One of the difficulties of writing this current miniseries, and especially the episode I'm currently working on, is that every time I think I'm nearly finished I come across another interesting guy I need to include.

He said "Tuiscon" came from "Thoutsson" ("The Eldest Son" - De Oudste Zoon in modern Dutch), because he was the eldest son of Japheth. Other etymologies he mentioned included deriving Adam from the Dutch "Hat-dam" ("barrier against hatred") and Noah from "Noot-acht" ("pay attention to need").

He argued that it was not Heber, the ancestor of the Hebrews, who was allowed to keep his own language as a reward for refusing to help build the Tower of Babel (a popular extra-Biblical legend), but Gomer, who he identified with Tuiscon, the legendary progenitor of the Germanic peoples.

In 1545, Levita finally claimed credit for the (now very successful) grammar that had been plagiarised 40 years earlier, and published a revised version without the parts (plagiarised from a different source, and apparently wildly inaccurate) that his assistant had added.

This was controversial, and some considered it an attack on the authenticity of the Bible itself. In the era of the Reformation, as Protestants took an interest in the original Hebrew Bible text, Christians also entered the debate, and it continued through the 16th and 17th centuries.

Instead, he argues that the niqud were added by Masoretic scholars in the mid-first-millenium CE (something now generally accepted as fact).

The Massoreth ha-Massoreth is an exploration of the Masorah, a corpus of centuries of commentary accompanying the Hebrew Bible. In it, Levita argues against the mainstream view of the time that the vowel pointers in the Hebrew Bible were included in the original, divinely-inspired texts.

In the end, though, Levita was uprooted yet again, once more by the Holy Roman Emperor's army, in the infamous 1527 sack of Rome by the Landsknechte. He returned, yet again, to Venice, where he worked on his most controversial work.

Forced back to Venice by the War of the League of Cambrai, he eventually ended up teaching Cardinal Egidio da Viterbo in Rome, who wanted to learn Hebrew in order to study Kabbalah, popular with humanists ever since Pico della Mirandola argued (ironically) for its use to prove the divinity of Jesus.

In Padua, he also wrote a commentary on a Hebrew grammar by the 12th-century scholar Moses Kimhi (his assistant stole the manuscript and published it under his own name), and the Bovo-Bukh, a reworking, in his native Yiddish, of the chivalric romance Buovo d'Antona.

He left his native Bavaria at some point in the late 15th century, amid waves of persecution of the region's Jewish population, and ended up in first Venice and then Padua, where he earned a living teaching Hebrew.

You can listen at historyofscience.podbean.com/e/forbidden-experiment-2/

I also explore the rumour's context in terms of Frederick's life, personality and reputation, and Medieval ideas about the origin of language.

This episode concerns a similar experiment allegedly carried out by Frederick II, King of Sicily and Holy Roman Emperor, one of the most remarkable figures of the European Middle Ages.

Conservatives: "Haha stupid liberals compare everyone they disagree with to the Nazis"

Also Conservatives: "We're going to behave like the Nazis"

I still need to start adding pages for individual episodes, with sources and transcripts and things like that, but there's a website there, and I've also got an email address, you get in touch with corrections or suggestions or anything you like really at admin@scienceapeculiarhistory.co.uk