Johann Reuchlin (; German: [ˈjoːhan ˈʁɔʏçlɪn]; 29 January 1455 – 30 June 1522), sometimes called Johannes, was a German Catholic humanist and a scholar of Greek and Hebrew, whose work also took him to modern-day Austria, Switzerland, Italy, and France. Most of Reuchlin's career centered on advancing German knowledge of Greek and Hebrew.
Johann Reuchlin was born at Pforzheim in the Black Forest in 1455, where his father was an administrative officer of the Dominican monastery. According to the fashion of the time, his name was graecized by his Italian friends into Capnion (Καπνίων), a nickname which Reuchlin used as a sort of transparent mask when he introduced himself as an interlocutor in the De Verbo Mirifico. He remained fond of his home town; he constantly calls himself Phorcensis, and in the De Verbo he ascribes to Pforzheim his inclination towards literature.
Here he began his Latin studies in the monastery school, and, though in 1470 he was for a short time at Freiburg, that university seems to have taught him little. Reuchlin's career as a scholar appears to have turned almost on an accident; his fine voice gained him a place in the household of Charles I, Margrave of Baden, and soon, having some reputation as a Latinist, he was chosen to accompany Frederick, the third son of the prince, to the University of Paris.
Frederick was some years his junior, and was destined for an ecclesiastical career. This new connection did not last long, but it determined the course of Reuchlin's life. He now began to learn Greek, which had been taught in the French capital since 1470, and he also attached himself to the leader of the Paris realists, Jean à Lapide (d. 1496), a worthy and learned man, whom he followed to the vigorous young University of Basel in 1474.
At Basel, Reuchlin took his master's degree in 1477 and began to lecture, teaching a more classical Latin than was then common in German schools, and explaining Aristotle in Greek. He continued his Greek studies at Basel under Andronicus Contoblacas. In Basel he made the acquaintance of the bookseller Johann Amerbach, for whom he prepared a Latin lexicon (Vocabularius Breviloquus, 1st edition, 1475–76), which ran through many editions. This first publication, and Reuchlin's account of his teaching at Basel in a letter to Cardinal Adrian (Adriano Castellesi) in February 1518, show that he had already found his life's work. He was a born teacher, and this work was not to be done mainly from the professor's chair.
By 1477, Reuchlin had left Basel to seek further Greek training with George Hermonymus in Paris, and to learn to write a fair Greek hand that he might support himself by copying manuscripts. And now he felt that he must choose a profession. His choice fell on law, and he was thus led to the great school of Orléans (1478), and finally to Poitiers, where he became licentiate in July 1481.
From Poitiers, Reuchlin went in December 1481 to Tübingen with the intention of becoming a teacher in the local university, but his friends recommended him to Count Eberhard of Württemberg, who was about to travel to Italy and required an interpreter. Reuchlin was selected for this post, and in February 1482 left Stuttgart for Florence and Rome. The journey lasted but a few months, but it brought the German scholar into contact with several learned Italians, especially at the Medicean Academy in Florence; his connection with the count became permanent, and after his return to Stuttgart he received important posts at Eberhard's court. About this time, he appears to have married, but little is known of his married life. He left no children, but in later years, his sister's grandson Philipp Melanchthon was like a son to him until the Reformation estranged them.
In 1490, he was again in Italy. Here he saw Pico della Mirandola, to whose Kabbalistic doctrines he afterward became heir, and made a friend of the pope's secretary, Jakob Questenberg, which was of service to him in his later troubles. Again in 1492 he was employed on an embassy to the emperor Frederick at Linz, and here he began to read Hebrew with the emperor's Jewish physician Jakob ben Jehiel Loans, whose instruction laid the basis of that thorough knowledge which Reuchlin afterward improved on his third visit to Rome in 1498 by the instruction of Obadja Sforno of Cesena. In 1494, his rising reputation was greatly enhanced by the publication of De Verbo Mirifico.
In 1496, Duke Eberhard I of Württemberg died, and enemies of Reuchlin had the ear of his successor, Duke Heinrich of Württemberg (formerly Heinrich Count of Württemberg-Mömpelgard). He was glad, therefore, hastily to follow the invitation of Johann von Dalberg (1445–1503), the scholarly bishop of Worms, and flee to Heidelberg, which was then the seat of the Rhenish Society. In this court of letters Reuchlin's appointed function was to make translations from the Greek authors, in which his reading was already extremely wide. Though Reuchlin had no public office as a teacher, he was for much of his life the real centre of all Greek and Hebrew teaching in Germany. To carry out this work he provided a series of aids for beginners and others. He never published a Greek grammar, but he had one in manuscript for use with his pupils, and also published several little elementary Greek books. Reuchlin, it may be noted, pronounced Greek as his native teachers had taught him to do, i.e., in the modern Greek fashion. This pronunciation, which he defends in De recta Latini Graecique sermonis pronuntiatione (1528), came to be known, in contrast to that used by Desiderius Erasmus, as the Reuchlinian.
At Heidelberg, Reuchlin had many private pupils, among whom Franz von Sickingen is the best-known name. With the monks he had never been liked; at Stuttgart, his great adversary was the Augustinian Conrad Holzinger. On this man he took a scholar's revenge in his first Latin comedy Sergius, a satire on worthless monks and false relics. Through Dalberg, Reuchlin came into contact with Philip, Count Palatine of the Rhine, who employed him to direct the studies of his sons, and in 1498 gave him the mission to Rome, which has been already noticed as fruitful for Reuchlin's progress in Hebrew. He came back laden with Hebrew books and found when he reached Heidelberg that a change of government had opened the way for his return to Stuttgart, where his wife had remained all along. His friends had now again the upper hand and knew Reuchlin's value. In 1500, or perhaps in 1502, he was given a very high judicial office in the Swabian League, which he held until 1512, when he retired to a small estate near Stuttgart.
For many years Reuchlin had been increasingly absorbed in Hebrew studies, which had for him more than a mere philological interest. He was interested in the reform of preaching as shown in his De Arte Predicandi (1503) — a book that became a sort of preacher's manual — but above all, as a scholar, he was eager that the Bible should be better known, and could not tie himself to the authority of the Vulgate.
The key to the Hebraea veritas was the grammatical and exegetical tradition of the medieval rabbis, especially of David Kimhi, and when he mastered this, he was resolved to open it to others. In 1506, appeared his epoch-making De Rudimentis Hebraicis — grammar and lexicon — mainly after Kimhi, yet not a mere copy of one man's teaching. The edition was costly and sold slowly. One great difficulty was that wars in Italy prevented Hebrew Bibles from coming into Germany. But for this also Reuchlin found help by printing the Penitential Psalms with grammatical explanations (1512), and other helps followed from time to time. But his Greek studies had interested him in those fantastical and mystical systems of later times with which the Kabbala has no small affinity. Following Pico, he seemed to find in the Kabbala a profound theosophy that might be of the greatest service for the defence of Christianity and the reconciliation of science with the mysteries of faith, a common notion at that time. Reuchlin's mystico-cabalistic ideas and objects were expounded in the De Verbo Mirifico, and finally in the De Arte Cabalistica (1517).