satirical writer, poet, and a pre-Tridentine Roman Catholic controversialist.
Murner was born in Oberehnheim (Obernai), Alsace on 24 December 1475
and died in the same place in 1537. After frequenting the Latin school in
Strasbourg and entering the Franciscan Order, he was ordained priest in 1494.
Between 1495 and 1498, when he obtained his M.A., he studied at Freiburg im
Breisgau, where one of his teachers was Jakob Locher, the humanist who, not
unlike Salutati, saw theology as rooted in pagan poetics, and who abhorred
scholasticism because of the sterility of its methods. Locher thought that both
theology and poetry had as their ultimate goal exhorting men to live virtu-
ously. He considered Homer as the best of theologians and Augustine par-
ticularly as the best of poets and the greatest imitator of poetic eloquence and
pagan ethics. From 1498 untilc.1500, Murner frequented several universities
(Cologne, Paris, Krakow, Prague, Vienna, Basel), completing his studies in
poetics and in natural philosophy. In 1506, he was made Doctor of Theology
in Freiburg im Breisgau, and in 1519, he became doctorutriusque iurisin
Basel. In 1505, he was crowned poet laureate by Emperor Maximilian I.
Fromc.1501 onwards Murner lived in Strasbourg, serving his order as
teacher and preacher. He initially came into public view over his literary
quarrel with the humanist Jakob Wimpfeling and his circle, who ran a
humanist school which rivalled the Franciscan establishment where Murner
taught. It was here that the latter published in 1503 hisHonestorum poetarum
condigna laudatio, impudicorum vero miranda castigatio(The appropriate
praise of honest poets and a strong castigation of immodest ones), a reply to
the attacks of Wimpfeling and his circle, who accused him of lacking humanist
culture. Murner protested, saying that all he objected to was poetry that might
be offensive to God and not poetry in general. It was also in Strasbourg that he
published in 1509 hisDe augustiniana hieronymianaque reformatione poe-
tarum(The reformation of poets by Augustine and Jerome), which upheld the
same view. Dedicated to Locher, it reproduced the text of the famousJerome’s
Dream, in which the church father recounts a‘dream’, or rather a hallucin-
atory state brought on by a bout of high fever. In the‘dream’, which probably
took place around 376AD, he was taken up before God’s tribunal to be judged,
reprimanded, and whipped by an angel for his excessive love of the language of
Cicero at the expense of the language of Scripture, especially of the Old
Testament, which he had found‘barbarous’prior to his vision. He was accused
of being a Ciceronian rather than a Christian. This caused him to revise
fundamentally his view of sacred and profane eloquence.^16 Murner published
theReformatiofor similar reasons that he had published theLaudatioin 1503:
as a warning to Wimpfeling but perhaps also to Locher and others not to rely
excessively on pagan rhetoric, while remaining very careful to point out that
(^16) On this see among others Neil Adkin, https://ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/
13043/illinoisclassica201995ADKIN.pdf?sequence=2 (accessed on 19 March 2013).
38 Irena Backus