Basel : the birthplace of German Erasmianism

The article discusses the early chapter in the long history of the development of the German Sonderbewußtsein, namely, the importance of the Basel humanist circle for the rise of the collective identity of the German humanists, which manifested itself in the notion of the Erasmiani. Available source material, taken chiefly from the correspondence of the German humanists, was analyzed form the cultural history perspective. Thus, the analyses were aimed at understanding the collective ideas and concepts rather than describing the events which accompanied these commonly shared notions. The article consists of three chapters. In the first chapter, entitled Rudolph Agricola and Germans in the Foreign Land, the preface of Rudolph Agricola to his De inventione dialectica was examined in detail as the most important testimony to the early development of the German Sonderbewußtsein. Agricola’s genuinely German reinterpretation of the Roman tradition (Vergil and Cicero) explains how the Northern humanists of the late 15th century perceived the Mediterranean model of humanist culture (including its driving factor - the Latin language). As such, this preface discusses the cultural chauvinism of the Italian humanists towards the German barbarians. Agricola leaves no doubt that regardless of significant intellectual abilities, the Northern humanists were forced to remain under a considerable influence of the Mediterranean humanism, to a certain degree alien to German aspirations. As a result, he revealed a provincial, complex-ridden condition of German culture in the late 15th century, still not able to compete with the Italians for cultural priority. The so-called pre-Erasmian generation of the German humanists (as witnessed by Jakob Wimpfeling, Dietrich Gresemund, Conrad Celtis and young Erasmus) shared that gloomy diagnosis made by Agricola. They awaited a national hero who could make the Northern barbarian a distinguished, independent, and thus truly German man of letters, and finally unite the dispersed German intellectuals into a distinctive community of scholars. The second chapter, Germans on Erasmus’s Triumphal Way to Basel, examines that atmosphere of anticipation among the German humanists at the beginning of the 16thcentury. Consequently, it explains the reasons why in autumn 1514, Erasmus, as the future editor of Novum instrumentum, was chosen by his German followers, and the Basel circle in particular, to be the main person responsible for the forthcoming cultural rebirth of the Northern barbaricum. Despite its religious and academic influence on European Biblical studies, from the Rhenish perspective, Novum instrumentum was perceived as a token of that long anticipated cultural change redefining the hierarchy between the Mediterranean humanism and Northern barbarism. According to the German humanists, Novum instrumentum was a truly unprecedented enterprise, since none of the Italian scholars had undertaken it before. For this reason, Erasmus’ triumphal way along the river Rhine down to Basel, to the printing house (in order to publish the anticipated edition of New Testament, as his Upper German milieu tended to believe already in 1514), was celebrated by the Rhenish circles of humanists like a national holiday. He was imagined and portrayed as a national hero finally able to come up to all the expectations put forward by the earlier, pre-Erasmian generation. Under the influence of such an image of Erasmus, the German Sonderbewußtsein took a different shape and eventually allowed the Northern humanists to overcome their sense of cultural inferiority. In other words, the Germans finally founded their own, independent and privileged place in the cultural landscape. The third chapter, German Erasmians in Their Own Land, elaborates on the rise and decline of Erasmianism, being the first form of the collective identity of the German humanists. In this chapter, a cultural and doxographical systematization of Erasmianism was undertaken, as well as a brief Begriffsgeschichte of Erasmianus, a concept coined by the German followers of Erasmus. From the cultural perspective, Erasmianism stood for intellectual, religious and national values which together made up a set of beliefs allowing the Erasmians to define themselves as Germans. From the doxographical point of view, Erasmianism indicated a brand new curriculum of humanist and divine studies, substantially different from the Mediterranean studia humanitatis and late-medieval academic theology. Despite the fact that an Erasmianus was proficient in ancient languages and Biblical studies, in traditional terms he was neither a humanist nor a theologian. These two aspects, concerning the collective significance of certain ideas and describing the principles of thought, are complementary. For the German Erasmiani were spokesmen of Erasmus’s national image; German students of bonae litterae; Erasmus’s fellow-workers in the Basel printing house; and supporters of Novum instrumentum or of Erasmus himself in the face of charges leveled by academic theologians, jointly labeled as theologastri and mateologi. At the final stage, in 1520 the Erasmians became disturbers of the social and religious order in Basel. This was a sign of the rapidly approaching decline of Erasmianism. Although in its primal German form Erasmianism was a short-lived phenomenon (first verbalized around the year 1515 and outdated five years later by the growing impact of Martin Luther on German people), it paved the way for the Lutheran, all-embracing reform of Germanness, which was completely liberated from the Roman political, intellectual and religious implications