Rhodomanologia - Digital Edition of the Greek and Latin Poetry by Laurentius Rhodoman until 1588

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Thomas Gärtner; Professor Dr. Patrick Sahle; Professor Dr. Stefan Weise
• Subject Area: Greek and Latin Philology ; German Medieval Studies (Medieval German Literature)
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 461456140

Laurentius Rhodoman (1545‒1606) was, according to his contemporaries and modern researchers, one of the best Hellenists and poets in ancient Greek during the Renaissance in Germany. He further integrated most consequently the Lutheran Reformation into a philhellenic poetics and a consistent education programme. Therefore this research project, subsequent to the recent quincentenary of the reformation, aims at making his hitherto mostly neglected literary oeuvre accessible for the public by the means of a digital edition and a selective book edition.Rhodoman was headmaster at several grammar schools in Schwerin, Lüneburg, Walkenried and Stralsund as well as professor at the Universities of Jena and Wittenberg. His literary work consists of an immense body of mostly ancient Greek poetry, notably in the Ionic dialect of epics, which should serve – according to Rhodoman himself – as linguistic training for his pupils. By the means of the edition, a translation and short explicatory notes, his poetic oeuvre will receive for the first time full philological treatment and will give a specific testimony to the functional use of linguistic knowledge for the religiously ideological education within the period of confessionalisation. The exploration of Rhodoman’s poetry therefore combines various research areas, such as editorial technique, classical reception studies, Renaissance studies, ecclesiastical history and historical pedagogics, in a unique way. His poetry is of excellent quality with regard to his command of the Greek poetic language. Unlike anyone else he developed a specific German–Hellenic picture of the Res publica litterarum through the combination of his philhellenic humanism and reformatory pedagogics.We apply for the editorial exploration of the first part of Rhodoman’s poetry which is about one-half of his entire poetic output, including all works written partly during his own education at Ilfeld and Rostock, but mainly during his rectorship at Lüneburg and Walkenried up to 1588. These early works include all poems on Luther and the reformation but also his major mythological poems. Most of the texts were printed in Rhodoman’s lifetime. There is only one major theological poem which is transmitted by two manuscripts at Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek in Weimar. Special achievements of this project will be – next to the actual edition of Rhodoman’s Greek and Latin poems – the exploration and visualisation of their intertextual relations and dependencies as well as a full German translation which will make them accessible to a wider circle of researchers and interested persons alike for the first time.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants