The literary society of Dürer's epoch at Nuremberg was grouped in the _Sodalitas Literaria Rhenana_, under the learned Conrad Celtes, who published a book of Latin comedies, pure in Latinity and lax in morals, which he mischievously attributed to the Abbess Roswitha. Pirkheimer and the monk Chelidonius also belonged to this sodality. Other contemporary literati of the city were Cochläus, Luther's satirical opponent; the Hebraist Osiander; Venatorius, who united the discordant professions of poetry and mathematics; the Provost Pfinzing, for whose poem of _Tewrdannkh_, Dürer's pupil Schäuffelein made 118 illustrations; Baumgärtner, Melanchthon's friend; Veit Dietrich, the reformer; and Joachim Camerarius, the Latinist. But the most illustrious of Nuremberg's authors at that time was the cobbler-poet, Hans Sachs, a radical in politics and religion, who scourged the priests and the capitalists of his day in songs and satires which were sung and recited by the workmen of all Germany. He himself tells us that he wrote 4,200 master-songs, 208 comedies and tragedies, 73 devotional and love songs, and 1,007 fables, tales, and miscellaneous poems; and others say that his songs helped the Reformation as much as Luther's preaching. Thus the activities of mechanics, art, and literature pressed forward with equal fervor in the quaint old Franconian city, while Albert Dürer's life was passing on. "Abroad and far off still mightier things were doing; Copernicus was writing in his observatory, Vasco di Gama was on the Southern Seas."