Nicholas’ father was Ulrich Ellenbog, a physician of Memmingen, who graduated as Doctor of Medicine from Pavia in 1459, and became first Reader in Medicine at Ingolstadt.  The letters introduce us to most of his children.  One son, Onofrius, went for a soldier, became attached to Maximilian’s train, and received a knighthood; another, Ulrich, became M.D. at Siena, but died immediately afterwards; another, John, became a parish priest.  Of the daughters three remained in the world; one, Elizabeth, married; another, Cunigunde, died of plague caught in nursing some nuns.  The fourth daughter, Barbara, at the age of nine entered the convent of Heppach, and lived there forty-one years, rising to be Prioress and then Abbess.  We shall hear of her again.

Nicholas Ellenbog, 1480 or 1481-1543, was the third son.  After five years at Heidelberg, 1497-1502, in which he met Wimpfeling and was fellow-student, though a year senior, to Oecolampadius, he went off to Cracow, the Polish university, which was then so flourishing as to attract students from the west.  Schurer, for example, the Strasburg printer, was M.A. of Cracow in 1494; and some idea of the condition of learning there may be gained from a book-seller’s letter to Aldus from Cracow, December 1505, ordering 100 copies of Constantine Lascaris’ Greek grammar.  For some months Ellenbog heard lectures there on astronomy, which remained a favourite subject with him throughout his life.  Then an impulse came to him to follow his father’s footsteps in medicine, and at the advice of friends he went back across half Europe to Montpellier, which from its earliest days had been famous for its medical faculty.  In the long vacation of 1502 he spent two months with a friend in the chateau of a nobleman among the Gascon hills, and on their return journey they stayed for a fortnight in a house of Dominican nuns.  The sisters were strict in their observances, and gave a good pattern of the unworldly life, which attracted Ellenbog strongly.  In 1503 he went home for the long vacation to Memmingen.  On the way he was taken by the plague, and with difficulty dragged himself in to Ravensburg.  For three months he lay ill, and death came very close.  As its unearthly glow irradiated the world around him, reversing its light and shade, the visions of the nunnery recurred.  He vowed that if his life were still his to give, it should be given to God’s service; and on recovering he entered Ottobeuren.

In his noviciate year he was under the guidance of a kind and sympathetic novice-master, who allowed him to study quietly in his cell to his heart’s content; and during this period he composed what he calls an epitome or breviary of Plato.  Its precise character he does not specify, but its second title suggests that it may have been a collection of extracts from Plato:  not from the Greek, for he had little acquaintance with that yet, but presumably from such of Plato’s works as had been translated into