Gebwiler, Hieronymus

(ca. 1473-1545)

   Alsatian humanist and schoolmaster. Born at Kaysersberg and educated at Basel and Paris (B.A. 1493, M.A. 1495), in 1501 he became headmaster of the famous Latin school at Sélestat, where he attracted several pupils who later became influential humanists, including Beatus Rhenanus, Bonifacius Amerbach of Basel, and his own eventual successor as headmaster, Johannes Witz (Sapidus). In 1509 he moved to Strasbourg as head-master of the cathedral school, being determined to make the school into an ideal classical Gymnasium. He abandoned the traditional Latin grammar book of the Middle Ages, the Doctrinale of Alexander de Villa Dei, and adopted a new humanist grammar by Johannes Cochlaeus. Gebwiler published editions of the Epistles of Horace and comedies of Plautus for use in teaching Latin, as well as an annotated edition of the commentaries on Aristotle's Physics by the French humanist Lefèvre d'Etaples and an edition of the historical work De inventorions rerum / On the Inventors of Things by the Italian humanist Polydore Vergil. He opposed the Protestant Reformation, and when the movement won control of Strasbourg in 1525 he left to become director of a school in Haguenau.