Friedrich Staphylus e la translatio studiorum Graecorum nella Germania della Riforma

In 1550, the German theologian Friedrich Staphylus (Stapellage) delivered an Oratio de literis et praecipue Graecis in Breslau to encourage his students to undertake the study of Greek. This oration belongs to a rhetorical sub-genre that began with Theodore Gaza's De litteris Graecis (Ferrara, 1446). Along with the usual arguments in favor of Greek studies, Staphylus offers a short history of the return of Greek learning to the West from Charlemagne to his own times. His rewriting of the process that led to the translatio studiorum Graecorum from Byzantium to Europe, although marked by national pride and anti-Catholic polemics, documents the attitude of German Reformed scholars toward Greek humanism and their awareness of the active role they played in its development. [Publisher's text]