Abstract
When the astronomical clock of the Strasbourg Cathedral was inaugurated in 1574, Nicodemus Frischlin, humanist and professor of poetics in Tübingen, responded to this monumental, ‘time-defining event’ with a didactic poem – in Latin, and profoundly informed by the great models of Classical Antiquity – in which he embedded the stages of human life in an encompassing horizon of both secular and religious temporality. With his ‘carmen’, Frischlin aimed to complement the ambitious technological construction with an equally ambitious literary account, gradually tracing the building’s multiple and hybrid conceptions and semantics of ‘time’ in versified description. This article examines how Frischlin’s didactic poetry organizes knowledge of anthropological, historical, and eschatological times; moreover, illuminating the motifs of the moon disc, the ‘Lebensalterautomat’, and the mechanical figure of Death, it sheds light on the emulating adaptation of Classical tradition (Lucretius; Ovid). Frischlin portrays the Strasbourg clock as a technological masterpiece without equal in Classical Antiquity.
Frick, Julia