Rutgerus Sycamber

Rutgerus Sycamber or Roger of Venray (b. 1456/57, d. after 1509) was a humanist, music theorist, and a prolific but little-published writer. He was a canon regular of the Augustinian Order based for most of his life at the monastery of Hagen near Worms.

Sycamber is notable for the expansiveness of his correspondence with other humanists in Germany, the Netherlands and France, among them Erasmus, Johannes Trithemius, Robert Gaguin and Wigand Wirt, the last debating the Immaculate Conception. His latest known letter is dated 3 September 1507. He was part of a circle of literary men living in the cities of southwest Germany, and was known for his "aggressive self-promotion."

Sycamber was born in Venray in upper Gelderland, close to the border with the Duchy of Cleves. In antiquity, this was the territory of the Germanic people called by the Romans the Sicambri, Sigambri, Sugambri, etc., and from this ethnonym he took his Latin surname. It can thus be surmised that he self-identified in some sense as "German."

Little known in the 21st century, Sycamber was a prolific but "rather mediocre" writer. Between 1495 and 1505, he produced as many as 140 opuscula in both poetry and prose, which have survived only erratically. Despite his wide network of influential literary contacts, few of his works were published. Even his friend Trithemius remarked on his prodigious if unavailing output:

Our Rutgerus Sycamber is writing books as is his habit and produces countless offspring — so many that it is wearisome to me even to list individual titles … for he has completed (to use his own word) 136 works of his lucubrations in four volumes and he has not stopped writing today."

Sycamber's Dialogus de musica (ca. 1500), also known as De recta, congrua devotaque cantione dialogus, dealt with the correct performance of chant in the liturgy. Other published works are De quantitate syllabarum (Cologne, 1502) and Litania ad omnes sanctos (Deventer, 1514). The former is written as a dialogue between Sycamber and the dedicatee, the teacher (magister) Jacob Sonnenschyn, to whom Sycamber also addresses appended poems.