Poor Henrys. From Job’s Poverty to Rich Authorship and Succession

Abstract

Around 1500, a Pauper Henricus appears in literature, who sometimes causes confusion among scholars because he is mistaken for Hartmann’s Poor Henry. However, it is the poet Henry from Settimello near Florence who, in a single surviving text, a lament in the tradition of consolation philosophy entitled ›Elegia‹, typologically echoes Job in his suffering and poverty. In an academic-Latin culture, he not only established himself as a school author from the late Middle Ages onwards, but also became a figure of identification and the patron saint of studentes pauperes, who followed in his footsteps due to the personal union of scholarship and poverty. Around 1500, anonymous third parties Samaritanically assisted him in his narrow authorship by posthumously attributing and subordinating texts to him that primarily dealt with the subject of ›poverty‹. The powerful typological backdrop of Job serves as an example of how a temporal community is constituted across the ages.