In 1617, Jakob Bidermann (1578 – August 20, 1639), an Ehingen-born Jesuit active as professor in Dillingen (an der Donau) wrote an allegorical play in Latin named Cosmarchia, presenting a strange city named Cosmopolis where the citizens choose the king, but allow him to rule for one year only, afterwards banishing him forever; of course, with their last choice everything changes… Bidermann is considered one of important Neo-Latin playwrights (his earliest play, Cenodoxus is a version of the story of Faust). There are several modern editions of the Cosmarchia: an edition of the play with German translation (Bibliotheca Neolatina, 1991), another edition from 2002, and an English translation (1982).
In 2003, the important Neo-Latin research project CAMENA published a digital edition of Cosmarchia (along with other Bidermann’s plays), connecting the TEI XML annotated text, its HTML version and facsimiles of the 1666 book which was the source of the edition. This edition made Bidermann’s play machine-readable, accessible over the Internet, and open to further digital transformations (because the CAMENA texts were published under a Creative Commons license).
A couple of weeks ago, at the beginning of March 2022, the International Association for Neo-Latin Studies organized, at the University of Bonn, a Vacation School on the theme of Digital Neo-Latin Studies. One of the school workshops was dedicated to DraCor, an infrastructure for the research on European drama; thanks to the efforts of Alexander Winkler and Ingo Boerner, each participant chose a Neo-Latin play published by CAMENA, proofread it and transformed it into a format used in DraCor (for that task Boerner prepared a whole XML/XSL framework). In that workshop I was one of the participants, and I chose the Cosmarchia. Until the Vacation School I knew nothing of Bidermann, but he writes charming and very competent Latin, and, as a playwright, knows how to leave space for actors and knows how to entertain. Bidermann’s allegory is simple and clear, but the idea of people choosing their own king and then throwing him out after a mandate – to be sure, Bidermann dislikes the idea – sounds quite modern (Bidermann found the idea in Vita Barlaami et Josaphati).
Today I have finished proofreading the 1146 verses long play, and I have submitted it as a pull request to Winkler’s JesDraCor Github repository, having learned something both about Neo-Latin drama and about creating a pull request in the Github software developing system.
(Image: Tobias Bjørkli on Pexels.)