Greek History in the Early-Modern Classroom: Lectures on Herodotus by Johannes Rosa and School Notes by Jacques Bongars (Jena, 1568)

Ellis, Anthony (2020). Greek History in the Early-Modern Classroom: Lectures on Herodotus by Johannes Rosa and School Notes by Jacques Bongars (Jena, 1568). In: Constantinidou, Natasha; Lamers, Han (eds.) Receptions of Hellenism in Early Modern Europe. Brill's Studies in Intellectual History: Vol. 303 (pp. 113-140). Leiden: Brill 10.1163/9789004402461_007

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In 1568 Johannes Rosa (1532–1571)—Professor of History, Ethics, Logic, and Theology at the Lutheran University of Jena—delivered a set of lectures on Herodotus. Rosa never published anything on Herodotus but one of his stu- dents, a fourteen-year old French Huguenot by the name of Jacques Bongars (1554–1612), assiduously copied down Rosa’s words, bound them with the rest of his school-notes, and kept the volume throughout his itinerant diplomatic career. They survive today in manuscript at the Burgerbibliothek in Bern along with the rest of Bongars’s Nachlass.1 Rosa was not a renowned Hellenist, nor did his lectures attract much attention. As such, their chance survival gives us an opportunity to look inside a fairly unremarkable classroom in Lutheran Germany, and to ask how and why young students at a late sixteenth-century Lutheran university studied ancient Greek history.

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