The Muses in Mourning: Identity and Classicism in Calvinist Heidelberg

Abstract

Abstract This paper explores the attitude of sixteenth-century Protestant reformers towards Renaissance humanism and classical learning by examining an eclogue composed in Doric Greek by the Heidelberg arts professor Simon Stenius. Reading Stenius’ eclogue against his classical models, Theocritus (Idylls 1 and 7) and Homer’s Phaeacian narrative (Odyssey, Bks 5–7), it points out the meaning involved in the way Stenius characterizes the dismissal of the Calvinist faculty from Heidelberg upon the accession of the unsympathetic Ludwig VI. It notes how Stenius uses the pastoral genre to infuse his own work with an air of displacement and how he transposes the image of the shipwrecked Odysseus onto his own exiles in order to imply their loss of identity. When this loss of identity is soon given further definition by the ecphrasis of a rustic cup which inverts the cup described in Theocritus Idyll 1, Stenius’ attitude to classical learning is revealed: The cup not only signifies a silencing of the Muses, but – most importantly – it joins the Muses together with the Heidelberg Protestants in a mutual association of mourning. The sum total is the location of the voice and identity of the Heidelberg Calvinists within the highest registers of classical literature.