Eduard David Mortier Fraenkel FBA ((1888-03-17)17 March 1888 – (1970-02-05)5 February 1970) was a German classical scholar who served as the Corpus Christi Professor of Latin at the University of Oxford from 1935 until 1953.

In 1934, antisemitic legislation introduced by the Nazi Party forced him to seek refuge in the United Kingdom where he eventually settled at Corpus Christi College.

The book was developed from his doctoral thesis and changed the study of Roman comedy by asserting that Plautus was a more innovative playwright than previously thought.

In 2018, following a petition by the student body, Corpus Christi decided to re-name a room in the college that had been named after Fraenkel in reaction to allegations of sexual harassment against him.

His three-year stint there was a difficult period for him and his family; his son Albert died from an illness and Fraenkel was subject to antisemitism in the context of what the classicist Gordon Williams described as "personal quarrels" within the faculty.

[13] When it proved difficult to sustain his family with his position at Trinity, Fraenkel began planning a lecture tour through the United States for late 1934, by which he hoped to find a permanent appointment.

Fraenkel applied for the chair with the support of many British classicists including the future Vice-Chancellor of the university Maurice Bowra, and A. E. Housman, the Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge.

[18] During term time, participants met once a week to conduct "a slow and detailed examination", reading and discussing the text at a pace of under 10 lines per hour.

[19] Individual students were asked to prepare on specific passages with Fraenkel commenting on their work and challenging them on points of interest including interpretation, textual criticism, and the history of classical scholarship.

In around 1955, he met the Italian cleric Giuseppe De Luca [it], who directed a scholarly publishing house, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura [it].

[26] Fraenkel's approach to this problem was to isolate recurring details and forms of expression as a basis for the reconstruction of Plautus's original contribution to the genre of comedy.

[27] Using this method, he identified four elements which he deemed characteristic of Plautus: the opening formulae of direct speeches; his characters' habit to intimate their own transformation into someone else; his use of Greek mythology; and his treatment of inanimate objects as animate.

[29] In 1960, an Italian translation of Plautinisches im Plautus was published, which gave Fraenkel the opportunity to add a list of amendments to his original argument.

[30] Writing for Classical Philology, the classicist Henry Prescott considered Fraenkel's book the most important contribution to the study of Roman comedy since Leo's Plautinische Forschungen.

Although Prescott described its conclusions as an "important swing of the pendulum" towards recognising Plautus's originality,[27] he regarded Fraenkel's identification of typical elements as the more successful part of the argument.

[30] The classicist Lisa Maurice wrote that, even though some of its arguments had been rejected, Plautinisches im Plautus was "the catalyst for modern Plautine scholarship".

[29] Fraenkel had begun to show interest in the Agamemnon of Aeschylus as early as 1925 but focused on Latin literature in the years leading up to his application for the Corpus Professorship.

[35] In a remarkable piece of detection, he showed that many of the most penetrating notes in the highly influential early edition of the text (1663) by Thomas Stanley owed much to the anonymous generosity of John Pearson.

[40] The reviewer C. Arthur Lynch called the edition a "source of joy and amazement", highlighting Fraenkel's willingness to admit irremediable difficulties in the text.

[46] In Fraenkel's chapters on the Epodes and Satires, he argued that Horace had undergone a process of artistic maturation away from the imitation of his literary models (the Greek lyric poet Archilochus and the Roman satirist Gaius Lucilius) towards his own conception of the respective genres.

[50] He interpreted the Carmen Saeculare, a celebratory hymn commissioned for the Secular Games of 17 BC, as a poem independent from its festival context, which marked Horace's return to lyric poetry.

[64] Acknowledging the influence of these seminars on the intellectual development of many Oxford undergraduates, the Hellenist Martin West wrote: "Here we saw German philology in action; we felt it reverberate through us as he patrolled the room behind our chairs [...] We knew, and could not doubt, that this was what Classical Scholarship was and that it was for us to learn to carry it on.

"[20] The philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, who had been a student at Oxford, composed a poem entitled 'The Agamemnon Class, 1939' which juxtaposed Fraenkel's seminar with the outbreak of the Second World War.

[59] In her 2000 book A Memoir: People and Places, the philosopher Mary Warnock wrote that in 1943 Fraenkel had touched her and another female student, Imogen Wrong, against their will during 'individual evening tutorials' in his office.

According to Warnock, Fraenkel apologised for his actions after being confronted in a letter by Jocelyn Toynbee, then a Classics tutor at Newnham College, Cambridge.

His statement was criticised by the ancient historian Mary Beard, who described it as a probable "defence mechanism" against further dissemination of knowledge of Fraenkel's behaviour.

[67] On 26 November 2017, the college's undergraduate student body passed a resolution calling for the room to be renamed and for a portrait of Fraenkel to be removed in response to the allegations of sexual harassment made against him.