Rodolphus Agricola

He was an educator, musician, builder of church organs, a poet in Latin and the vernacular, a diplomat, a boxer and a Hebrew scholar towards the end of his life.

[citation needed] Today, he is best known as the author of De inventione dialectica, the father of Northern European humanism and a zealous anti-scholastic in the late fifteenth century.

Agricola was born in Baflo in the Dutch province of Groningen as the illegitimate son of the cleric and future abbot Hendrik Vries and Zycka Huesman, a rich farmer's daughter.

Educated first by the school of St. Maarten in Groningen, Agricola matriculated at the University of Erfurt with his father's assistance and received a BA in 1458.

Here, at the Cistercian Abbey of St Bernard at Aduard, near Groningen, and at 's-Heerenbergh near Emmerich in the south-east, he was at the center of a group of scholars and humanists, with whom he kept up a lively exchange of letters.

His correspondents included the musician and choirmaster of Antwerp Jacobus Barbirianus (Barbireau), rector of the Latin School at Deventer Alexander Hegius von Heek and Johannes Reuchlin, the humanist scholar and later student of Hebrew.

In 1470, he taught a deaf child how to communicate orally and in writing; his work, De inventione dialectica, documents this pioneering educational effort.

In 1479, Agricola completed his De inventione dialectica (On Dialectical Invention) in Dillingen, which argued for the precise application of loci in scholarly argumentation.

[4] De inventione dialectica was influential in creating a place for logic in rhetorical studies and was of significance in the education of early humanists.

Agricola's De formando studio—his long letter on a private educational program—was printed as a small booklet and influenced pedagogy of the early sixteenth century.