Introduction I: The connection of philology and humanism

The Greek meaning of the term philology (gr. love of words) gives way to a very important observation: As love is something different for anyone, so are words. As there are various forms of love (parental love, relationship love, erotic love...) depending on the relations among people in their various social contexts, also the meaning of words is depending on the context in which they are expressed by whom and in which social situation and for which purpose.

Philologists, in this sense, could be defined as 'lovers of words', people having an intense relationship to words and asking themselves a lot on their usage, meaning, purpose and power.

Philologists in the 16th century are often, not totally correctly, synonymized to humanists, humanists meaning learned people who try to explain not only linguistical, but also political, historical and especially social challenges of the Early Modern Period by 'updating' knowledge on these subjects from Classical antiquity. More precisely then, humanists should be considered as "Sprachvirtuosen mit öffentlichem Redeauftrag" (Hirschi 2010, 39). Humanists acquire their far-reaching knowledge by searching, reading and editing antique words, antique texts, antique books and combining the acquired knowledge with their view on the (Early) modern circumstances.

Based on their unique knowledge in antique philological practices, humanists try to compete (aemulari), on the one hand, with their antique predecessors in poetry (Vergil) and prose (Cicero) that they copy (imitari), and with their humanist colleagues on the other hand, each of them claiming for himself to be the best, the most apt (aptum) imitator of antiquity and thus the best explanator of the present times (on imitation see McLaughlin 1995, García Galiano 1992).

The term Ciceronianism that researchers fixed recently (Robert 2011) shows the systematicity of this oscillation between antiquity and present (Muhlack 2017, 43; cf. García Galiano 1992, 44). It is one of the most important ways that humanism could legitimate itself as an important sociopolitical movement, even if inside, humanism was not a consistent, uniform group of likeminded, learnt people but developed a highly controversial view on Classical antiquity as on Early Modern history.

In what follows, we may see one of the less known but probably most important examples of Ciceronianism as it deals with the concept of humanist philology on the one hand but, on the other hand, touches the political circumstances of the 1530s considerably.