Stephan Hansen Stephanius

Stephanus Johannis Stephanius—the Latinized name adopted by Staphen or Stephan Hansen, and used only after 1625 in conjunction with his Latin forenames—was born at Copenhagen on 23 July 1599 and died at Sorø on 22 April 1650. A philologist, historian, editor, lexicographer, teacher, manuscript collector, and royal historiographer, he occupies a central position in seventeenth-century Danish historical scholarship. His father, Johannes Stephanius, or Hans Staphensen, was a professor at the University of Copenhagen and later superintendent of Sorø School and its estates; his mother, Anne Pedersdatter Winstrup, was a daughter of Peder Jensen Winstrup, bishop of Zealand. In 1608 Stephanius accompanied his father to Sorø, where he attended the school before completing his secondary education at Herlufsholm. He entered the University of Copenhagen in 1615 and received the baccalaureate degree in philosophy in 1618. Among his Copenhagen teachers, Hans Jensen Alanus—whom Stephanius later called his praeceptor and host—was particularly important. Alanus’s defence of Saxo Grammaticus against the criticisms of Goropius Becanus belonged to the immediate intellectual background of Stephanius’s subsequent engagement with Denmark’s medieval Latin historiography.

His academic formation was completed through prolonged study abroad. He studied at Wittenberg in 1620–21, returned there in 1622, passed the winter of 1622–23 at Rostock, and proceeded to Leiden. After returning to Denmark in 1624, he became rector of the school at Slangerup and took the master’s degree at Copenhagen in 1625. In this period he established the scholarly friendship with Ole Worm that was to continue throughout his life and to prove indispensable to his antiquarian and historical researches. Relinquishing the Slangerup rectorship, he matriculated again at Leiden in July 1626. There his principal teachers were Daniel Heinsius and Gerardus Joannes Vossius, whose philological learning and historical method placed him within the most advanced traditions of contemporary northern European humanism. Leiden also brought him into sustained contact with Johannes Isacius Pontanus, the Danish royal historiographer resident at Harderwijk. Their shared interest in Saxo generated an extensive exchange of conjectures, parallels, and historical information; Pontanus became both an intellectual collaborator and an important patron of Stephanius’s early career.

Stephanius first appeared in print at Leiden in 1627 with the Breves notae et emendationes in Saxonem Grammaticum, accompanied in the same year by a Florilegium sententiarum selectiorum drawn from Saxo. The former, prepared with assistance from Heinsius and Vossius and partly founded upon notes inherited from his father, already announced the editorial enterprise that would dominate his mature scholarship. In 1629 the Elzevir press issued his De regno Daniae et Norwegiae tractatus varii, an anthology of medieval and modern writings on the history, geography, institutions, and customs of the Danish-Norwegian monarchy. Two differently constituted editions appeared in close succession. The volume belonged to the Elzevir series of compact political and geographical descriptions of European states and demonstrates Stephanius’s early ability to assemble, organize, and mediate heterogeneous historical materials for an international learned readership. Pontanus supplied material and may have facilitated Stephanius’s association with the Elzevir firm.

Late in 1629 Stephanius was appointed professor of eloquence at Sorø Academy, taking up his duties in March 1630. His work there combined humanist pedagogy with historical and philological research. In 1631 he served on a commission of professors from Copenhagen and Sorø charged with reforming learned education and preparing more suitable Latin textbooks. His contributions included the Colloquiorum familiarium libri IV of 1634, a collection of conversational exercises in Latin composition and usage, and the Nomenclator Latino-Danicus, whose first part, likewise published in 1634, arranged nouns and adjectives by subject, while the second part of 1638 presented verbs alphabetically. These books formed an integrated apparatus for the teaching of Latin and remained in use in Denmark and Norway well into the eighteenth century; editions of the colloquies also circulated in Swedish and Finnish centres. Their longevity reflects Stephanius’s practical command of the pedagogical requirements of the Latin school as well as his preference for orderly classification and idiomatic expression.

Upon the death of Johannes Meursius in 1639, Stephanius succeeded him as professor of history at Sorø and as royal historiographer. In the latter capacity he continued the official narrative of the reign of Christian III, treating the years 1550–59; the work was published posthumously in 1650 under the supervision of the younger Hans Svaning. His principal scholarly energies, however, remained devoted to medieval Danish historical sources. In 1642 he produced the first printed edition of the surviving works of Sven Aggesen. Modern textual criticism has demonstrated that Stephanius sometimes reshaped difficult readings according to his own conception of correct Latin rather than preserving the evidence of his manuscript with sufficient fidelity. Nevertheless, the edition rescued a fundamental Danish historical text from manuscript circulation and formed an important stage in the reception of Aggesen. The strengths and limitations of the work are characteristic of Stephanius’s philology: an extensive knowledge of classical usage, confidence in conjectural correction, and a humanist desire to restore linguistic coherence to medieval Latin.

Stephanius’s enduring achievement was his edition of Saxo Grammaticus. The text, bearing the date 1644 on its title-page but issued in 1645, was accompanied by the substantial Notae uberiores in Historiam Danicam Saxonis Grammatici. Publication was delayed by the scale and expense of the undertaking; when neither Danish nor Dutch booksellers were prepared to assume the entire financial risk, public assistance was obtained for the purchase of paper. Stephanius supplied a considerably more readable Latin text than that available in the sixteenth-century editions and subjected a medieval historian to the critical and explanatory procedures conventionally applied to classical authors. His commentary combined textual conjecture, grammatical and lexical explanation, identification of Saxo’s borrowings from Latin writers—particularly authors of the Silver Age—and extensive historical and antiquarian elucidation. Woodcut blocks previously employed in Worm’s Monumenta Danica were made available for the illustrations. Stephanius did not possess a sufficient command of Old Norse to use the northern vernacular traditions independently; he therefore relied upon Worm’s assistance and upon information supplied by Icelandic scholars, especially Brynjólfur Sveinsson. The resulting edition was necessarily conditioned by the incomplete evidence and antiquarian assumptions of its age, yet it established Saxo as an object of rigorous Neo-Latin philology and remained a major point of reference in the textual and linguistic study of the Gesta Danorum.

His work on Saxo formed part of a larger, unrealized plan to collect the narrative and documentary sources of medieval Danish history into a comprehensive corpus. Stephanius compiled a register of manuscripts borrowed for his official researches, later printed as the Designatio variorum documentorum et antiquitatum, and assembled extensive transcripts and excerpts, including the collection known as the Chronologiae Danicae systema. Some copies were probably made by his amanuensis, Frands Nielsen Grenaa, whose handwriting is difficult to distinguish from that of Stephanius. These materials acquired exceptional importance after the destruction of much of the University Library at Copenhagen in the fire of 1728; Stephanius’s transcripts sometimes preserve evidence derived from manuscripts subsequently lost. His conception of a national corpus of historical sources anticipated, in both purpose and method, the Scriptores rerum Danicarum medii aevi begun by Jacob Langebek in the eighteenth century.

Stephanius was also a discerning bibliophile. From youth he acquired printed books and manuscripts, later incorporating much of his father’s library and materials formerly associated with other scholars. At his death the collection comprised medieval codices, later historical manuscripts, his own working papers, incunabula, and a substantial working library, especially rich in philology and history. After an unsuccessful attempt to secure its acquisition in Denmark, his widow sold the collection through Swedish intermediaries. Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie advanced the purchase money, apparently in connection with Queen Christina’s collecting interests, but eventually took possession of the library himself. Large portions subsequently entered Swedish institutional collections, above all Uppsala University Library, while other volumes and manuscripts became dispersed among libraries at Stockholm, Lund, Kalmar, and elsewhere. Provenance research has reconstructed a significant part of this movement and established Stephanius’s library as an important surviving monument of seventeenth-century Scandinavian scholarship and collecting.

Stephanius married first, in 1631, Anna Jacobaea, daughter of the physician Matthias Jacobaeus; she died in February 1633. In October 1634 he married Thale Eisenberg, who survived him. His final years were burdened by illness and by the financial dislocation of the Danish crown during and after Christian IV’s wars, which repeatedly delayed or prevented payment of his official salary. He died at Sorø at the age of fifty. His importance rests not upon an original philosophy of history but upon a disciplined conjunction of humanist philology, antiquarian inquiry, editorial labour, pedagogy, and systematic collecting. Through his editions of Sven Aggesen and Saxo, his source transcripts, and the dispersal yet partial survival of his library, he became one of the principal agents by whom Denmark’s medieval historical inheritance was transmitted into modern scholarship.