Renaissance Monks: Monastic Humanism in Six Biographical Sketches (review)

This book consists of expanded versions of biographical articles published in several lexika and The American Benedictine Review. The six monks, all but one of them active along the upper Rhine or Danube basin, are (1) Conradus Leontorius [Konrad Töritz of Leonberg] (ca. 1460-1507/1511), a Cistercian of Maulbronn; (2) Benedictus Chelidonius [Benedikt Schwalbe of Nürnberg] (ca. 1460-1521), monk of St. Aegidius in Nuremberg and then abbot of the Benedictine Schottenstift in Vienna; (3) Wolfgangus Marius [Lukas Mayer of Dorfbach near Passau] (1469-1544), a Cistercian of the abbey of Aldersbach in Bavaria; (4)Henricus Urbanus [Heinrich Fastnacht of Orb near Gelnhausen] (d. after 1538), a Cistercian of Georgenthal in Thuringia; (5) Vitus Bild [Veit Bild] (1481-1529), a Benedictine of SS. Ulrich and Afra in Augsburg; (6) Nikolaus Ellebog (1481-1543), Benedictine of Ottobeuren in Swabia.

The chapters usefully explicate, with accompanying bibliographical citations in footnotes, the personal networks among the German humanists inside and outside the monasteries in the last decade of the fifteenth century through the first two or three decades of the sixteenth century. Posset rejects the model of late-medieval deformation yielding to Reformation, explaining the Protestant Reformation more as the product of late medieval reform and humanism than as a response to abuses.

We catch a glimpse, for example, of Leontorius trying to mediate between Jacob Wimpfeling and the prior of the Dominican friary in Basel after Wimpfeling debunked the belief that Augustine, the author of the rule the Dominicans followed, was a monk. Leontorius, having done all manner of editorial work for the Basel printer Amerbach, requested a gratis set of the eleven-volume Augustine edition in return, or, from the printer Froben, a set of spectacles. We follow Benedikt Chelidonius in his classical poetic collaboration with Albrecht Dürer's picture books on the Passion of Christ and the life of Mary and Heinrich Urbanus's midwifery on behalf of the Croatian humanist Marcus Marulus's Carmen on the crucified Christ. We learn about Veit Bild's careful preservation of 550 letters from and to the leading German humanists of his day but also of his studies in mathematics, astronomy and astrology, cartography, and hagiography, not to mention his pastime of turning the library catalogue of his monastery into Latin verse. And we observe Nikolaus Ellebog's efforts to learn Hebrew with the aid of Johannes Reuchlin.

The book could have used more rigorous editing. It alternates between writing down to a very basic level, on the one hand, and employing technical language and orthography that only a specialist could figure out, on the other. "Scholastic manuscript" on page 88 probably means "scholastic treatise."Sometimes Posset's prose reflects undigested Latinisms or Germanisms:the ablative-of-means use of cura and its variants, so common on Latin title pages, has put on English dress as "took care of"(p. 51) when "edited by" would make more sense to most readers; "six-liner" for "hexastichon" makes sense in German but not really in English (p. 81). Oddly enough in a book of biographies, we find no consistent treatment of birth and death dates for the six humanist monks. Indeed, in the chapter on Henricus Urbanus we learn only after plowing through three or four pages that his dates are unknown. Posset does not attempt a "ca." guess even in the running text of the chapter, but leaves it to the reader to figure out Urbanus's approximate birth date based on his university matriculation.

The book's reference value is clear; it offers in addition in some places glimpses of real human beings and their networks that would not so readily emerge from entry after entry in a bio-bibliographical lexicon. The indexes are very thorough.