ZEUSS, JOHANN KASPAR. — Historian and philologist, born at Vogtendorf (Franconia) on 22 July 1806, died there on 10 November 1856.
After completing his secondary studies in Bamberg and graduating from the University of Munich, he subsequently became professor of history at a secondary school in Munich and then at the lyceums of Speyer and Bamberg. A scholar of prodigious learning, he devoted himself to history and ethnology, but especially to philology, achieving worldwide renown for his research on the language of the Celts. Having won the admiration of scholars with his youthful work Die Deutschen und die Nachbarstämme (Munich 1837), a complete collection of all the passages in Greek and Latin literature relating to the Germanic peoples of central Europe (a valuable working tool also because of its extremely abundant critical notes, it was reprinted several times up to 1925), Z. published another imposing work two years later, Die Herkunft der Baiern von den Markomannen gegen die bisherigen Muthmassungen beweisen (there 1839; 2nd ed. 1857), followed by Traditiones possessionesque Wissenburgenses (Speyer 1842) and Die Freie Reichstadt Speier vor ihrer Zerstörung nach urkundlichen Quellen geschildert (there 1843). But his principal work was the Grammatica Celtica e monumentis vetustis tam Hibernicae linguae quam Britannicarum dialectorum Cambricae, Cornicae, Aremoricae comparatis Gallicae priscae reliquis (Berlin 1853; 2nd ed. 1871), in which, as the title indicates, through extensive research in the principal European libraries, he examined all the surviving fragments of the ancient and almost forgotten Celtic languages; it was therefore rightly said that Z. brought the language of the Celts back to life and created its philological study, which had never previously been attempted.
Although he remained a layman, contrary to the wishes of his family, who would have wanted him to become a priest, Z. was a man of sincere and practiced piety in an age and environment dominated by positivism.
Renzo U. Montini