A complement to the ongoing series on Luther and Aristotle–not in the sense that they have a lot in common, but in the sense that they both deal with Luther on an important ancient author.

Luther does not speak much of Catullus, whose poems became fashionable again in the Renaissance. There are just a handful of passages that deal with him. I begin with the one passage in the Table Talk (so far as I am aware) in which Luther mentions Catullus. It deals with Luther’s view that Catullus should not be read in schools–so perhaps there is a link with Aristotle after all, whom Luther wanted removed from the curriculum in the Address to the Christian Nobility of 1520. The passage below is dated to September 1538.

Translation (WA TR 4,4012)

Obscene poetry. Afterwards, Luther said that it was absolutely necessary that the books of Juvenal, Martial, Catullus, and the Priapea of Vergil be removed from schools and places of education, because they wrote things so obscene and absurd that they cannot be read without harm.^[1]

Some remarks

1. The Priapea are a set of 80 obscene poems whose author(s) is (are) unknown. They are not by Vergil. It is possible that Luther is referring to something else: three Priapic poems in a collection called the Appendix Vergiliana. These poems circulated under Vergil’s name, but are mostly not by him. It is generally thought probable that the three poems in question are not by him. If Luther thought they were by Vergil, it would be interesting to know how this affected his evaluation of a poet he otherwise holds in the highest esteem.
2. The text translated is macaronic, a mixture of Latin and German. What I have rendered “schools and places of education” (“ludis und schulen”) seems redundant, though in the text as it stands there is a wordplay between “schools” (ludis) and “absurd” (ludicra).
3. However, WA gives two other versions of the same statement, one entirely in German and one entirely in Latin. The content is mostly the same, with one exception: in both of these other versions, Luther says that the books in question should be removed from “lands and schools” (“ausn Landen und Schulen”; “ex regionibus et scholis“). If this latter reading is correct, Luther was not merely making a pedagogical point, but one with much wider social implications and applications.
4. Juvenal wrote satire that was often brutal and explicit. Martial, a writer of epigrams, likewise wrote many explicit poems, and there are some in the collection of Catullus as well. But is that the totality of what they wrote? No. So a question occurs: Is Luther advocating the removal of only the obscene poems, i.e., bowdlerizing the collections without getting rid of them entirely? A question perhaps to be returned to at another time.