A Brill Calendar: August 23

Few scholarly careers are as poignant as the one of Rodolphus Agricola (Baflo, Groningen, August 23 1443 – Heidelberg, Palatinate, October 27 1485).

When he started to lecture on classical literature at Heidelberg University – invited there by Bishop Johann von Dalberg – he only had a year to live; allowing Roelof Huysman (as he was born) just enough time to write his swan-song, ‘De formando studio’, a book on education for all forms of learning and scholarship.

The abstract term ‘Northern Renaissance’ finds in Agricola a fine personal manifestation. After study at Groningen, Erfurt and Cologne, Agricola graduated at Louvain University in 1465; half-way his short life. During the first decade after Gutenberg’s seminal invention the idiom ‘visiting professor’ is a pleonasm. The northerner crossed the Alps to Pavia University and learned to read and write Greek. He also lectured in praise of philosophy and of the human potential to learn in the widest possible sense; while writing a life of Petrarch, the paragon of a new kind of scholarship. Agricola became a syndic at Groningen and stayed in close touch with his intellectual roots in Aduard monastery and with his old master, Wessel Gansfort.

In the European tradition it is seldom that a scholarly indebtedness encompassing generations vanishes completely out of sight. Erasmus’s fame starting the century next was solidly founded on ‘Modern Devotion’ and on Agricola’s earlier achievement; ‘vide’ his magnum opus, ‘De inventione dialectica,’ a rich inventory of classical rhetoric, based on representative texts. Much as educator Roelof Huysman became to young people a ‘locus classicus’ in his own right for European Humanism.