Heinrich Steinhöwel, alternativelySteinhäuel orSteinheil (1410/1411 – 1 March 1479) was a German doctor,humanist, translator and writer. From 1450 he settled inUlm, from which most of his works were published.
According to recent research, Steinhöwel was born in 1410 or 1411 inWeil der Stadt and went to study medicine at theUniversity of Vienna from 1429 to 1436. He continued his education at theUniversity of Padua from 1438, where he began by studyingcanon law, transferring later to receive his doctorate in medicine in 1443. From 1444 he taught medicine at theUniversity of Heidelberg, going on to practice as a doctor in his hometown of Weil in 1446, then in 1449 inEsslingen am Neckar.[1]
In 1450 Steinhöwel was appointedcity physician ofUlm, initially for six years and then with an extended contract, and was also granted apharmacy connection there. Later he authored a small work on the treatment ofplague,Das Büchlein der Ordnung der Pestilenz (1473), the first on its subject in German, which went through four reprints before the end of the century. He was also consulted medically by various princes, includingEberhard I, Duke of Württemberg andPhilip the Good, Duke of Burgundy.[2]
Steinhöwel broughtJohann Zainer [de], the brother of his Augsburg printer to Ulm, where he set up what was probably the first printing press in 1472 with Steinhöwel's financial support. In 1473, a Latin and soon afterwards a German translation ofGiovanni Boccaccio'sDe claris mulieribus ('Famous Women') was published, both of them with numerous high-quality woodcuts, as well as Steinhöwel'sTütsche Cronica ('German Chronicle').
Steinhöwel lived during the transition period from theLate Middle Ages to theRenaissance, when there was growing interest in classical Roman and Greek culture. After settling in Ulm, he was at the centre of a circle of humanistically minded men in Swabia and also worked as a translator from Latin and editor of ancient texts. Among such works was his metrical adaptation of the ancient novelApollonius of Tyre,[3] as well as works byPetrarch.
Around 1476, Steinhöwel published his famous and influential bilingual collection ofAesop's Fables, with the Latin text in verse accompanied by a German prose translation. The 550-page work contains 191woodcuts and numerous decorativeinitials.[4] The collection was also accompanied by a biography of Aesop and stories byPetrus Alphonsus andPoggio Bracciolini. Very soon after, translations or adaptations followed in Italian (1479), French (1480), English (the Caxton edition of 1484), Czech (about 1488) and Spanish (1489).[5]
Steinhöwel exerted a great influence on the development of a sophisticated German written language through his relatively free translations from Latin into German. Statements about his principles of translation, published in the introductions to his works, are among the early Renaissance theoretical considerations of the problem of translation and thus implicitly of cultural transfer.[6]
He died in Ulm in 1479.
