Magister Paulus Niavis: Epistole breues, Epistole mediocres, Epistole longiores

Rand H. Johnson’s edition of the Latin letters of the late fifteenth-century German schoolmaster Paulus Niavis brings to light the life and thought of a teachers whose career spanned an era of radical curriculum reform in the arts faculties at schools and universities, where the centuries-old program of scholasticism was being replaced by a program based on the Italian studia humanitatis. Niavis’s letters, written after his academic conversion, reflect the blending of Italian and German humanism. While Niavis expresses praise and admiration for classical Latinity, his letters also offer examples from late antique, medieval, and scholastic sources. Johnson’s careful treatment of Niavis’s thoughts offers us a window into the methods of a humanist forerunner and pioneer in his native Saxony. Niavis’s consideration of his own cultural moment represents a particular insight into the great educational changes on the ground at an important moment in the history of the German classroom.