indeed have excellent pedigree as paradigms for linguistic expression and analysis, encourage and generate intellectual pleasure, because they totally rhetoricize allegory42 as a means of instruction in reading classical poetry, and thence the writing and reading of poetry by adults; perhaps this chapter of education nearly began with another Elementa rhetoricae (Basle: J. OporinusOporinus, Johannes 1545) on the subject of rhetoric43 published at first in 1540 by Joachim Camerarius;44 a typical rhetorical work of him that reflects Camerarius’ integration of Humanism with Protestantism insofar as he placed in it the traditions of the ancient rhetorical manuals and medieval homiletics and added to this a theory of didactic texts. In his Elementa he allowed rhetorical narration and strategies for reading to develop along more interesting ways than MelanchthonMelanchthon, Philipp’s narrow way, but he kept allegory securely demystified. In Joachim Camerarius’ expression, rhetoric becomes an instrument both of speaking and writing coherently and persuasively and of deriving critical evaluations of Scripture and profane texts. Of course, MelanchthonMelanchthon, Philipp’s pedagogy had a tremendous impact on the development of Protestant education, although his successors soon narrowed his program by adopting a more rigorous Ciceronianism45, and Camerarius, his friend and biographer, was, like MelanchthonMelanchthon, Philipp, a moderate Ciceronian. For Camerarius, CiceroCicero first demonstrated the full powers of the Latin language and remains the timeless and unsurpassable standard. Furthermore, in the Disputatio de imitatione that Camerarius included in his commentary on Cicero’s Tusculan DisputationsCiceroTusc., he responds to ErasmusErasmus von Rotterdam, DesideriusCiceronianus’ Ciceronianus (1528),46 i.e. a treatise attacking the style of scholarly Latin written during the early 16th century, which style attempted to adherently imitate Cicero’s Latin.
Camerarius included letter-writing in his Elementa, a textbook that adapted the ancient progymnasmata in a graded series of exercises: narratio (fabula and historia), expositio and descriptio, chreia, sententia, ethologia, epistola, comparatio, paraphrasis, imitatio, aetiologia, aenigma, loci communes, probatio and reprehensio, laudatio and vituperatio. His illustration of most of these exercises, for instance his famous description of Albrecht DürerDürer, Albrecht’s “Melencolia I” as an example of expositio and descriptio (ecphrasis), suggest that he encouraged original composition.47 Camerarius edited a Greek text of TheonTheon, Ailios’s progymnasmata adorned with model themes from Libanius together with a Latin translation of the exercises and the themes in 1540; TheonTheon, Ailios commenting briefly on letter-writing. If we consider the axiom that intellectual history is not the story of personal genius, great ideas, or chains of influence, but only a project of applied scepticism,48 rhetorical projects in the Confessional Age were elaborated and schematized upon the classical canon, supplemented at times by select Church fathers and the leading Humanists of the preceding generations. When Camerarius assures his readers that rhetoric must be taught to schoolboys “so that we can defend against the ignorance and rudeness of our age and repel nonsensical barbarisms”,49 the more overtly political function of oratory in fostering obedience to the law or modifying the behaviour of the masses (in moderanda plebe) cannot be really excluded from the purpose of preparing textbooks on rhetoric larded with rules for correct usage and designed to raise neo-Latin to the Italian standard.50 But Camerarius’ notion of rhetoric did not entail any sort of scepticism, for it enhanced upper moral and pedagogic intentions such as those of hagiographic writing. Hagiography was practised particularly intensely throughout the Middle Ages and it was closely linked to the medieval concept of sainthood and to the ritual of the cult of the saints. These Lives were generally brief, quite unlike some luxuriant Humanist biographies such as ErasmusErasmus von Rotterdam, Desiderius’ Life of Jerome or Camerarius’ Life of MelanchthonMelanchthon, Philipp.51Melanchthon, Philipp The later sixteenth-century Lives of the reformers, regardless of whether they were friendly or hostile, helped create an image or images of the Reformation which survived into the twentieth century and beyond, although the original accounts remain for the most part forgotten and neglected. Moreover, rhetoric could disclose the meanings of enigma and apocalypse,52 which might “exercise the intelligence” according to Poole recapitulating the vices of style presented by George Puttenham in his Arte of English PoesiePuttenham, GeorgeArte of English Poesie (1589).53 In the case of the application of rhetorical analysis to Biblical text this point is always crucial, mainly for a Protestant scholar that adjusted himself to a historically orientated interpretation of the sacred texts.
If the 15th century had rediscovered antiquity, then the 16th was slowly deciphering it. The spirit of the Revival of Learning, so called, ordered that the position of classical philology was originally and essentially ancillary, so that ancient authors were to be rescued and brought back into the effective service of humane studies. Although in the stylized prefaces of the early editors of the text, who seem to prefer to discuss rather anything than the text of the author and its sources, one commonplace is recurring again and again: the idea, expressed in images of polishing the rust engendered by centuries of slothful neglect, that the editor’s task should restore the author to its pristine splendour, Camerarius’ teaching and editing career has been an excellent exception. Whilst he adjusted his vast knowledge of Altertumswissenschaft – forgive my conscious anachronism in favour of expression – to his liberal theological view and Humanistic methods of pedagogy, he left behind him more than an admonition of science and research.54 Only a few could then be aware of his innovative genious in Greek studies; the Wechsel’s house refusal to publish his Greek letters in 1577 is an indication of the lack of highly competent Hellenists in the republic of letters.55 To conclude with, Camerarius is a conspicuous figure in the Revival of Letters and the Reformation in Germany;56 perhaps its suitable avatar.
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Camerarius,
