BEATUS RHENANUS (BLESSED BEATUS RHENANUS). — German scholar and editor, of a family originally from Rheinau (Lower Alsace), whose surname was Bild; born at Schlettstadt on 22 August 1485, died at Strasbourg on 20 July 1547.
He studied in Paris from 1503 to 1507, where his teacher of Aristotelian philosophy was J. Le Fèvre d’Étaples; he was in Strasbourg in 1509–10, in Basel after 1511, and in his native town after 1526, where he held no offices or dignities but devoted himself to philological and historical work. He was in contact with the most illustrious scholars and printers of his age, especially Erasmus, and like him initially welcomed Luther’s Reformation with sympathy, particularly regarding indulgences and auricular confession; but he distanced himself when he perceived its revolutionary character. He edited the works of Erasmus (Basel edition, 1540) and of other humanists, as well as of the Church Fathers (Gregory of Nyssa, Prudentius, Origen) and Latin classics (Pliny the Younger, Suetonius, Seneca, Tacitus); notable are his first editions of Velleius Paterculus (Basel, 1520) and Tertullian (ibid., 1521). He published the first commentary on the recently discovered Germania of Tacitus, and in the Rerum Germanicarum libri tres (ibid., 1531) he produced the finest work of German humanism in the field of historical-critical research. His introduction to the liturgy of St John Chrysostom was discovered in England in 1932.