LUCIANUS/NACHTIGALL, Ottmar (a.k.a. LUSCINIUS), tr. & ed.

Deorvm dialogi numero. 70. una cum interpretatione e regione Latina: nus[quam] antea impressi.

      Strasbourg Joannes Schottus 1515 Rare first edition of the Strasbourg humanist Ottmar Nachtigall’s edition and parallel Latin translation of Lucian’s satirical Dialogues of the Gods. The ancient’s cynicism and common sense found a wide audience among Northern European humanists in the intellectual orbit of Erasmus. A member of the circle of Strasbourg humanists which included Jakob Sturm, Nikolaus Gerbel, Thomas Vogler, his teacher Jakob Wimpfeling and Sebastian Brant, Nachtigall is credited with introducing the formal teaching of Greek to the city of Strasbourg. In this capacity he prepared a number of Greek grammars and Greek texts, including an edition of the Palatine Anthology. He met Erasmus during the humanist’s visit to Strasbourg in 1514; Erasmus is duly saluted in the present work’s preface (a1v), though relations between the two men later underwent some strain when they lived in the same house in Basel (see Contemporaries of Erasmus III.3). Nachtigall is also known for a popular defense of humanistic studies, Grunnius sophista and original works of music theory, and his career warrants study as a Northern humanist sympathetic to church reform who nonetheless remained a Catholic. OCLC lists U.Texas/Austin, Cambridge, Emory Pitts, Harvard.PROVENANCE: Josef Adolf Schwerdfeger (1867-1931), Austrian historian. * VD16 L2955; Proctor 10277; Adams L-1617; Hoffmann III.538; Panzer VI.73, n. 385.