His collected works, edited between 1834 and 1860, comprise twenty-eight volumes, with five supplementary volumes appearing from 1910 to 1929; but more items have been discovered since then, especially in regard to his extensive correspondence. A new edition of the letters that is being prepared under the leadership of Heinz Scheible (1977-) includes some three hundred previously unpublished items, as well as many corrections of earlier ones. Melanchthon's importance in German intellectual history is indicated by the fact that some 2.5 million copies of his more than seven hundred works may have existed by 1600--a time when the Germanies had a population of perhaps twenty million, many of whom were literate in neither German nor Latin.
Melanchthon was born on 16 February 1497 in Bretten to George Schwartzerd, an armorer of the elector palatine in Heidelberg, and Barbara Schwartzerd, née Reuter, the daughter of a well-to-do merchant. After receiving his primary education from a tutor in Bretten he went to Reuchlin's Latin School in Pforzheim, where he lived in Reuchlin's sister's house. The Pforzheim school had an excellent reputation because of Reuchlin's humanist scholarship, and Melanchthon became acquainted with several future humanists there.
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