Early Modern Protests against the Tyrant: The Radicalization of the Political Discourse in the Early Sixteenth Century: Ulrich Von Hutten

Abstract

In the late Middle Ages and early modern age, political commentators increasingly raised their voice against abusive rulers, attacking them as dictators and even as tyrants. They drew, of course, from the ancient tradition of criticism of the ruler, but they had their own cases to complain about. Scholarship has so far investigated numerous treatises and pamphlets by the leading philosophers and theologians from that time, active particularly in Italy, France, and England. In this study, the focus will rest, by contrast, on the significant contribution to this anti-tyrant discourse by the German humanist Ulrich von Hutten (d. 1523), his Phalarismus. While the author was motivated to write this sharp critique of tyranny in response to a major conflict affecting his own family, this dialog pamphlet, structurally somewhat indebted to Dante Alighieri’s Divina Commedia (ca. 1320), laid the foundation for this genre of political criticism in early modern Germany, which, however, came to full fruition not until the eighteenth century. We can thus recognize Ulrich von Hutten as a major contributor to this European discourse driven by humanist intellectuals who effectively succeeded in exposing the evil nature of a tyrant well ahead of their successors during the age of the Enlightenment. To what extent von Hutten’s work became a source of inspiration for them remains an open-ended question.