About

About

Welcome to our Trilingue e-resource, which we have baptized DaLeT, Database of the Leuven Trilingue. It is the first database devoted to an early modern trilingual institute, the Collegium Trilingue Lovaniense, or the Three-Language College in Leuven, where one could study the three so-called sacred languages Latin, Greek, and Hebrew for free. The Trilingue was also known as the Collegium Buslidianum, or Busleyden College, named after its material founder Jerome of Busleyden (ca. 1470-1517), a prominent diplomat with humanist interests and many important connections throughout Habsburg Europe. The brainchild of Erasmus of Rotterdam, the institute existed from 1517 until 1797, when it was dissolved in the wake of the French revolution and the annexation of most parts of present-day Belgium by France. The Trilingue was most influential during its acme in the 16th century, especially the years 1517-1578, when it educated numerous prominent scholars, scientists, and politicians. DaLeT focuses on this early period of the college, after which Leuven intellectual life became seriously upset by the Eighty Years’ War and other dire circumstances such as the plague. For more information on the Trilingue, see the information and references in:

The data offered by this website will be updated every Monday. You can download our raw data through https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8305741, which will be regularly updated.

What?

What does DaLeT offer?

  1. A new and dynamic way for publishing student notes included in 16th-century prints, applied to three core Trilingue sources, one for each language taught. This part was already available in our bèta-version, first presented to the scholarly community on May 28, 2021 during the KU Leuven workshop ‘How to investigate student notes from the Renaissance (ca. 1300-1600)?’. Watch our presentation here:
  2. A database of courses, books, and people at the Trilingue during its acme, around 1517-1578.
  3. A ‘teacher’s corner’ (in Dutch) for high school teachers of Classics in the Low Countries with Trilingue-related teaching resources (DaLes), planned for release in the fall of 2023.

Why DaLeT? The story behind the acronym

Since etymology was part and parcel of the Trilingue classroom, we cannot omit a word on our acronym DaLeT here. The acronym coincides with the name for the Hebrew letter ד, known as ‘dalet’ and related to the Greek delta Δ. The pictographic origin of this letter is a door, evoking the metaphor of a digital gateway to the Trilingue classroom, but also recalling the early modern 'Janua'-genre for language manuals and the four gates of the Trilingue, situated near the Vismarkt (Fish Market) in Leuven.

The corpora of annotations edited: brief contextualization

Latin - Nicolaus Episcopius’ notes on Aeneid 12 (1549)

Nicolaus Episcopius the Younger (Bischoff; ca. 1531-December 1565/January 1566) was the son of the well-known Basel printer Nicolaus Episcopius the Elder, the brother-in-law of Hieronymus Froben. From the 1540s onward, Nicolaus Episcopius the Younger embarked on an extended study trip, or peregrinatio academica, throughout Europe. In September 1549, Nicolaus arrived in Leuven. Wasting no time, he went straight to the Vismarkt, where the Collegium Trilingue was located. Enrolling at the university on December 20, he stayed in Leuven at least until the spring of 1550. There is no record of Nicolaus attending the Greek or Hebrew lectures, but we have two sets of notes reflecting the Latin classes he took with Petrus Nannius (1496-1557): Vergil’s Aeneid 12 (September 24-December 9, 1549) and Cicero’s Pro Caelio (January 8, 1550; unfinished). Both annotated textbooks are kept at the University Library of Basel (shelfmarks Ba Va 28:1 and Ba Va 28:4, respectively). DaLeT offers a complete edition of Episcopius’ notes, taken during Nannius’ courses on Aeneid 12.

Detailed bibliographical reference: P. Virgilii Maronis Aeneidos liber duodecimus, Leuven: Servatius Sassenus, 1549. Kept at Basel, University Library, Ba Va 28:1.

Greek - Johannes Aegidius’ notes on Odyssey 1-3 (1543)

From October 23, 1543 onward, a further unknown student named Johannes Aegidius (Jan Gillis/Gilles?) attended Rutger Rescius’ classes on Homer’s Odyssey. Perhaps he can be identified as the Jan Gillis (ca. 1519–1581) who was active as the town clerk of Antwerp from 1556 until his death. This Jan Gillis enrolled at the Artes Faculty in Leuven on 14 May 1532. Assuming that he matriculated at the average age of 13 or 14 years, Gillis was most likely born around 1519. Gillis most likely graduated from the Artes Faculty in 1534, aged 15 or 16. It is unknown whether he next pursued an education at one of the four higher faculties: Medicine, Theology, Civil Law, and Canon Law. In any case, leaving Leuven behind, he registered at the University of Orléans, where, by 1541, he qualified as a licentiatus in both civil and canon law at the age of 22. It is possible that by October 1543 Gillis arrived once more in Leuven to attend the Greek lectures at the Trilingue. The annotations in this corpus cover the first two and a half books of the Odyssey.

Detailed bibliographical reference: Ὁμήρου Ὀδύσσεια. Βατραχομυομαχία. Ὕμνοι λβ. Homeri Vlyssea. Batrachomyomachia. Hymni. XXXII. Leuven: Rutger Rescius & Bartholomaeus Gravius, August 1535. Kept at Ghent, University Library, BIB.CL.00451.

Hebrew - Adrianus Vossius’ notes on Psalms 1-49 (1547)

In the year 1547, a certain Adrianus Vossius (Adriaan de Vos?) from Ghent acquired a small psalterium Hebraicum, a monolingual Hebrew psalter, published in Basel in 1532. Vossius made good use of his copy, noting extensively in it during the Hebrew classes of the Collegium Trilingue. His notes most likely reflect the lessons of Andreas Gennepius Balenus, who taught Hebrew at the Trilingue from 1532 till 1568. The annotations in his psalter show a wide array of remarks on the Hebrew text, suggesting that the language was taught inductively. Unfortunately, we do not possess any further information on Vossius himself, but this token of his student time, today kept at the KBR in Brussels, is invaluable for our knowledge of early modern Hebraism.

Detailed bibliographical reference: סֵפֶר תְּהִלִּים. Psalterium Hebraicum, Basel: Johannes Froben, February 1532. Kept at Brussels, KBR, LP 213 A.

Editorial principles for the annotations

For Hebrew and Greek we reproduce only the portion of the printed text that has been annotated. Each annotation is given a separate ID, edited diplomatically, translated into English, and, if necessary, commented upon to elucidate it. Every annotation is also linked to the corresponding printed text, of which we offer the line references as well. The number of words, including symbols representing word(s) such as most importantly the one for ‘id est’, is also systematically indicated, as are the ancient, medieval, and contemporary sources to which the Trilingue professors referred their students. We also offer a double typology of the notes, in terms of position on the page and contents.

We have transcribed the annotations as faithfully as possible, solving abbreviations [between square brackets], as in ‘Collegiu[m]’. The early modern Latin alphabet’s long s <ſ>, however, we have consistently replaced by its more familiar round counterpart <s>, and all early modern Greek ligatures have been transcribed into the modern ligature-free alphabet. If the text has become illegible, for instance due to the binding process or the fraying of edges, we add our conjecture <between angle brackets>. If we have no convincing conjecture, we use †cruces† to mark the lost fragment. As a result, our edition is mostly diplomatic, since often every little detail is important in correctly interpreting and translating the annotations against the background of the teaching context at the Trilingue. Our proposed interpretations transpire from the English translations and comments we provide. Providing a diplomatic edition will also enable other scholars either to check our interpretation of the annotation or to suggest an alternative reading. For Latin and Greek, we have moreover rendered the text of the 16th-century edition diplomatically, in order to show the database user which text the Trilingue student had before him when listening to the lectures at the Trilingue. For Hebrew, this proved very difficult to realize because of the different directionality of its script: from right to left instead of from left to right. For this reason we have chosen as the basis for our annotations the transcribed text from SHEBANQ, but adapted to the Hebrew text as printed by Froben.

Our typology addresses both the content of the annotations and their position vis-à-vis the printed text by means of tags. Our tagging of the annotations’ content has conventionally been called ‘kind’, whereas the position tags have been labelled ‘type’. We currently distinguish five types. The two most important ones are ‘interlinear’ (annotations written between two lines of printed text) and ‘marginal’ (annotations written in the margins of the printed text), but we have added to these:

As to the kinds of contents in the annotations, this is an open category, including the following kinds, which we refrain from defining systematically here, since most of them are self-explanatory: botanical, classroom reference (to the classroom context and activities there), contemporary reference (especially to politics and customs), correction of the printed text, cross-reference (inside the text read in class), cultural (relating to ancient culture, mostly), dialectological (note on Greek dialects), etymological, geographical, gesticulation (reference to gesticulation done by professor), grammatical, Greek paraphrase, Greek synonym, historical, interpretive choice (referring to notes where the professor offered different interpretive options), Latin paraphrase, Latin synonym, legal, lexical, medical, metrical, military, moralizing, mythological, narrative clarification, natural-historical, ontological (referring to the causes of things, in an Aristotelian framework), poetical, proper name indication, provenance note, psychological, reference (to ancient, medieval, and contemporary sources, both literary and scholarly), rhetorical, standardization of Greek (referring to notes that offer the expected standard, i.e. Attic-Koine form of the Homeric-dialectal form in the printed text), syntactical, text-critical, translation (Latin), and translation (vernacular).

References to other works are represented as follows. If a parallel passage is offered in the field ‘Source’, this is certainly the source text to which the professor referred. If the passage is preceded by ‘cf.’ (‘confer’), the parallel is very probable but we cannot be sure that the professor explicitly referred to it. Often it concerns indirect citations in this case. The early modern editions we used for source parallels are included below, under ‘Literature’.

The phrase ‘form x pro form y’ in the ‘Comment’ field means that the annotator made a mistake against Latin or Greek, for which we offer the corrected form (pro stands for ‘instead of’).

Glossary

interfoliar annotation:
annotation written on a page without printed text bound between pages with printed text (typical for interfoliated/interleaved books)
interlinear annotation:
annotation written between two lines of printed text
linear annotation:
annotation written on the printed text
marginal annotation:
annotation written in the margins of the printed text (upper, lower, right-hand, left-hand)
stray annotation:
annotation on a page with printed text but actually referring to a different page with printed text (e.g. the title page or the page following the annotation)

Literature

Early modern prints referred to in class

The Trilingue professors referred frequently to early modern printed works that served to elucidate the works read in their classes. We have compiled a list of the editions they (probably) used during their courses below, as far as we can gather from the student notes thus far edited. To ancient and medieval works for which we have thus far been unable to identify the early modern edition used we refer in an abbreviated fashion, following the section divisions of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae and Brepols Latin databases.

Latin
Greek
Hebrew

Selection of secondary literature on the Trilingue classes

DaLeT is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0