NIKOLAUS BRYLINGER UND HEINRICH PANTALEON
modifié le: 2011-06-07
 

In my paper I analyse the cooperation between the translator and editor Heinrich Pantaleon (1522-1595) and the printer who published most of his works, mainly in the 1550's and 1560's, Nikolaus Brylinger (active 1536-1565, heirs until 1600). In chronological order, these works are: a bilingual Greek-Latin edition of Homer's epics (1551), which was most likely edited by H. Pantaleon, a bilingual Latin-German edition of the New Testament (1556), a translation of Sleidanus' Commentariorum de statu religionis et republicae, Carolo V. Caesare, libri XXVI (1556), a translation of Werner von Heberstein's Rerum Moscovitarum Commentarii (1563), Pantaleon's Prosopographia heroum atque illustrium virorum totius Germaniae (1565-1566) ans his own translation of the work (Heldenbuch der Teutschen Nation, 1567-1568), and a translation of Gilles' Annales et Chroniques de France translated by Nikolaus Falckner (1572) but accompanied by Pantaleon's authorizing preface. In each of these texts I analyse Pantaleon's arguments for the use of the vernacular and argue that, on the one hand, they are linked to his concept of 'nation' and, particularly, to the position of the 'German nation' (Teutsche Nation') in his teleological concept of world's history but, on the other hand, that in Pantaleon's perception the vernacular is not a value of his own but rather a pragmatically used means for spreading knowledge within the literate but not scholarly 'national' audience. The context of Brylinger's book production – and especially the cooperation between Brylinger and Pantaleon – allows such conclusion: we observe how arguments used firstly for Latin are later adopted for the vernacular or how such works as the Prosopographia are first printed in Latin and then in German. Most of all, the secondary role of the vernacular can be documented by the fact that a vast majority of the German texts published in Brylinger's are translations.

Jan Hon, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München