Bebele, Henry

, a native of Justingen, in Suabia, where his father was a labourer, was educated at home, and in 1495 went to Cracow, where, and at Tubingen, he studied the languages, jurisprudence, and particularly poetry. In 1501, the emperor Maximilian I. honoured him with the poetical crown. Before this, in 1497, he was professor at Tubingen, and lectured on the ancient orators and historians, and is said to have been the first who introduced into Germany a relish for the purity of the Latin tongue, in which his works show that he had attained considerable excellence. His Latin dissertations of the historical kind, relating to Germany, are inserted in the first volume of Scharde’s Scrip. Her. Germanicarum. Ife is less to his credit that he wrote some tales of a very licentious kind. He formed, also, a collection of German proverbs, which with his poems were published at Strasburgh, in 1512, 4to, under the title “Opuscula BebeJiana.” A posthumous work of his, “De necessitate linguae Latinae,” was published at Augsburgh, in 1801, with his life in German, by Zapf. Saxius fixes his death in 1514. ²