KONRAD

MUTIAN (1471-1526)  , German humanist, was born in Homberg on the 15th of October 1471 of well-to-do parents named Mut, and was subsequently known as Konrad Mutianus Rufus, from his red hair . At Deventer under Alexander Hegius he had Erasmus as schoolfellow; proceeding(1486) to the university of Erfurt, he took the master's degree in 1492 . From 1495 he travelled in Italy, taking the doctor's degree in canon law at Bologna . Returning in 1502, the landgraf of Hesse promoted him to high office . The post was not congenial; he resigned it (1503) for a small salary as canonicus in Gotha . Mutian was a man of great influence in a select circle especially connected with the university of Erfurt, and known as the Mutianiscl er Bund, which included Eoban Hess, Crotus Rubeanus, Justus Jonas and other leaders of independent thought . He had no public ambition; except in correspondence, and as an epigrammatist, he was no writer, but he furnished ideas to those who wrote . He may deserve the title which has been given him as "precursor of the Reformation," in so far as he desired the reform of the Church, but not the establishment of a rival . Like Erasmus, he was with Luther in his early stage, but deserted him in his later development . Though he had personally no hand in it, the Epistolae obscurorum virorum (due especially to Crotus Rubeanus) was the outcome of the Reuchlinists in his Bund . He died at Gotha on the 3oth of March (Good Friday) 1526 . See F .

W . Kampschulte,

Die Universitdt Erfurt (1858–186o) ; C . Krause, Eobanus Hessus (1879); L . Geiger, in Allgemeine Deutsche Biog . (1886) ; C . Krause, Der Briefwechsel des Mutianus Rufus (1885) ; another collection by K . GiIlert (189o) . (A .