biblical interpretation cou ld teach, in the sixteenth century, that the

central message o f the Bible w as to b e found in the teachings o f a few

select books, while the rest were to be played down or even excised

from the corpus; in the seventeenth cen tury, that the central message o f

the Bible was to be found in every book, every word, and every mark

o f punctuation in the O ld T estament as we ll as the N ew ; in the eigh-

teenth century, that each bo ok o f the Bib le had been written fo r a

specific audience and must be in interpreted in accordance with the

values, beliefs, and assumptions o f its orig in al readers.48 M od em ac-

counts hardly sug gest the richness o f the polyh istors’ w o rk in this central

field— far less the diversity o f their conclusions. Y e t a final assessment o f

their w or k must take account o f changes as radical as these in h a lf a

dozen other fields as well, from classical philology to music.49 Perhaps

that is enough to sho w that m uch m ore exp loration is still needed in the

regions we have travelled through so rapidly.

In the end, we may well share Mencke’s amusement at his prede-

cessors. W e cannot fail to see the com ic side o f m en like

Johann Seger, rector o f the University o f Wittenberg and imperial poet

laureate. He had an engraving made on copper, showing the crucified Christ

in the background and himself in front. From his lips came the words “ Lord

47. Ibid., 182.48. See in general Homig, Die Anfange der historischkritischen Theologie; O. Merk,

“ An fan ge neutestamendicher Wissenschaft im 18. Jahrhundert,” Hislorische Kr ilik in der

Theologie: Beilrage zu ihrer Ceschichte, ed. G. Schwaiger (Gottingen, 1980), 3759.

49. C f. W . Jens’s interesting remarks on the strange evolution o f legal thought in

Tubingen, Eine deutsche UniversildU 500 Jahre Tubinger Gelehrtenrepublik, 2d ed. (Munich,

1981), chap. 6.




Jesus, do yo u love me?” , and from the lips o f Jesus came the answer “ Yes,

most eminent, excellent and learned Master Seger, imperial poet laureate and

w orth y rector o f W ittenberg, I do lo ve you.” 50

Y e t w e should n o t assume th at M en cke is te ll in g th e w h o le sto ry. A fter

all, it w ill go hard w ith o ur m em ory i f historians tw o centuries from

n o w rely solely upon ou r critics. If w e can muster energy, sym pathy,

and a willingness to read som e unprom ising sources, w e can find as

m uch that is solid as is funn y in the w or ld o f the polyhistors. Schurz-

fleisch h imself w ou ld have had enough o f a sense o f hum or and se lf-

m oc ke ry to find that an appropriate epitaph, for h im self and for his

culture.

Anthony Grafton 47

50. Mencke, Charlatanry o f the Learned, 64. For a w itty and vivid account o f the be-

hav ior o f the real polyhistors, see Jens, Eine deutsche Universitdt , chaps. 28.

anthony grafton - the world of the polyhistors

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