Heinrich Glarean’s Books: The Intellectual World of a Sixteenth-Century Musical Humanist ed. by Iain Fenlon, Inga Mai Groote (review)

When Glareanus lectured on Suetonius’ lives of the Caesars in 1554 at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau, at the age of 66, he startled his students by opening with a song: Grates nunc omnes reddamus Domino Deo (p. 257), which he included with the music in his volume of Annotationes published in 1560. The Christmas sequence was perhaps meant as an innoculation against the unsavoury lives of the Caesars, as opposed to his lectures on the morally impeccable Livy, which he also opened with a song, in this case his autobiographical poem, praising Cologne, Freiburg, the Emperor Charles, and his brother Ferdinand (ibid.). Glareanus’s musical inclinations surface throughout the present volume, though the editors’ objective is to place him in the context in which he is best known to non-musicologists, as a professor of history and ‘poetics’ (classics) at the University of Freiburg, where he taught and published editions of and annotations on classical authors (including Livy, Suetonius, Horace, Ovid, Sallust, Terence, Cicero, Homer, Lucan, Valerius Maximus, and Curtius Rufus). He was in fact multiply talented: before 1520 (when he was 32) he had published a book on the geography of Switzerland, an introduction to music (Isagoge in musicen, to which he characteristically gave a Greek title), two books of Latin verse, an introduction to grammar, and a commentary on Tacitus’ Germania. Subsequently he published books on arithmetic, chronology, and weights and measures, and a curious sermon on the Lord’s Supper.

The focus in this collection of essays is thus not on Glareanus the music theorist but Glareanus the teacher and thinker, as reflected in his publications and also in his extensive library, many books of which have been identified (a list appears on pp. 312–34, and the collection is discussed in a chapter by Iain Fenlon and Inga Mai Groote). Glareanus was losing his eyesight in later years and sold his library before he died to Johann Egolf von Knöringen, later bishop of Augsburg; his collection in turn went to the Jesuit University in Ingolstadt and eventually made its way to the university library in Munich. Since Glareanus was in the habit of annotating his books, his handwriting is easily identifiable; moreover, many of his scholarly acquaintances sent him books with personal dedications, including Erasmus, his lifelong friend, who gave him the 1533 edition of his Adagiorum opus. Proverbs were another of Glareanus’s interests; he heavily annotated the 1515 edition and corresponded with Erasmus on needed corrections, but the letter did not reach him in time for their incorporation in the next revision. His discussion of one famous adage is taken up by Andrea Horz (‘A Dorio ad Phrygium: Glarean and the Adagia of Erasmus’).

Much of the literature on Glareanus has been in German, and it is the virtue of this book, which draws on the papers of two seminars, to make his wider world more accessible to English-language readers. Half the articles deal with non-musical topics: Barbara Mahlmann-Bauer offers an illuminating discussion of Glareanus’s initial sympathy with Luther and his increasing discomfort with the reformers in Basel, which led him to follow his friend Erasmus to the University of Freiburg im Breisgau; he feared for the future of humanist education in the increasingly bitter partisan environment in Basel, but also the loss of Latin ecclesiastical song. Sparks of his indignation leap out of the page in his annotations in Latin and German on Luther’s De captivitate Babylonica. Mahlmann-Bauer also discusses, in another chapter, Glareanus’s ‘Concio de coena Domini’, a broadsheet published without date or printer, in which Glareanus sides more with the Zurich reformers than Luther in his belief in the therapeutic effects of communion. Max Engammare discusses Glareanus’s annotations in his Bible; not surprisingly, his attention was...