received, in the spirit of his time, an excellent education in Italy at the universities of Padua, Bologna, and Pavia, where in February 1459 he became ‘Doctor of the Laws’. In the 1460s and until his death, Eyb practised law in marriage and inheritance cases and was a clergyman in Bamberg, Eichstätt, and Würzburg.

In 1459, Albrecht von Eyb wrote his major Latin work Margarita poetica – an anthology of humanist rhetoric, unique in the German lands, which includes some of his early works-exercises – which was printed until 1503, with the text distributed in France and Italy in addition to Germany. In the last years of his life Eyb finalised another of his most popular works written in German – Ehebüchlein. Eyb was an innovator here again: the moralistic Ehebüchlein spoke to the reader-Bürger, the target audience for this work, in a language he could understand, on a topic he knew and cared about. In 1474 he completed his last work, Spiegel der Sitten, which would have remained a classic representative of this long-standing medieval genre if it had not included the third part of the work – translation of two of Plautus’s comedies, Bacchides and Menaechmi, as well as the Italian comedy Philogenia. Eyb takes a crucial step towards integrating cutting-edge literature into the existing tradition: all three texts are not just translated but adapted for the German reader.

Nevertheless, being a true ‘humanist’ in the 15th century primarily meant engaging in rhetoric, specifically following classical models of Latin prose and poetry. Margarita poetica, therefore, is a work deserving closer attention: along with other contemporary rhetorical treatises by German authors, this text allows us to discern the formation of a new community – the circle of German humanists – in an era when this movement had not yet become institutionalized.