Topographical-Historical Method in Sixteenth-Century German Scholarship

Abstract

One of the most pressing tasks facing German humanist scholars at the beginning of the sixteenth century was the exploration and description of their country. The national awakening of which they liked to speak and write, the quickening of energies under Maximilian and Charles which they thought they perceived, could have little political meaning until the German territories became known to the Germans themselves. The courses of rivers, the dimensions of forests, roads and passes and waterways, the size and location of towns and villages were familiar to local residents, but virtually unknown to Germans at large. The mental image which the German humanist had before his mind's eye, a vision of a spacious and flourishing country, well endowed with resources and populous enough to exploit them, no longer the land of vast swamps and impenetrable forests of which the ancients had written—this vision needed to be fixed.

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