According to the fashion of the time, his name was graecized by his Italian friends into Capnion (Καπνίων), a nickname which Reuchlin used as a sort of transparent mask when he introduced himself as an interlocutor in the De Verbo Mirifico.

Reuchlin's career as a scholar appears to have turned almost on an accident; his fine voice gained him a place in the household of Charles I, Margrave of Baden, and soon, having some reputation as a Latinist, he was chosen to accompany Frederick, the third son of the prince, to the University of Paris.

[2] At Basel Reuchlin took his master's degree (1477), and began to lecture with success, teaching a more classical Latin than was then common in German schools, and explaining Aristotle in Greek.

This first publication, and Reuchlin's account of his teaching at Basel in a letter to Cardinal Adrian (Adriano Castellesi) in February 1518, show that he had already found his life's work.

[3] From Poitiers, Reuchlin went in December 1481 to Tübingen with the intention of becoming a teacher in the local university, but his friends recommended him to Count Eberhard of Württemberg, who was about to travel to Italy and required an interpreter.

The journey lasted but a few months, but it brought the German scholar into contact with several learned Italians, especially at the Medicean Academy in Florence; his connection with the count became permanent, and after his return to Stuttgart he received important posts at Eberhard's court.

Here he saw Pico della Mirandola, to whose Kabbalistic doctrines he afterward became heir, and made a friend of the pope's secretary, Jakob Questenberg, which was of service to him in his later troubles.

He was glad, therefore, hastily to follow the invitation of Johann von Dalberg (1445–1503), the scholarly bishop of Worms, and flee to Heidelberg, which was then the seat of the Rhenish Society In this court of letters Reuchlin's appointed function was to make translations from the Greek authors, in which his reading was already extremely wide.

He came back laden with Hebrew books and found when he reached Heidelberg that a change of government had opened the way for his return to Stuttgart, where his wife had remained all along.

He was interested in the reform of preaching as shown in his De Arte Predicandi (1503)—a book that became a sort of preacher's manual; but above all, as a scholar, he was eager that the Bible should be better known, and could not tie himself to the authority of the Vulgate.

Following Pico, he seemed to find in the Kabbala a profound theosophy that might be of the greatest service for the defence of Christianity and the reconciliation of science with the mysteries of faith, a common notion at that time.

[6][7] Pfefferkorn, himself converted from Judaism, actively preached against the Jews and attempted to destroy copies of the Talmud, and engaged in what became a long-running pamphleteering battle with Reuchlin.

"[8] Pfefferkorn's plans were backed by the Dominicans of Cologne; and in 1509 he obtained the emperor's authority to confiscate all Jewish books directed against the Christian faith.

His answer is dated from Stuttgart, 6 October 1510; in it, he divides the books into six classes — apart from the Bible which no one proposed to destroy — and, going through each class, he shows that the books openly insulting to Christianity are very few and viewed as worthless by most Jews themselves, while the others are either works necessary to the Jewish worship, which was licensed by papal as well as imperial law or contain matter of value and scholarly interest which ought not to be sacrificed because they are connected with another faith than that of the Christians.

Pfefferkorn circulated at the Frankfurt Fair of 1511 a gross libel (Handspiegel wider und gegen die Juden) declaring that Reuchlin had been bribed.

He was willing to receive corrections in theology, which was not his subject, but he could not unsay what he had said; and as his enemies tried to press him into a corner, he met them with open defiance in a Defensio contra Calumniatores (1513).

It was closely followed by Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum (Letters of obscure men), a satirical collection purporting to defend his accusers, but actually directed against them.

[10] When, in 1517, he received the theses propounded by Luther, he exclaimed, "Thanks be to God, at last, they have found a man who will give them so much to do that they will be compelled to let my old age end in peace.

But in the spring he found it necessary to visit the baths of Liebenzell, and there contracted jaundice, of which he died, leaving in the history of the new learning a name only second to that of his younger contemporary Erasmus.