The Arch-Humanist

The name Conrad Celtis is not one that you’ll find in most standard books on the history of mathematics, which is not surprising as he was a Renaissance humanist scholar best known in his lifetime as a poet. However, Celtis played an important role in the history of mathematics and is a good example of the fact that if you really wish to study the evolution of the mathematical sciences it is necessary to leave the narrow confines of the mathematics books.

Conrad Celtis: Gedächtnisbild von Hans Burgkmair dem Älteren, 1507
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Born Konrad Bickel or Pyckell, (Conrad Celtis was his humanist pseudonym) the son of a winemaker, in Franconian Wipfield am Main near Schweinfurt on 1 February 1459, he obtained his BA at the University of Cologne in 1497. Unsatisfied with the quality of tuition in Cologne he undertook the first of many study journeys, which typified his life, to Buda in 1482, where he came into contact with the humanist circle on the court of Matthias Corvinus, the earlier patron of Regiomontanus. 1484 he continued his studies at the University of Heidelberg specialising in poetics and rhetoric, learning Greek and Hebrew and humanism as a student of Rudolf Agricola, a leading Dutch early humanist scholar. Celtis obtained his MA in 1485. 1486 found him underway in Italy, where he continued his humanist studies at the leading Italian universities and in conversation with many leading humanist scholars. Returning to Germany he taught poetics at the universities of Erfurt, Rostock and Leipzig and on 18 April 1487 he was crowned Poet Laureate by Emperor Friedrich III in Nürnberg during the Reichstag. In Nürnberg he became part of the circle of humanists that produced the Nürnberger Chronicle to which he contributed the section on the history and geography of Nürnberg. It is here that we see the central occupation of Celtis’ life that brought him into contact with the Renaissance mathematical sciences.

During his time in Italy he suffered under the jibes of his Italian colleges who said that whilst Italy had perfect humanist credentials being the inheritors of the ancient Roman culture, Germany was historically a land of uncultured barbarians. This spurred Celtis on to prove them wrong. He set himself the task of researching and writing a history of Germany to show that its culture was the equal of Italy’s. Celtis’ concept of history, like that of his Renaissance contemporaries, was more a mixture of our history and geography the two disciplines being regarded as two sides of the same coin. Geography being based on Ptolemaeus’ Geographia (Geographike Hyphegesis), which of course meant cartography, a branch of the mathematical sciences.

Continuing his travels in 1489 Celtis matriculated at the University of Kraków specifically to study the mathematical sciences for which Kraków had an excellent reputation. A couple of years later Nicolaus Copernicus would learn the fundamentals of mathematics and astronomy there. Wandering back to Germany via Prague and Nürnberg Celtis was appointed professor of poetics and rhetoric at the University of Ingolstadt in 1491/92. Ingolstadt was the first German university to have a dedicated chair for mathematics, established around 1470 to teach medical students astrology and the necessary mathematics and astronomy to cast a horoscope. When Celtis came to Ingolstadt there were the professor of mathematics was Andreas Stiborius (born Stöberl 1464–1515) who was followed by his best student Johannes Stabius (born Stöberer before 1468­–1522) both of whom Celtis convinced to support him in his cartographic endeavours.

In 1497 Celtis received a call to the University of Vienna where he established a Collegium poetarum et mathematicorum, that is a college for poetry and mathematics, with Stiborius, whom he had brought with him from Ingolstadt, as the professor for mathematics. In 1502 he also brought Stabius, who had succeeded Stiborius as professor in Ingolstadt, and his star student Georg Tanstetter to Vienna. Stiborius, Stabius and Tanstetter became what is known, to historians of mathematics, as the Second Viennese School of Mathematics, the First Viennese School being Johannes von Gmunden, Peuerbach and Regiomontanus, in the middle of the fifteenth century. Under these three Vienna became a major European centre for the mathematical sciences producing many important mathematicians the most notable being Peter Apian.

Although not a mathematician himself Conrad Celtis, the humanist poet, was the driving force behind one of the most important German language centres for Renaissance mathematics and as such earns a place in the history of mathematics. A dedicated humanist, wherever he went on his travels Celtis would establish humanist societies to propagate humanist studies and it was this activity that earned him the German title of Der Erzhumanist, in English the Arch Humanist. Celtis died in 1508 but his Collegium poetarum et mathematicorum survived him by twenty-two years, closing first in 1530