The Poetic Works of Helius Eobanus Hessus: Volume 5: A Veritable Proteus, 1524-1528

As the University of Erfurt collapsed in the early 1520s, Hessus faced losing his livelihood. To cope, he imagined himself a shape-changing Proteus. Transforming first into a lawyer, then a physician, he finally became a teacher at the Nuremberg academy organized by Philip Melanchthon. Volume 5 traces this story via Hessus’s poems of 1524-1528: ＂Some Rules for Preserving Good Health＂ (1524; 1531), with attached ＂Praise of Medicine＂ and two sets of epigrams; ＂Three Elegies＂ (1526), two praising the Nuremberg school and one attacking a criticaster; ＂Venus Triumphant＂ (1527), with poems on Joachim Camerarius’s wedding; ＂Against the Hypocrisy of the Monastic Habit＂ (1527), with four Psalm paraphrases; and ＂Seventeen Bucolic Idyls＂ (1528), updating the ＂Bucolicon＂ of 1509 and adding five idyls.

Harry Vredeveld, Ph.D. (1970) in German, Princeton University, is Professor Emeritus at The Ohio State University, Columbus. Besides the Hessus edition and numerous articles on Neo-Latin authors, he has edited Erasmus’s poems for Collected Works (1993) and Opera omnia (1995).