Johannes Susenbrot

Title page of the “Grammaticae artis institutio”, Leipzig 1539 edition

Former Latin school in Ravensburg

Johannes Susenbrot (also Hans Susenbrot , Susenbrat or Sausenbrat , Latinized Ioannes Susenbrotus ; * 1484 or 1485 in Wangen im Allgäu ; † probably 1542 in Ravensburg ) was a German Latin teacher and textbook author.

Born in the Free Imperial City of Wangen, Susenbrot studied at the Universities of Vienna and Basel and taught from 1506 in Leutkirch im Allgäu , from 1508 in Pfullendorf and 1512–1519 in Schaffhausen . After stations in Wangen and Basel , he became a Latin teacher at the Latin school in Ravensburg in 1522 . In 1525 he went back to Pfullendorf, but after a while returned to Ravensburg. In addition to the urban youth, he also taught distinguished students, including Counts von Fürstenberg , Zollern and Lupfen and many nobles, including two Ratzenrieder members of the Humpis family, who became rich as Ravensburger merchants .

Susenbrot wrote several Latin works in Ravensburg, including the Latin textbook Grammaticae artis institutio . His rhetoric textbook Epitome troporum defines 132 rhetorical tropes and figures and backs them up with excerpts from ancient literature as well as references to ancient and contemporary works on rhetoric.

Susenbrot grew up in the Catholic faith and remained faithful to it throughout his life. In April 1541 he applied to the city's magistrate for a traditional “cloister” to be undertaken in the nearby Weingarten Abbey on the next day of Mary , due to the plague from which more than 1,000 residents of the city had died . The council accepted the proposal, but demanded that no one be forced to make this pilgrimage.

In 1542 Susenbrot was struck down from behind by a drunken cooper named Konrad Jäck in Ravensburg with a butt and later died of the injuries sustained in this way. In his original feud , the perpetrator had to swear never to enter Ravensburg again and was expelled from the city.

Susenbrot's textbooks carried the author's name to schools in Europe. Even William Shakespeare seems the book Epitome troporum to have known, since he relies several times on the fact-to-find examples. Susenbrot was considered a typical schoolmaster in England - on March 12, 1615, students at Cambridge Trinity College played a Latin comedy presumably written by John Chappell with the title Susenbrotus, or Fortunia to the English King James I in Royston . In 1660 the Epitome was recommended as a school book by an English teacher.

Works

• Grammaticae artis institutio , Schumann, Leipzig 1539; further editions
• Scholae christianae epigrammatum libri duo, ex variis Christianorum poetis excerpti, ac iam à multis mendis repurgati in usum Christianorum adulescentulorum , Brylinger, Basel 1541 (collected Christian poems)
• Epitome Troporvm Ac Schematvm Et Grammaticorum & Rhetorum: ad Authores tum prophanos tum sacros intelligendos non minus utilis quàm necessaria , Froschauer , Tiguri 1541? and other editions, in England from 1562, e.g. B. in Kyngston, London 1576, last edited, translated and commented by Joseph Xavier Brennan, Urbana IL 1953 ( table of contents )
• Methodus octo partium orationis una cum formulis declinandi nomina ac coniugandi verba, pueris nuper musarum adyta ingressis cognitu cum primis necessaria , Froschauer, Tiguri (Zurich) 1565

literature

• Thomas Whitfield Baldwin: William Shakspere's Small Latine and Lesse Greeke . University of Illinois Press, Urbana IL 1944
• Joseph Xavier Brennan: Joannes Susenbrotus. A forgotten Humanist , in: PMLA Publications of the modern language association of America , December 1960, Vol. LXXV, No. 5
• Joseph Xavier Brennan: The Grammaticae Artis Institutio of Joannes Susenbrotus, the Epitome Troporum ac Schematum etc. In: Papers of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia , 14/1961
• Alfons Dreher : History of the imperial city of Ravensburg and its landscape from its beginnings to its mediatization in 1802 . Volume 2. Dorn, Ravensburg 1972 ISBN 3-87437-085-2 , p. 769
• Wilhelm Fox: Hans Susenbrot, a missing Swabian humanist and Latin schoolmaster , in: Diözesan-Archiv von Schwaben , Volume 25, year 1907, pp. 8–12 ( PDF ).
• Tobias Hafner : History of the City of Ravensburg. From their sources and document collections . Dorn, Ravensburg 1887, p. 481 (there reference to the original feud of the cooper Konrad Jäck in Perg. Urk. 1316, Ravensburg City Archives)
• Connie McQuillen (Ed.): A comedy called Susenbrotus . University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 1997, ISBN 0-472-10756-9 ( excerpts from Google Books )
• Ulrich-Dieter Oppitz: A Sachsenspiegel fragment in Ravensburg and Johann Susenbrot , in: Ulm and Oberschwaben , vol. 51, vol. 2000, pp. 216-219, here pp. 217f.
• Thomas Zinsmaier: Johannes Susenbrotus' Epitome troporum ac schematum - an early modern literary rhetoric , in: Wolfgang Kofler / Karlheinz Töchterle (eds.): The ancient rhetoric in the European intellectual history. Innsbruck / Vienna / Bozen 2005, pp. 250–269.

Web links

• Epitome in the London 1576 edition by Gallica
• Gregor Kalivoda: Rhetoric Lexicography (PDF; 122 kB)