ConradCeltes, a German poet of some renown,‘born in 1459, made the great discoverythat the alphabet could be substituted in

CELTES, KONRAD (1459-1508), German humanist and Latin poet, the son of a vintner named Pickel (of which Celtes is the Greek translation), was born at Wipfeld near Schweinfurt. He early ran away from home to avoid being set to his father’s trade, and at Heidelberg was lucky enough to find a generous patron in Johann von Dalberg and a teacher in Agricola. After the death of the latter (1485) Celtes led the wandering life of a scholar of the Renaissance, visiting most of the countries of the continent, teaching in various universities, and everywhere establishing learned societies on the model of the academy of Pomponius Laetus at Rome. Among these was the Sodalitas litteraria Rhenana or Celtica at Mainz (1491). In 1486 he published his first book, Ars versificandi et carminum, which created an immense sensation and gained him the honour of being crowned as the first poet laureate of Germany, the ceremony being performed by the emperor Frederick III. at the diet of Nuremberg in 1487. In 1497 he was appointed by the emperor Maximilian I. professor of poetry and rhetoric at Vienna, and in 1502 was made head of the new Collegium Poetarum et Mathematicorum, with the right of conferring the laureateship. He did much to introduce system into the methods of teaching, to purify the Latin of learned intercourse, and to further the study of the classics, especially the Greek. But he was more than a mere classicist of the Renaissance. He was keenly interested in history and topography, especially in that of his native country. It was he who first unearthed (in the convent of St Emmeran at Regensburg) the remarkable Latin poems of the nun Hrosvitha of Gandersheim, of which he published an edition (Nuremberg, 1501), the historical poem Ligurinus sive de rebus gestis Frederici primi imperatoris libri x. (Augsburg, 1507), and the celebrated map of the Roman empire known as the Tabula Peutingeriana (after Konrad Peutinger, to whom he left it). He projected a great work on Germany; but of this only the Germania generalis and an historical work in prose, De origine, situ, moribus et institutis Nurimbergae libettus, saw the light. As a writer of Latin verse Celtes far surpassed any of his predecessors. He composed odes, elegies, epigrams, dramatic pieces and an unfinished epic, the Theodoriceis. His epigrams, edited by Hartfelder, were published at Berlin in 1881. His editions of the classics are now, of course, out of date. He died at Vienna on the 4th of February 1508. For a full list of Celtes’s works see Engelbert Klüpfel, De vita et scriptis Conradi Celtis (2 vols., Freiburg, 1827); also Johann Aschbach, Die früheren Wanderjahre des Conrad Celtes (Vienna, 1869); Hartmann, Konrad Celtes in Nürnberg (Nuremberg, 1889).

Similar lists of 100 words had been in circulation well before Celtis, however, those were not alphabetically designed.

In the Ars memorandi noua secretissima, published in 1500 or 1501,20 Jodocus Weczdorff de Triptis (Weimar) inserted an alphabetical list of words, similar to that of Celtis, but he simply suggested that it could be used as a memory house without any scope for our private associations. Moreover, the alphabetic table of Celtis was included in the famous Margarita philosophica nova of Gregor Reisch, which was probably the most popular handbook of the artes scholars in the fi rst two decades of the 16th century.

Although Celtis rejected the use of such fi gurative let-ters and he promoted his own alphabetic-associative system instead, still, Cusanus copied both methods in his treatise. However, he only copies the words of the mne-monic alphabet of Celtis but not the associative method itself. The fi rst fi ve elements of Celtis (in the work of Cusanus: abbas, eques, illuminator, organista, usurarius) are not associative topoi anymore, but only the scheme of a ready-made mental book (liber mentalis).

The criticism of Celtis turns against the entire tradition of 15th century art of memory, but particularly against the teachings of Jacobus Publicius,11 whose Oratoriae artis epito-mata he had excerpted both in his summary of the Ciceronian rhetoric and the treatise on letter writing.

Celtis advises his readers to memorise things with the aid of the alphabet, because by “keeping the natural order” of the letters (servata earundem naturali ordine), the elements or members of our material can be easily retained by memory. According to the ideas presented by Celtis, under each letter of the alphabet one should memorise fi ve words that begin with the same letter, and these could be the images that belong to the locus, i.e. to the letter itself.

Konrad Celtis, Epitoma in utramque Ciceronis rhetoricam cum arte memoratiua noua, et modo epi-stolandi utilissimo (Ingolstadt: [s.n.], 1492), 14r-v. EK Inc. 444.

One of the most interesting new treatises is contained in the Epitoma in utramque Cic-eronis rhetoricam of Cornad Celtis, the ‘German archhumanist’