WIMPFELING, JAKOB

Jakob Wimpfeling was a conservative German Renaissance humanist who tirelessly worked for educational reforms. Born in the old imperial Alsatian city of Schlettstadt (today Selestat, France), Wimpfeling attended the local Latin school and, at age fourteen, enrolled at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau, where he received his bachelor of arts in 1466. After a brief sojourn at the University of Erfurt, he studied and taught at the University of Heidelberg, obtaining a master of arts in 1471 and the baccalaureate in theology in 1479, and rapidly climbed the academic ladder, becoming the dean of the arts faculty and rector of the university. After the plague put an end to his activities in Heidelberg, in 1483 he moved to nearby Speyer to become a cathdedral canon. He rejoined the faculty in Heidelberg in 1498, answering a call from Elector Philip of the Palatinate to work on university reform. In 1501 he left Heidelberg and spent the next fourteen years in Strasbourg, joining his friends Johannes Geiler von Kayserberg and Sebastian Brant there and founding a literary society around 1508 on the model of the loose associations Conrad Celtis had estab­lished earlier in various parts of Europe. In 1515 he moved back to Schlettstadt, where he died.

Although Wimpfeling was a prolific writer working in such diverse fields as literature, church history, politics, and theology, his work is dominated by two major themes: his concern for the correct education of the youth and his his-toriographical interests. In the former area, his most important works are two educational treatises,Isidoneus Germanicus(Guide to German Youth, 1497) andAdolescentia(Youth, 1500). Filled with extensive quotations and pragmatic tips for moral living, these works also reveal the very tentative nature of his hu­manism. In contrast to many other humanists, Wimpfeling did not appreciate ancient literature for its own sake but allowed its study only for the development of a good Latin style and for the moral teachings it offered.For this reason, his choice of Latin authors was very selective and was always filtered through the lenses of his orthodox Christianity. If his interests in pedagogy were one of his concerns, his historical studies, informed by a fierce patriotism, were another. They prompted him to write a number of works, among them a treatise calledGermania(1501), a rambling work in which he tried to prove that his native Alsace had always been inhabited by Germans. Also inspired by his patriotism was his workEpithoma rerum Germanicarum(A Short History of Germany, 1505). It is remarkable for its treatment not only of the military and political matters but also of the cultural history, comprising a veritable hall of fame of theologians, poets, musicians, historians, architects, sculptors, and painters. The work contributed decisively to the development of a German historiography.

Wimpfeling's views and his somewhat cantankerous nature involved him in a number of bitter scholarly feuds: he quarreled with the Augustinians, whom he angered by denying that St. Augustine had been a monk; with the Swiss, whom he blamed for having left the empire; and with the flamboyant humanist Jakob Locher, whom he accused of corrupting the youth.

Though Wimpfeling vehemently attacked ecclesiastical abuses and at first welcomed Martin Luther,* he sharply rejected the Reformer after 1521 when it had become clear to him that the Lutheran movement was leading to a schism of the church. He died a lonely and bitter man in his native town.

E. Bernstein, German Humanism, 1983.

J. H. Overfield, "Jakob Wimpfeling," in German Writers of the Renaissance and Ref­ormation, 1280-1580, Dictionary of Literary Biography, 179, 1997: 317-25.