Simon Lemnius (died 1550) was the most important humanist of eastern Switzerland. He is best known for the controversy he had with none other than Martin Luther (1483–1546) while still a student at the University of Wittenberg: Lemnius had published a collection of Latin epigrams, which Luther felt so offended by that he had the young Lemnius imprisoned and eventually forced him to flee Wittenberg. In return, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81) later dedicated a detailed homage to him, portraying him as a poet who fell out of favour and suffered persecution because of his work.

With the Raeteid, a Latin epic poem in nine books, Lemnius composed in the mid-sixteenth century a work that can justifiably be described as the national epic of the Grisons. The poem celebrates the heroic resistance of three Swiss groups that, for the first time, joined forces during the Swabian War in 1499 to oppose the troops of Maximilian I. The union of these three groups or Bünde – Gotteshausbund, Grauer or Oberer Bund, Zehngerichtebund – later developed into the canton of Graubünden. The poem’s central heroic figure is Benedikt Fontana (c. 1450–99), who had given the decisive turn to the Battle of Calven on 22 May 1499. Fontana’s first appearance in literature occurs in Lemnius’ Raeteid.

A modern edition of the epic was published in 1874 by the Swiss politician and intellectual Placidus Plattner (1834–1924), who served as governor of Graubünden from 1873 to 1874. Issued for the Historisch-antiquarische Gesellschaft von Graubünden in Chur, this edition was an important step in making the text accessible, but it suffers from serious shortcomings. Plattner apparently relied on only one manuscript, and, more problematically, he intervened extensively in the text, restructuring it according to his own ideas and abbreviating numerous passages whenever he considered them to be incompatible with the historical facts.

The aim of the present project is, after a century and a half, to provide a modern critical edition of the Raeteid based on all known manuscripts. This edition will be accompanied by a reliable translation and a historical and literary commentary, thereby making this allusive work accessible to a wider readership.