During the fifteenth century, and the early sixteenth, influences of importance to English comedy proceed not from the literature of Italy and Spain alone. In northern Europe additions most significant to the history of the type were making. To the crop of French _sotties_, _moralités_, and _farces_ I have already referred. The German Reuchlin in 1498 put forth a roaring Latin comedy called the _Henno_, which, in modern Terentian style, embodied the chicaneries of Pathelin. About the same time the Germans began to make the acquaintance, through translations in their own tongue, of highly flavoured Italian Latin plays like the _Poliscene_ and the _Philogenia;_ while those of them who cared not for such things were favoured with a recrudescence of the Christian Terence school. In 1507 the young humanist, Kilian Reuter, in imitation of the nun of Gandersheim, produced in Latin his pious comedy depicting the passion of St. Dorothea. In Holland, meanwhile, were springing into existence the Latin prototypes of more than one of our own didactic interludes; for in the _comedia sacra_ the attempt was made to combine the intrigue of the Italian university play with the moral of the prodigal son and the technique of the Terentian drama. The more important of these plays of the prodigal son, in respect of influence upon English comedy, are the _Asotus_ of Macropedius, written before 1529, and his _Rebelles_, 1535, the _Acolastus_ of Gnapheus, 1529, and the _Studentes_ of Stymmelius, 1549. The most dramatic of them are the second and third as mentioned. The _Acolastus_, indeed, translated into English by Palsgrave in 1540, exerted a long-enduring influence upon our drama. To the same period belong also a species of biblical comedies dealing with heroes, like the _Joseph_ of the Dutch Jesuit, Crocus, 1535, and the _Susanna_, _Judith_, _Eli_, _Ruth_, _Job_, _Solomon_, _Goliath_, etc., of Macropedius, the Swiss Sixt Birck, and others; and another kind of play that occupied itself with prototypes of the Roman Antichrist,--Haman, Judas, and the like. The former may be called the idyllic or heroic miracle, the latter the polemic. And of the latter the most influential development was the controversial interlude, _Pammachius_, written by the German Protestant Naogeorgos (Kirchmayer) and dedicated to the Archbishop of Canterbury. By 1545 this play, in which the Pope figures as the Antichrist, had not only been acted at Cambridge in the original, but translated into English by our own John Bale; and, as we shall presently see, it was, somewhere between 1540 and 1548, imitated by him in one of the most vigorous of our controversial dramas.[65]