Ernst Robert Curtius

Ernst Robert Curtius (; 14 April 1886 – 19 April 1956) was a German literary scholar, philologist, and Romance languages literary critic, best known for his 1948 study Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter, translated in English as European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages.

Biography Curtius was Alsatian, born in Thann, into a north German family; Ernst Curtius, his grandfather, and Georg Curtius, his great-uncle, were both notable scholars. His family moved to Strasbourg after his father Friedrich Curtius was appointed president of the Lutheran Protestant Church of Augsburg Confession of Alsace and Lorraine, and Curtius received his Abitur from the Strasbourg Protestant gymnasium. He studied at Strasbourg under Gustav Gröber. He traveled in Europe afterward, and was fluent in French and English. Albert Schweitzer, who boarded with the family between 1906 and 1912, is credited with introducing Curtius to modern French literature; of great influence also was the Romance philologist Gustav Gröber. It is a study of Medieval Latin literature and its effect on subsequent writing in modern European languages. Curtius argues that, first, the standard "Classic-Medieval-Renaissance-Modern" division of literature was counterproductive given the continuity between those literatures; and second, that, in the words of L.R. Lind, "much of Renaissance and later European literature cannot be fully understood without a knowledge of that literature's relation to Medieval Latin rhetoric in the use of commonplaces, metaphors, turns of phrase, or, to employ the term Curtius prefers, topoi". The book was largely responsible for introducing the concept of the "literary topos" into scholarly and critical discussion of literary commonplaces.