Ernst Robert Curtius

Ernst Robert Curtius (/ˈkʊərtsiʊs/; 14 April 1886 – 19 April 1956) was a German literary scholar, philologist, and Romance languages literary critic, best known for his 1948 study Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter, translated in English as European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages.

Albert Schweitzer, who boarded with the family between 1906 and 1912, is credited with introducing Curtius to modern French literature; of great influence also was the Romance philologist Gustav Gröber.

[1] He studied philology and philosophy in Strasbourg (doctorate, 1910), Berlin, and Heidelberg; he wrote his Habilitationsschrift for Gröber in Bonn, 1913, and began teaching there in 1914.

World War I interrupted his scholarly work: Curtius served in France and Poland and was wounded in 1915; his injuries were severe enough for him to be discharged in 1916; he returned to Bonn to resume teaching.

Curtius saw European literature as part of a continuous tradition that began with the Greek and Latin authors and continued throughout the Middle Ages; he did not acknowledge a break between those traditions, a division that would separate historical periods from each other and support a set of national literatures without connections to each other.