Luder, Peter

(1415-1472)

   One of the "wandering poets," educated Germans who moved about the country in the decades after 1450 teaching poetry or other literary subjects relevant to Renaissance humanism, and trying to create a Renaissance culture in Germany. He sought to inspire young Germans to emulate their Italian contemporaries by abandoning traditional medieval university subjects and mastering classical Latin style and literature. Educated at Heidelberg, about 1434 Luder went to Italy and studied humanistic subjects at the University of Ferrara under Guarino da Verona. He lived in Italy for nearly 20 years before returning to Germany in 1456.

   Luder began his migratory teaching at Heidelberg that year by announcing that the subject of his course would be the studia humanitatis, "that is, the books of the [ancient] poets, orators, and historians." He announced that he intended to restore the purity of the Latin language, which had fallen into medieval "barbarism." Subsequently he lectured at Ulm and the universities of Erfurt and Leipzig. After returning to Italy and completing a doctorate in medicine, he settled in Basel, where he lectured on both poetry and medicine and served as town physician. He acted as a diplomatic representative for the duke of the Tyrol and in 1470 lectured at Vienna.

   The peripatetic nature of Luder's career may well have been due to his excessive drinking, his love affairs (thoroughly advertised in his Latin poems), and the hostility of conservative faculty to a teacher who challenged the scholastic tradition, but the main cause was probably that since the new subjects did not form part of the curriculum of studies required for degrees, students could not afford to spend much of their time attending lectures on such topics. Hence the potential public for such lectures at any one place was limited, and after teaching for a term or two, he had exhausted the paying audience and had to move on to another place.