Pious Resolutions: Humanist Poetry, Commonplace Collecting, and Student Interaction at the University of Wittenberg in 1586

Kiss, Farkas Gábor (2024) Pious Resolutions: Humanist Poetry, Commonplace Collecting, and Student Interaction at the University of Wittenberg in 1586. In: Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies (Leuven 2022). (2024). Brill, Leiden, pp. 405-415. ISBN 9789004695573

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Abstract

This paper analyses the Carmen in commendationem Christianae pietatis (Song in praise of Christian piety) of Georgius Caposius (Kaposi), written in 1584. Caposius published this poem while he was a student at the University of Wittenberg, and dedicated it to his patrons in Hungary. After analyzing the structure and the rhetorical genre of the poem (called “fictive hymn” by Menander Rhetor and Julius Caesar Scaliger), I focused on the thematic elements of this encomium, which are commonplace examples taken from the Bible and ancient history. I have demonstrated that the Biblical exempla cited in the poem closely follow the Biblical commonplace collections of Augustin Marlorat (1575) and Christoph Obenheim (1576). I claim that Caposius’ selection of these sources might have been influenced by his fellow student, Isaac Fegyverneki (Fegvernekinus), who was collecting Biblical commonplaces from these two sources in these years, and published them in his Enchiridion locorum communium theologicorum in 1586. Thus, this carmen suggests a close collaboration between fellow students at the Wittenberg university, while preparing an occasional poem.

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