CELTES, KONRAD German humanist and Latin poet, was born at Wipfeld, near Schweinfurt. After study ing at Heidelberg Celtes led the wandering life of a scholar of the Renaissance, teaching in various universities, and everywhere establishing learned societies on the model of the academy of Pomponius Laetus at Rome. Among these was the Sodalitas lit teraria Rhenana or Celtica at Mainz (i 49i) . In 1486 he pub lished his first book, Ars versificandi et carminum, which gained him the honour of being crowned as the first poet laureate of Germany, the ceremony being performed by the emperor, Fred erick III., at the diet of Nuremberg in 1487. In 1497 he was appointed by the emperor, Maximilian I., professor of poetry and rhetoric at Vienna, and in 1502 was made head of the new Collegium Poetarum et Mathematicorum, with the right of con ferring the laureateship. He did much to introduce system into the methods of teaching, to purify the Latin of learned inter course, and to further the study of the classics, especially the Greek. But he was more than a mere classicist of the Renaissance. He was keenly interested in history and topography, especially in that of his native country. It was he who first unearthed (in the convent of St. Emmeran at Regensburg) the Latin poems of the nun, Hrosvitha of Gandersheim, of which he published an edition (Nuremberg, 1501). He also published an historical poem, Ligurinus sive de rebus gestis Frederici primi imperatoris libri x. (Augsburg, 1507), and the map of the Roman empire known as the Tabula Peutingeriana (after Konrad Peutinger, to whom he left it). He projected a great work on Germany; but of this only the Germania generalis and an historical work in prose, De origine, situ, moribus et institutis Nurimbergae libellus, appeared. As a writer of Latin verse Celtes far surpassed any of his predecessors. His epigrams, edited by Hartfelder, were published at Berlin in 1881. His editions of the classics are now, of course, out of date.