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Nobilitas Literaria

When the German humanist Crotus Rubeanus (1480-1545), known primarily as the co-author of the Epistolae obscurorum virorum, in 1521 wrote a report at the end of his brief rectorate of the university of Erfurt, he added a large picture. In the center of that colorful parchment he proudly had painted his family coat of arms, a hunting horn held by a hand, an allusion to his pre-humanist name "Jäger", that is hunter. This coat of arms is framed by 16 smaller coats of arms, of which the four somewhat larger one in the corners belong to Erasmus of Rotterdam, Martin Luther, Johannes Reuchlin and Mutianus Rufus, while the remaining twelve depict the heraldic signs of his personal friends: Ulrich von Hutten, Eobanus Hessus, Justus Jonas, Philipp Melanchthon, Johann Lang, Peter Eberbach, Forchemius (Georg Peltz aus Forchheim), Heinrich Urban or Urbanus, Andreas Carlstadt, Adam Kraft, Joachim Camerarius and Jodocus Menus. The document, preserved in the Municipal Archives of Erfurt, is remarkable for a number of reasons: first, next to the three leading heads of German Renaissance humanism of the time, Reuchlin, Mutian and Erasmus, Luther is added as the champion of the new cultural movement of humanism. Second, the inscriptions and mottoes are in the three holy languages the humanists thought essential for any humanist, Latin, Greek and Hebrew. Thirdly, the iconographical lay-out points to the typical humanist form of a community, a "sodalitas" . And fourthly, and for our context most importantly, the very fact that Crotus had made these coats of arms is in itself remarkable. Coats of arms were after all were the privilege of the nobility. All of the persons depicted here through their heraldic signs, with the exception of Ulrich von Hutten, came from a bourgeois background, and some like Eobanus Hessus and Crotus himself from peasant stock. To be sure, nine years before, in 1512, Mutianus Rufus, the undisputed head of the Erfurt, or to be precise Gotha humanists, had created his own set of coats of arms for his friends Spalatinus, Crotus, Urbanus and Jonas, thus eliminating the stigma of the lack of coats of arms. Crotus's colorful drawing as well as Mutianus's earlier heraldic creations on behalf of his friends point to the claim of the humanists to belong to a nobilitas literaria, a nobility, to be sure, which derived its identity not through birth and privileges but through education and personal achievement and a shared interest in antiquity.