Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl

Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl (6 April 1806 – 9 November 1876) was a German scholar best known for his studies of Plautus.

He was born in Großvargula, in present-day Thuringia. His family, in which culture and poverty were hereditary, were Protestants who had migrated several generations earlier from Bohemia. Ritschl was fortunate in his school training, at a time when the great reform in the higher schools of Prussia had not yet been thoroughly carried out. His chief teacher, Spitzner, a pupil of Gottfried Hermann, divined the boy's genius and allowed it free growth, applying only so much either of stimulus or of restraint as was absolutely needful. After a wasted year at the University of Leipzig, where Hermann stood at the zenith of his fame, Ritschl passed in 1826 to Halle.

Here he came under the powerful influence of Christian Karl Reisig, a young Hermannianer with exceptional talent, a fascinating personality and a rare gift for instilling into his pupils his own ardour for classical study. The great controversy between the Realists and the Verbalists was then at its height, and Ritschl naturally sided with Hermann against Böckh. The early death of Reisig in 1828 did not sever Ritschl from Halle, where he began his professorial career with a great reputation and brilliant success, but soon hearers fell away, and the pinch of poverty compelled his removal to Breslau, where he reached the rank of ordinary professor in 1834, and held other offices.

The great event of Ritschl's life was a sojourn of nearly a year in Italy (1836–37), spent in libraries and museums, and more particularly in the laborious examination of the Ambrosian palimpsest of Plautus at Milan. The remainder of his life was largely occupied in working out the material then gathered and the ideas then conceived. Bonn, where he moved on his marriage in 1839, and where he remained for twenty-six years, was the great scene of his activity both as scholar and as teacher.

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