ready for university at thirteen or fourteen. A few became assistants to the teacher and stayed on until
the age of twenty.
Though Latin continued to be the language of bureaucracy, ecclesiastical affairs and scholarship in most
of Europe until well into the seventeenth century, by the early sixteenth century the vernacular languages
were gaining ground. In 1521, Martin Luther began publication of his German Bible; in 1526, William
Tyndale brought out his English translation of the Bible in Cologne and Worms,
having been forced to
leave England under threat of death; in 1530, in both Sweden and Denmark, a government decree
prescribed that the Bible was to be read in church in the vernacular. In Rhenanus’s days, however, the
prestige and official use of Latin continued not only in the Catholic Church, where priests were required
to conduct services in Latin, but also in universities such as the Sorbonne, which Rhenanus wished to
attend. Latin schools were therefore still in great demand.
Schools, Latin and otherwise, provided a certain degree of order in the chaotic existence of students in
the late Middle Ages. Because scholarship was seen as the seat of a “third power” positioned between the
Church and the State, students were granted a number of official privileges from the twelfth century on.
In 1158, the German Holy Roman emperor Frederick Barbarossa exempted them from the jurisdiction of
secular authorities except in serious criminal cases, and guaranteed them safe conduct when travelling. A
privilege accorded by King Philippe Auguste of France in 1200 forbade the Provost of Paris to imprison
them under any excuse.
And from Henry III onwards, each English monarch guaranteed secular immunity
to the students at Oxford.
To attend school, students had to pay tax-fees, and they were taxed according to their
bursa, a unit based
on their weekly bed and board. If they were unable to pay, they had to swear that they were “without
means of support” and sometimes they were granted fellowships assured by subventions. In the fifteenth
century, poor students accounted for 18 per cent of the student body in Paris, 25 per cent in Vienna and
19 per cent in Leipzig. Privileged but penniless, anxious to preserve their rights but uncertain about how
to make a living, thousands of students roamed the land, living off alms and larceny. A few survived by
pretending to be fortune-tellers or magicians,
selling miraculous trinkets, announcing eclipses or
catastrophes, conjuring up spirits, predicting the future, teaching prayers to rescue souls from purgatory,
giving out recipes to guard crops against hail and cattle against disease. Some claimed to be descendants
of the Druids and boasted that they had entered the Mountain of Venus, where they had been initiated
into the secret arts; as a sign of this, they wore capes of yellow netting over their shoulders. Many went
from town to town following an older cleric whom they served and from whom they sought instruction;
the teacher was known as a
bacchante (not from “Bacchus” but from the verb
bacchari, “to roam”), and
his disciples were called
Schützen (protectors) in German or
bejaunes (dunces) in French. Only those who
were determined to become clerics or to enter some form of civil service would
seek the means to leave
the road and enter a learning establishment like the Latin school in Sélestat.
The students who attended the Latin school in Sélestat came from different parts of Alsace and Lorraine,
and even farther, from Switzerland. Those who belonged to rich bourgeois or noble families (as was the
case with Beatus Rhenanus) could choose to be lodged in the boarding-house run by the rector and his
wife, or to stay as paying guests at the house of their private tutor, or even at one of the local inns. But
those who had sworn that they were too poor to pay their fees had great difficulties in finding room and
board. The Swiss Thomas Platter, who arrived at the school in 1495 at the age of eighteen “knowing
nothing, unable even to read [the best-known of medieval grammar primers, the
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