Hebrew Poetry Transformed, or, Scholarship Invincible between Renaissance and Enlightenment
- Creators
- Haugen, Kristine Louise
Abstract
During the 1470s and 1480s, a Sicilian Jewish convert to Christianity known as Flavius Mithridates made a long tour of the universities of France and Germany. According to a later report by Johann Reuchlin, Mithridates delivered well-attended lectures on a subject that united the new study of Hebrew with the revival of pagan antiquity: the poetic form of biblical Hebrew verse. This topic, in Mithridates's hands, became a variety of comparative literature, for he insisted that he had discovered in the poetic books of the Hebrew Bible-Job, the Psalms, the Lamentations of Jeremiah, and so on-a formal system akin to that of ancient Greek, featuring 'accents' (tonoi), 'quantities' (chronoi), 'breathings' (pneumata), and 'exceptions' (pathemata). But once Mithridates's lectures were over, Reuchlin wrote, his hearers admitted that they had understood nothing he said; in retrospect, they abandoned both the teacher and his doctrines as completely obscure. Mithridates, meanwhile, returned to Italy 'having accumulated a large heap of money'.
Additional Information
© 2012 Warburg Institute. Posted on gennaio 8th, 2013 by Redazione. I am grateful to many friends for advice on these subjects, but above all to Mordechai Feingold for his extraordinarily generous help. I also profited deeply from conversations with Hans Aarsleff about the study of language. This article is dedicated to Professor Aarsleff.Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 38700
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20130529-080045422
- Created
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2013-05-30Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2019-10-03Created from EPrint's last_modified field