Foreword

Beatus Rhenanus Today

Beatus Rhenanus' life and works offer manifold interests.

First of all, there is pedagogy.

The pupil of Sélestat's Latin School has left to us notebooks which reflect a studious young man who earnestly noted down the classes he had the good fortune to attend in his home town. His passion to understand the great Latin authors of classical antiquity may be perceived in the care he took to transcribe his masters' remarks. One sees a handsome bookhand, already regular and orderly, with which he highlighted the margins and pages of his books, transcribing in German, or even in the Alsatian dialect, the technical terms designating aspects of everyday life familiar to him in Sélestat, but present in the Latin poets as exotic vocabulary, even for an enthusiastic pupil of Latin. The teaching of the period circa 1500, known to the general public thanks to Rabelais's fictitious description of the "abbaye de Thélème" or to Montaigne's reflexions in his essay Sur l'institution des enfants, may be apprehended in situ at the Humanist Library of Sélestat through these precious notebooks and manuals bearing Rhenanus' handwriting. At a time when young people advocate convulsive revolution and schools have been shaken to their very foundations, one may indeed ask what the secret of Sélestat's Latin School was. In the space of several decades, it produced a harvest of scholars who won the admiration of Erasmus of Rotterdam : "While other cities give birth only to men, you however produce geniuses. Your fecundity enriches the universe" (Praise of Sélestat). The pupils' notebooks that the Library preserves, Wilhelm Gisenheim's as well as Beatus Rhenanus', provide perhaps an explanation to the phenomenon in a more direct and concrete way than the mythical depiction of the "abbaye de Thélème".

Then, there is philology.

Having become "learned in each of the two (ancient) languages" (lingua doctus utraque), according to the fine praise of Erasmus, thanks to the Greek classes he took in Paris and in Basel, Beatus Rhenanus exhibited an intense activity as editor of ancient texts, moving from Church Fathers to classical authors, from Homer to Prudence, from Tertullian to Eusebius of Caesarea, Seneca, Tacitus and Livius, to mention only the most important. At the same time, he introduced, for Johann Froben, the works of Erasmus, Thomas More and other humanists by means of "Prefaces" which show the way to a reliable philological method, how to choose the "good readings", in spite of the deteriorated texts transmitted by manuscripts.

Finally, there is quite simply the human aspect.

Indeed, philological erudition did not draw Rhenanus away from the problems which troubled his times; they were numerous and great. The Christian religion, the cement of society and the foundation of morality, was unsettled by the Reformation. Tempers flared, ideas clashed, law and order were threatened. Beatus Rhenanus attempted to save public tranquillity and to reform religion without harm. Inspired by the thought of Martin Luther, friend of Ulrich Zwingli, Martin Bucer and Johann Sturm, who will write his biography, he had an abhorrence for all extremes and opted for a religious reform precluding a break with his catholic past. Did he owe his sense of moderation, his loathing of tumult, only to his good star, only to a firm will mastering mood changes and destructive passion, or did he forge his character, through the union of ancient wisdom with the Christian revelation, from the authors he edited and those more numerous which he had read, for they will constitute his library, astonishing in its richness and variety? Here indeed are the two sources of Western Civilization united as never before in the person of Beatus Rhenanus: ancient humanism and mystical Christian meditation both have a place in his library and meet in the personality of Beatus, to whom they bring that acuity of thought, remarked upon by his contemporaries, that interior equilibrium and that serenity in the heat of discussion, which allowed him to remain a link between the two camps, without compromise or betrayal.

Is this not an invitation for a modern world in disarray, which is seeking a sense to life and a panacea for its anxieties, to return to the same sources? Beatus Rhenanus' mission and books, piously preserved for centuries by the city of Sélestat, displayed and studied to their advantage by the admirable work of devoted and competent librarians such as Abbot Gény, Abott Clauss, Canon Walter, Abbot Adam, investigated by scholars from all of Europe, protected with loving care by the "Society of the Friends of the Humanist Library", are waiting for us to give them the place they deserve in the cultural life of France and beyond, in that of Europe.

The University of Strasbourg will give to its Latin Department the name of Beatus Rhenanus in order to pay homage to his philological work and his contribution to the assembling of ideas and peoples in Europe. From the 12th to the 15th of November 1998, a conference will unite scholars who have studied, sometimes reedited the texts of which Beatus Rhenanus gave us an edition in his time, in some cases, the edition "princeps", and a second conference, interdisciplinary, is planned for the year 2000 in order to bring to light the contributions of the humanist to the great political and religious debates of his century. The present exhibition is the first step in the rehabilitation of a great Alsatian, European and humanist

By François HEIM