An Itinerant Sheep, and The Origins of The Livonians: Friedrich Menius's Syntagma De Origine Livonorum (1635)

Abstract

During the 1630s, Friedrich Menius, professor of history at the University of Dorpat, was the first scholar to investigate the ethnic origins and the ancestry of Estonians and Latvians at an academic level. His treatise, entitled Syntagma de origine Livonorum, has nevertheless been largely ignored by later generations. This is mainly due to Menius's bad reputation as an academic adventurer and notorious troublemaker. The present paper intends to examine Menius's theories, place them in the context of early modern intellectual history, and interpret them as an expression of the worldview and mindset of a seventeenth-century Livonian scholar.