Poetic Works of Helius Eobanus Hessus

As the University of Erfurt collapsed in the early 1520s, Hessus faced losing his livelihood. To cope, he imagined himself a shape-changing Proteus. Transforming first into a lawyer, then a physician, he finally became a teacher at the Nuremberg academy organized by Philip Melanchthon. Volume 5 traces this story via Hessus's poems of 1524-1528: 'Some Rules for Preserving Good Health' (1524; 1531), with attached 'Praise of Medicine' and two sets of epigrams; 'Three Elegies' (1526), two praising the Nuremberg school and one attacking a criticaster; 'Venus Triumphant' (1527), with poems on Joachim Camerarius's wedding; 'Against the Hypocrisy of the Monastic Habit' (1527), with four Psalm paraphrases; and 'Seventeen Bucolic Idyls' (1528), updating the 'Bucolicon' of 1509 and adding five idyls.