Course XXV - Teaching 11: Tritemius the Humanist

Tritemius appears at Renaissance’s dawn and fosters its scientific aspect by becoming the father of outstanding humanists.
He was born on February 1, 1462 and died on December 13, 1518. His true name was Heidenberg, though he was known as Tritemius (John), or Trittenheim (Germany) after the place of his birth.
Despite his noble condition, his education was very careless, and at the age of 15 still he did not know how to read or to write. Orphan at the age of 2, his stepfather hindered is education and he had to go at night hours to the house of a neighbor, and by stealth, to acquire the first rudiments of knowledge. So he learnt how to read, write, decline and conjugate Latin words. In this way, so as he satisfied his own inclinations, also obeyed his stepfather’s impositions.
This did not satisfy all his ardent wishes to know, therefore he decided to leave his mother’s house, going to Treveris and other cities, and finally to Heidelberg, where he completed his studies and got all knowledge a man could have in those days.
Later he thought to come back to his mother’s house, but on January 25, 1482, in arriving at the Benedictine abbey of Spanheim, a heavy snow storm impeded him to continue his journey, a providential accident of which he took advantage to know and study the life of those monks, and week later, now fond of that kind of life, he decided to stay and took of habit on November 21 of the same year.
Nor for long he could follow the regularity of a simple monk, because soon afterwards he was chosen abbot despite his youth, and a short while after he entered the Order.
Tritemius found the monastery in a deplorable condition, as much in the temporal aspect as in the spiritual one, and his venturesome spirit tried first to restore the material aspect of the abbey; then he faced the most difficult task, but the most meritorious: the inner and moral reformation of his monks, beginning by the observance of the rule according to Bursfeld’s reformation, and then determining the work by the revival of sacred and profane studies.
In his lectures he would ceaselessly exhort his monks to read and write copying books and illuminating titles and capital letters; and thanks to it, he could gather a rich collection of books in his library, which in 1502 were 640 volumes and some years later more than 2,000 of any king and language, when there were some few volumes when he was appointed abbot.
The flourishing state achieved with this by the abbey increased the fame of Tritemius, and from everywhere people went to Spanheim to meet him; princes, bishops, sages, all were interested in consulting him and in taking advantage of his vast and deep knowledge in sciences and arts of any kind. This fame of virtue and wisdom was not unanimously shared by all. The envy of some of his monks, not well reconciled with the regular observance, would cause him many disappointments and sorrows (even he was unjustly called “wizard”).
In 1505, when he was in Heildelberg, in the court of Philip, Count of the Rhine Palatinate, he knew that his monks, rebelled against him, had removed him from his position of abbot. In order to ascertain properly the events, he retired to Cologne and then to Speyer, but some news he received were not satisfactory; his monks were steady in their resolution.
In view of this, Tritemius decided not to come back to the abbey where he had lived for more than twenty years, being sorry for having been deprived of the house where he professed, and of his rich library, gathered thanks to his painstaking labors, retiring to the abbey of Wurzburg entrusted to him. There he lived the last years of his life devoted to his favorite studies and not paying attention to promises of honorific posts that many people would offer him.
Tritemius has been object of many researches and even today arouses the curiosity of many learned persons. In addition to his ascetic work –an Imperishable Monument is the vigorous Bursfeld’s reformation– other compilations, because of their numerous mistakes and contradictions and the superficial character of the composition have almost lost their whole scientific value, except for the second half of the fifteen century. But there was some writer as G. Mentz that tried to defend him against historic accusations; for instance, to have invented the sources used for his “History of the Franks” (Mayence, 1515) and “Annals of the Abbey of Hirsangia”, which are, respectively, Hunibald and Meginfrid, whose writings were already entirely unknown in the sixteen century. But it is impossible to be convinced of the entire veracity of Tritemius in front of difficulties arisen from his literary procedures, especially in some of his flagrant contradictions.
Works on literary history are safer.
In short: Tritemius was a very prolific writer, since the number of his writings attests it, among which some were accused of necromancy. Despite a subsequent criticism of which he was object, in his time his work carried out the extraordinary mission of arousing the interest for science; so he became a true forerunner of the scientific revival.