Ernst Robert Curtius was a German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 literary scholar, a philologist and Romance language literary critic.

He is best known for his 1948 work Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter. It was a major study of the Medieval Latin

Medieval Latin

Medieval Latin was the form of Latin used in the Middle Ages, primarily as a medium of scholarly exchange and as the liturgical language of the medieval Roman Catholic Church, but also as a language of science, literature, law, and administration. Despite the clerical origin of many of its authors,...

 literature and its effect on subsequent writing in modern European languages. The book was largely responsible for introducing the literary topos

Literary topos

Topos , in Latin locus , referred in the context of classical Greek rhetoric to a standardised method of constructing or treating an argument. See topos in classical rhetoric...

concept as a scholarly and critical discussion of literary commonplace

Commonplace

Commonplace books were a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They became significant in Early Modern Europe....

s.http://books.google.cz/books?id=RVX1j8AxuwcC&pg=PA170&lpg=PA170&dq=Curtius+topos&source=bl&ots=bjS2_VUsP5&sig=S5vL30sxtHcXqt_U8Xqry7Uih0E&hl=cs&ei=WvH0S9uqCtWHOOC1qMUI&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CB8Q6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=Curtius%20topos&f=false

Curtius studied philology and philosophy in Strasbourg

University of Strasbourg

The University of Strasbourg in Strasbourg, Alsace, France, is the largest university in France, with about 43,000 students and over 4,000 researchers....

, Berlin

Humboldt University of Berlin

The Humboldt University of Berlin is Berlin's oldest university, founded in 1810 as the University of Berlin by the liberal Prussian educational reformer and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose university model has strongly influenced other European and Western universities...

, and Heidelberg. He was a professor in Marburg, Heidelberg, and Bonn

Bonn

Bonn is the 19th largest city in Germany. Located in the Cologne/Bonn Region, about 25 kilometres south of Cologne on the river Rhine in the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, it was the capital of West Germany from 1949 to 1990 and the official seat of government of united Germany from 1990 to 1999....

 and was a proponent of French literature to the German public. He died in Rome

Rome

Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...

.

He studied for a year at Cambridge

University of Cambridge

The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...

, where he met the poet and author Stephen Spender

Stephen Spender

Sir Stephen Harold Spender CBE was an English poet, novelist and essayist who concentrated on themes of social injustice and the class struggle in his work...

. Their relationship during Spender's resulting stays in Hamburg is shown in the semi-fictionalised autobiography, The Temple

The Temple (Stephen Spender)

The Temple is a novel written by Stephen Spender.This novel was written after Spender spent his summer vacation in Germany in 1929 and recounts his experiences there. It was not completed until the early 1930s...

. This novel also portrays Curtius (known as Ernst Stockmann in the novel) as homosexual.

Ernst Curtius

Ernst Curtius

You may be looking for Ernst Robert Curtius .Ernst Curtius was a German archaeologist and historian.-Biography:...

, his grandfather, and Georg Curtius

Georg Curtius

Georg Curtius was a German philologist.-Biography:After an education at Bonn and Berlin, he was for three years a schoolmaster in Dresden, until he returned to Berlin University as privatdocent...

, his great-uncle, were both notable scholars. He was Alsatian

Alsace

Alsace is the fifth-smallest of the 27 regions of France in land area , and the smallest in metropolitan France. It is also the seventh-most densely populated region in France and third most densely populated region in metropolitan France, with ca. 220 inhabitants per km²...

, being born in Thann

Thann, Haut-Rhin

Thann is a commune in the Haut-Rhin department in Alsace in north-eastern France.Its inhabitants are known as Thannois.-Geography:...

, into a north German family.

Works

• Die literarischen Wegbereiter des neuen Frankreich (1919)
• Die Französische Kultur (1931, translation as The Civilization of France: An Introduction (1932)
• Deutscher Geist in Gefahr (1932)
• "Zur Literarästhetik des Mittelalters," Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 58 (1938), 1-50, 129-232, and 433-79.
• Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (1948)
• Französischer Geist im 20. Jahrhundert (1952)

External links

• Ernst Robert Curtius (StadtMuseum Bonn)