Introduction

A talent cadre for manuscript researchers

A folder (65 cm x 87 cm) with teaching materials for Traube's palaeography lectures

Since his childhood days, Ludwig Traube had a passion for Medieval Latin. As a university professor, he insisted on the autonomy of his subject, refusing to subordinate it to the field of classiscal philology. His efforts led to the creation of the first professorship for medieval philology in Germany at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. Ludwig Traube’s lectures drew an international circle of students and spawned a whole generation of manuscript researchers, including Elias Avery Lowe, who became a professor for palaeography in Oxford and editor of the Codices Latini Antiquiores, and Paul Lehmann, who followed Traube as professor for medieval philology in Munich.

In spite of all his achievements in the fields of medieval philology and palaeography, Traube‘s repeated requests for a salaried professorship in Munich remained long unfulfilled. In a letter to Adolph Goldschmidt dated to 12 December 1901, he writes that he is absolutely exhausted, having been forced to give a comprehensive account of his teaching activities at the university in order to defend himself against hateful attacks in the press. Apparently the university newspaper had seen fit to spread the „clerical malevolence“ suggesting that Traube had given up teaching for lack of students. In his defence he had mobilised all forces, taking the grand sum of his teaching activities and even mentioning the names of Goldschmidt, Paul Winterfeld, Georg Swarzenski and other scholars who had come to him for palaeographical help in their other fields of research. In return, he offered to testify "verse vice" how essential the study of book illustration was for palaeographers (MGH-Archiv B 683/1).

In palaeographical exercises on late Roman and medieval handwriting, Ludwig Traube taught his students to read medieval manuscripts. In his account of his teaching practices written in 1901, he reveals that he held such exercises in his own private rooms, at first because of his health and then for technical reasons. This was apparently the only place where he had access to the books, manuscripts, and reproductions that were necessary for teaching palaeography. Indeed, he possessed a comprehensive collection of almost all available palaeographical materials and photographic manuscript reproductions which, in his judgement, was „probably the only such [collection]“ in the world, and which he had largely created to satisfy the „lively interest“ of his students (Rückblick, S. 26). The health problems he mentioned were not just physical, but also pschological: Traube suffered agoraphobia.