Udo, Archbishop of Trier, dies in 1078 while besieging Tübingen with an imperial army.

Earlier known as Udo of Nellenburg, he was born in Tübingen, Swabia, as the eldest son of Count Eberhard of Nellenburg.

After the murder of Archbishop Cuno I of Trier, a foreigner, in early June 1066, the cathedral chapter had elected Udo, one of their number to replace him; Udo received priestly consecration in 1067.

A leading German voice in the campaign of Pope Alexander II against simony, Udo had become involved in the campaign against lay investiture being waged by Pope Gregory VII against the Emperor Henry IV beginning in 1075.

Regarded as a mediator in the dispute, he has been unable to maintain the peace but still works at a resolution.

He had negotiated a reconciliation between emperor and pope in August 1077 and maintained his own good terms with the Holy See, receiving a letter from the pope in March 1078 asking him to work further for the establishment of peace.

He will eventually be buried in Trier Cathedral.

Eberhard I of Württemburg, whose motto is attempto ("I dare"), founds the University of Tübingen in 1477; its first rector is the Swabian historian and humanist Johannes Nauclerus.

Eberhard, a civic and ecclesiastic reformer who has become absorbed in the Renaissance revival of learning during his travels to Italy, also orders the expulsion of all Jews living in Württemberg.

He invites the Brethren of the Common Life and the community of devotio moderna to his country and founds collegiate churches in Urach, Dettingen an der Erms, Herrenberg, Einsiedel near Tübingen and Tachenhausen.

He takes interest in reforms of the church and monasteries.

Despite not being able to speak Latin, he holds education in high esteem and has a great number of Latin texts translated into German.

Parts of his large library have been preserved.

Born at Urach, Eberhard is the son of Ludwig I, Count of Württemberg-Urach, and his wife Mechthild of the Palatinate, born as countess palatine by the Rhine.

As Count Eberhard V, he officially took charge of the government of Württemberg-Urach when he was still underage.

Württemberg has been divided since 1442.

At first he had a legal guardian, a respected nobleman who had mentored his father as a youth, Rudolph von Ehingen of Kilchberg.

A fencing manual had been created for Eberhard in 1467 by Hans Talhoffer.

The manuscript is currently held by the Bavarian State Library.

The following year, in 1468, he had traveled to Jerusalem and became a knight of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre.

To commemorate this he chose the palm as his symbol.

In Urach on April 12 (or July 4), 1474, he had married a prestigious bride, Barbara, daughter of Ludovico III Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua.

The only daughter out of this marriage, Barbara, was born in Urach on August 2, 1475 and died on October 15 of that year.

 

Rudolph Jakob Camerarius contributes particularly toward establishing sexuality in plants by identifying and defining the male and female reproductive parts of the plant and also by describing their function in fertilization

One of the first botanists to perform experiments in heredity, he shows that pollen is required for this process.

Professor of natural philosophy at the University of Tübingen, he describes his findings in the form of a letter to a colleague, De sexu plantarum (1694; “On the sex of plants”), and in Opuscula botanica (1697; “Botanical Works”).

Christopher Marlowe had used the German legend of the historical Johann Georg Faust and his pact with the Devil, exchanging his soul for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures, as the basis for his more ambitious play, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (published around 1604 but possibly written as early as 1587).

Another important version of the incredible legend is the play Faust, written by the German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

The first part, which is the one more closely connected to the earlier legend, is published in Tübingen in 1808.

Goethe's Faust complicates the simple Christian moral of the original legend.

A hybrid between a play and an extended poem, Goethe's two-part "closet drama" is epic in scope.

It gathers together references from Christian, medieval, Roman, eastern, and Hellenic poetry, philosophy, and literature.

The composition and refinement of Goethe's own version of the legend will occupy him for over sixty years (though not continuously).

The final version, published after his death, will be recognized as a great work of German literature.

The story concerns the fate of Faust in his quest for the true essence of life ("was die Welt im Innersten zusammenhält").

Frustrated with learning and the limits to his knowledge, power, and enjoyment of life, he attracts the attention of the Devil (represented by Mephistopheles), who makes a bet with Faust that he will be able to satisfy him; a notion that Faust is incredibly reluctant towards, as he believes this happy zenith will never come.

This is a significant difference between Goethe's "Faust" and Marlowe's; Faust is not the one who suggests the wager.

In the first part, Mephistopheles leads Faust through experiences that culminate in a lustful relationship with Gretchen, an innocent young woman.

Gretchen and her family are destroyed by Mephistopheles' deceptions and Faust's desires.

Part one of the story ends in tragedy for Faust, as Gretchen is saved but Faust is left to grieve in shame.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe publishes his book Zu Farbenlehre (Theory of Colors) on May 16, 1810.

It is generally acknowledged in Goethe's time that, as Isaac Newton had shown in his Opticks in 1704, colorless (white) light is split up into its component colors when directed through a prism.

Goethe's starting point was the supposed discovery of how Newton erred in the prismatic experiment, and by 1793 Goethe had formulated his arguments against Newton in the essay "Über Newtons Hypothese der diversen Refrangibilität" ("On Newton's hypothesis of diverse refrangibility").

Yet, by 1794, Goethe had begun to increasingly note the importance of the physiological aspect of colors.

As Goethe notes in the historical section, Louis Bertrand Castel had already published a criticism of Newton's spectral description of prismatic color in 1740 in which he observed that the sequence of colors split by a prism depended on the distance from the prism—and that Newton was looking at a special case.

In the preface to the Theory of Colors, the poet's views on the nature of colors and how these are perceived by humans, Goethe explains that he has tried to apply the principle of polarity, in the work—a proposition that belongs to his earliest convictions and is constitutive of his entire study of nature.

The books contains detailed descriptions of phenomena such as colored shadows, refraction, and chromatic aberration.

The work originated in Goethe's occupation with painting and will mainly exert  an influence on the arts (Philipp Otto Runge, J. M. W. Turner, the Pre-Raphaelites, Wassily Kandinsky).

The book is a successor to two short essays entitled "Contributions to Optics".

Physicists will reject Gothe's work, but a number of philosophers and physicists will concern themselves with it, including Thomas Johann Seebeck, Arthur Schopenhauer, Hermann von Helmholtz, Rudolf Steiner, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Werner Heisenberg, Kurt Göd'el, and Mitchell Feigenbaum.

Goethe's book provides a catalogue of how color is perceived in a wide variety of circumstances, and considers Isaac Newton's observations to be special cases.

Unlike Newton, Goethe's concern is not so much with the analytic treatment of color, as with the qualities of how phenomena are perceived.

Philosophers will come to understand the distinction between the optical spectrum, as observed by Newton, and the phenomenon of human color perception as presented by Goethe—a subject analyzed at length by Wittgenstein in his comments on Goethe's theory in Remarks on Color.

Christian Gmelin observes in 1818 that salts of lithium color flames bright red.

Neither Gmelin nor Johan August Arfwedson, in attempting reductions by heating the oxide with iron or carbon, succeed in isolating the element itself from its salts.

Chemist William Thomas Brande and electrochemist Sir Humphry Davy later isolate the metal in pure form, producing a minute quantity by the electrolysis of lithium oxide (or lithium carbonate?).

David Strauss, a pioneer in the historical investigation of Jesus, begins publication of Das Leben Jessu, kritisch bearbeitet ("The life of Jesus, critically examined") in Tübingen.

Strauss had entered the University of Tübingen—the Tübinger Stift—in 1825.

The professors of philosophy there failed to interest him, but the theories of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Jakob Böhme, Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel hd successively claimed his allegiance.

He became an assistant to a country clergyman in 1830, and nine months later, he accepted the post of professor in the Evangelical Seminaries of Maulbronn and Blaubeuren, where he would teach Latin, history and Hebrew.

Strauss had resigned his office to study under Schleiermacher and Hegel in Berlin in October 1831.

Hegel died just as he arrived, and though Strauss regularly attended Schleiermacher's lectures, it was only those on the life of Jesus that interested him.

Strauss had tried to find kindred spirits among the followers of Hegel but was not successful.

While under the influence of Hegel's distinction between Vorstellung and Begriff, Strauss had already conceived the ideas found in his two principal theological works: Das Leben Jesu (Life of Jesus) and Christliche Glaubenslehre (Christian Dogma).

Hegelians generally would not accept his conclusions.

Strauss had returned to Tübingen in 1832, lecturing on logic, Plato, the history of philosophy and ethics with great success., but he he resigned in the fall of 1833 to devote all his time to the completion of his Das Leben Jesu, published when he is twenty-seven years old.