ABSTRACT
Niklas von Wyle (or nicolaus de wile, as he called himself in his Latin writings) was a chancery official (town clerk of Eßlingen 1448-69 and assistant chancery minister to Count Ulrich von Württemberg 1469-79). With his Translatzen (or Tütschungen), written in MSS for individual courtly patrons such as Pfalzgräfin Mechthild and Karl von Baden from 1461 onwards and published together in printed form (in Eßlingen) for a wider audience in 1478, Wyle formed part of a small group of translators (such as Albrecht von Eyb and Heinrich Steinhöwel) who first brought humanist thought from Italy to a mainly (non-latin literate) courtly audience in SW Germany. Text A (given here with Eyb’s parallel version, text B) is Wyle’s 2nd Translatze, which was reprinted in ten different versions (see Bertelsmeier-Kierst 1988: 3-18) and became one of the best-sellers of the fifteenth century and sixteenth century. Based on Leondardo Bruni’s Latin version, it is a translation of Boccaccio’s Guiscard and Sigismunda (Decameron, IV: 1). Wyle is therefore significant as a representative of the new type of author in the ENHG era which remained a key bearer of literary production well into the modern era, i.e. the poeta et secretarius. Although the poets whose work made the breakthrough from orality onto parchment in the MHG period had nearly all received a clerical education, it is a distinctive facet of the late Middle Ages that writing literature was a by-product of the professional cleric. At the turn of the fourteenth century, Johannes, chancery official at Tepl, produced his popular Ackermann and this trend continues right down to Goethe the chancery official (see ch. 26). The importance of high level chancery work in public life was as strong in the fifteenth century as it was for Goethe at the turn of the nineteenth century: Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, Wyle’s inspirational friend, who spent some years in the chancery at Vienna, ended his much-fêted career as Pope Pius II (1458).
