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

The title and subtitle of this book conceal the specificity of its important principal subject matter—namely, the substantial body of hagiographical writings produced by dozens of German humanist authors in the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries. Despite oversights by generations of modern scholars who apparently “want the humanists to be something other than they were,” Collins demonstrates that “[w]hen we allow the humanist authors to speak in their own voice, what we find is that they were exuberant writers about the saints” (pp. 14, 18). The book thus undermines simplistic and mistaken associations of Renaissance humanism with disdain for the “medieval” cult of the saints. Overlapping with some of the concerns in Alison Knowles Frazier’s study of hagiographical writing of Quattrocento Italian humanists, it sheds revealing light on a neglected chapter in the history of Catholic hagiography between the Golden Legend and the Acta Sanctorum, a chapter long overshadowed by the traditional association of humanism with the Reformation and the latter’s rejection of the cult of the saints.

Collins’s deeply researched book is based on a meticulous analysis of more than forty free-standing Latin lives of saints that deal with men and women who were active in the German lands of the Holy Roman Empire, accounts that were either written or revised between 1470 and 1530. Many of them were published, whereas others remained in manuscript; some were revised in telling ways, others translated also into the vernacular. Collins finds no single, simple pattern among his authors—some of whom were more deeply marked by humanist training than others—but rather a variety of complex relationships to the sources with which they worked, the princely or civic patrons with whom they collaborated, and the audiences and devotional practices toward which they directed their vitae. What emerges clearly in the four chapters of his study is the extent to which hagiographical writers such as Jerome Emser, Sigismund Meisterlin, Albert von Bonstetten, Joannes Cincinnius, and Henry Gundelfingen were not erudite elites standing outside “popular religion,” but rather were embedded within contemporary socioreligious contexts that presupposed the veneration of the saints “through a literature that was conceived not as ‘conservative’ so much as ordinary”(p. 127). At the same time, the German humanist authors revised and reworked medieval vitae in accord with their diverse aims, including a widespread desire to reform church and society—hence the predominance of exemplary bishops among their saintly types and of eremitic recluses who modeled radical holiness. In addition to their Latin usage and classical literary allusions, their use of poetry and poetic epigrams, the humanists’ hagiographical writings are marked by that hybrid combination of descriptive geography, historical chronicle, and storytelling known as chorography, which also characterized humanist historical writing more generally. In the case of Nicholas of Flue (1417–87),“the fifteenth-century’s saintly superstar” (p. 99) and the subject of the book’s fourth chapter, the humanists seized on an extreme ascetic and holy hermit who functioned as a sort of patron saint not merely for his home territory of Unterwalden, but for the Swiss Confederation as a whole. Admiration for “Brother Claus” survived the confessional divisions of the Reformation era in Switzerland.

Although Collins’s particular focus is humanist hagiography in Germanic lands from 1470 to 1530, the analytical reach of this important book is much broader. He incorporates a wide knowledge of the previous history of medieval hagiography of which his humanist authors made such extensive use, and in his conclusion he compares their writings to early-modern hagiographical successors such as Georg Witzel, Laurentius Surius, and the early Bollandists.