BEATUS

See also:

• BEATUS RHENANUS (1485-1547)

RHENANUS (1485-1547)  , German humanist, was born in 1485 at Schlettstadt in Alsace, where his father, named Bild, a native of Rheinau (hence the surname Rhenanus), was a prosperous butcher . He received his early education at the' famous Latin school of Schlettstadt, and afterwards (1503) went to Paris, where he came under the influence of Jacobus Faber Stapulensis, an eminent Aristotelian . In 1511 he removed to Basel, where he became intimate with Desiderius Erasmus, and took an active share in the publishing enterprises of Joannes Froben (q.v.) . In 1526 he returned to Schlettstadt, and devoted himself to a life of learned leisure, enlivened with epistolary and personal intercourse with Erasmus (the printing of whose more important works he personally superintended) and many other scholars of his time . He died at Strassburg on the loth of July 1547 . His earliest publication was a biography of Geiler of Kaisers-berg (1510) . Of his subsequent works the principal are Rerum Germanicarum Libri III . (1531), and editions of Velleius Palerculus (ed. princeps, from a MS. discovered by himself, 1522); Tacitus (,51q, exclusive of the Histories); Livius (1535); and Erasmus (with a life, 9 vols. fol., 1540-41) . See A . Horawitz, Beatus Rhenanus (1872), and by the same, Des Beatus Rhenanus literarische Tatigkeit (2 vols., 1872) ; also the notice by R . Hartfelder in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographic .