Konrad Celtis, King Matthias, and the academic movement in Hungary
Konrad Celtis, King Matthias, and the academic movement in Hungary

Summary/Abstract: This study deals with Celtis’ practice of rewriting and recontextualizing his own poetry. His poem To the literary odality of Hungarians (Ad sodalitatem litterariam Ungarorum, Odes II.2), addressed to a Hungarian ‘coetus’ (not a ‘sodalitas’) was first published in 1492. Through a detailed analysis of the poem, I claim that this ode was not directed to an academic circle of friends in Buda, but rather to the ‘bursa Hungarorum’ at the University of Cracow. As Celtis took up teaching in Ingolstadt in the spring of 1492, he published the Epitoma, which contained his course material on rhetoric from Cracow, and contained five poems, including this poem, which he composed while still in Poland. Consequently, it cannot be regarded as a proof of the continuity of academic thought between the Neo-platonic circles of King Matthias (1485-1490) and the Vienna-centered Sodalitas Danubiana of 1497. Around 1500, to please his Hungarian aristocratic friends in the Sodalitas Danubiana, he revised the same poem in Vienna and added it to the cycle of his Odes.

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