In Reforming Saints, David J. Collins explains how and why
Renaissance humanists composed Latin hagiography in Germany in the
decades leading up to the Reformation. Contrary to the traditional
wisdom, Collins's research uncovers a resurgence in the composition
of saints' lives in the half century leading up to 1520. German
humanists, he finds, were among the most active authors and editors
of these texts.
Focusing on forty Latin depictions of German saints written
between 1470 and 1520, Collins finds patterns both in how these
humanists chose their subjects and how they presented their
holiness. He argues that the humanist hagiographers took up the
writing of saints' lives to investigate Germany's medieval past, to
reconstruct and exalt its greatness, and to advocate programs of
religious and cultural reform. This literature, says Collins, left
a legacy that polemicists and philologists in Catholic Europe would
be using for their own purposes by the end of the sixteenth
century. These hagiographic writings are thus both reflective and
formative of the religious and cultural conflicts that defined this
period of European history. To bolster his case, Collins draws not
only on the Latin saints' lives, but also on vernacular lives, maps
and chorographic documents, personal and professional letters,
papal, urban, and municipal archives, painting, sculpture and
broadside print, and medieval and early modern histories and
chronicles. The result is a fresh, new portrait of the humanism of
Renaissance Germany.
With his surprising and insightful conclusions, Collins sheds new
light on humanism's appropriation in Germany, particularly in its
religious aspect. He approaches the humanists'writings on their own
terms and recaptures the creative energy the humanists brought to
the task of revising the legends of the saints. His scholarly
perspective includes the roles of emperors, princes, abbots, city
councilmen, artists, librarians, soldiers, peasants, and pilgrims,
showing how humanists reached larger and less learned audiences
than many other kinds of writing ever could. The cult of the saints
and Renaissance humanism are two topics that have attracted
considerable scholarly attention. Reforming Saints considers them
as seldom before -- at their intersection.
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