Reforming Saints: Saints’ Lives and Their Authors in Germany, 1470–1530 (review)

It is now some twenty-five years since the late John F. D’Amico firmly reconnected humanism with religion in his fine study Renaissance Humanism in Papal Rome (Baltimore, 1983). He was building on the pioneering work of John O’Malley on Giles of Viterbo, which was indebted in turn to Paul O. Kristeller’s fundamental insight that humanism was a method of study rather than a secular/pagan philosophy of life. In her landmark study Possible Lives: Authors and Saints in Renaissance Italy (New York, 2005), Alison Knowles Frazier took this process a stage further by recovering that “lost continent” of (largely manuscript) literature: humanist hagiography. With this distinguished study, whose prodigious learning is harnessed to admirable clarity of focus, David Collins has built upon this revisionist project in significant ways to show just how good it was to think with saints for humanist writers in German-speaking lands in what was such a crucial period for the history of Christianity. To this end, Collins has put to his texts the following questions: Why did their writers fashion their saintly subjects the way they did (often playing fast and loose with historical data in the process)? To what degree did the authors rely on antecedent narratives? Why did they adopt specific literary forms? To what degree were these new narratives the result of the participation of other interested parties? The backbone to his book is provided by a richly contextualized analysis of some forty vitae newly composed or revised over his chosen sixty-year period. The first of his case studies is that of the eleventh-century bishop, Benno of Meissen, whose canonization in 1523 was to be the last until 1588. However, as Collins shows, more significant than this is the fact that St. Benno was only the third person from Germany to be officially canonized in the previous century (his predecessors were Sebald of Nuremberg in 1425 and Leopold the Pious in 1485). Indeed, Collins points out that there was a resurgence in saints’ life-writing precisely in the period he has chosen to study and that it followed half a century of relative scarcity: an “interruption [that] was peculiar to Germany” (p. 11). This revival in the fortunes of the free-standing saint’s life was part of the Germania illustrata project: “a wider movement among German humanists to investigate, construct, and glorify an ancient and medieval past that was [specifically] ‘German’” (p. 17). Collins has performed an important service by recovering the specifically religious dimension to this project, whose association with the first German poet laureate, Conrad Celtis (1459–1508), and the latter’s contacts with Hartman Schedel (which has now been studied with exemplary scholarship by Gernot Michael Müller) have resulted in a focus on its literary, historical, and geographical aspects. The episcopal status of Benno was itself part of a pattern since the most common subject of the forty vitae studied by Collins was the holy bishop and the latter’s importance for religious reform. Central to their sanctity and success was their missionary activity; in Benno’s case. he was first given the sobriquet in the sixteenth-century of “the Apostle to the Wends.” Hieronymous Emser, author of a Life of Benno (1512), is emblematic of the wider development that Collins so deftly describes and analyzes in the degree to which, from the title page to the text itself, he combines the traditional and the new. Although the “humanist hallmarks” of the text are clear enough—from classicizing Latin to the invention of speeches and the accompanying historico-topographical excurses—such were the demands of Emser’s plural audiences that he had to make more complex and substantive changes that he applied “with strategic precision” (p. 48): “For devotees of Benno’s cult in Saxony, he stressed Benno’s holiness…. For the Dresden court, he emphasized...