Roland Stieglecker. Die Renaissance eines Heiligen: Sebastian Brant und Onuphrius eremita.
Collins, David J.
(Gratia: Bamberger Schriften zur Renaissanceforschung, 37.) Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2001. 542 pp. index, illus, bibl. 65.50 [euro]. ISBN: 3-447-04386-5.
Roland Stieglecker's opening question in his published dissertation is half observation, half provocation: If Renaissance humanists made their mark on western culture by reaching back over the Middle Ages to appropriate anew the literature and rhetoric of ancient Greece and Rome, and if the best fifteenth-century humanists in Germany were those who most directly presaged the later religious reforms of Luther and his circle, and if the medieval cult of the saints represented so much of what these humanists wanted to move beyond, then why did so many early German humanists contribute to the veneration of saints, most strikingly by editing and composing hagiographical vitae, poetry, and liturgical texts? Moreover, Stieglecker wonders, why have these writings garnered only minimal, usually derogatory scholarly attention? His response takes the form of a case study, examining the hagiographic poetry of Sebastian Brant (1457-1521) on the fourth-century desert father Onuphrius. Stieglecker suggests that with this panegyric Brant expressed in a humanist mode his admiration for the eremitic life and advocated a rejection of materialism to his non-eremitic readers. This poetry, offering as it did a sincere, hopeful response to the moral decadence Brant saw around him, thus complements his famous satire The Ship of Fools (1494); and so Stieglecker concludes that the poetry is no less "humanist" for its hagiographical subject, no less "Christian" for its classicizing forms and pagan imagery.
Brant composed four poems about Onuphrius. One appeared in a collection of his religious poetry in 1494; two more, on a broadsheet in the same year; and the fourth, in Brant's Varia carmina (1498) along with the other three. Stieglecker analyzes the poems individually and against one another. He moves carefully between various specialized kinds of analysis: linguistic, literary, and codicological, among others. These chapters are exemplary for their thoroughness and precision. In another set of chapters, Stieglecker associates Brant's interest in Onuphrius with the Carthusians in Basel and with a general interest among German humanists in the vita solitaria. Throughout the analysis Stieglecker pays careful attention to the artwork published with the poetry and the relation between image and text, and the reader is greatly aided by seventeen illustrations taken from the incunables and a splendid reproduction of the broadsheet in its original size included as an insert.
The book's weaknesses, as is often the case, are side effects of its strengths. The author devotes himself to the analysis of too much secondary literature and still misses a few works (such as anything by John O'Malley on Erasmus' piety as well as Hilmar Pabel's 1997 monograph on Erasmus and prayer) that would have enhanced his introductory presentation of such larger issues as how the saints fit into humanist piety and how humanists hoped to use their hagiography. In the long historiographical introduction (106 pages), Stieglecker never strays from a cautious representation of the established debates defined by well-known scholars beginning with Burckhardt. Yet these debates are old and warrant not merely another recounting but more aggressive critique, just as the hagiographic texts themselves beg for more creative historiographical reframing. Along a similar vein, I myself kept wishing for a richer contextualization of the compositions outside of Brant's personal life. For example, I am still unsure how Brant's devotion to Onuphrius was specifically "humanist," rather than more of the same fifteenth-century interest in eremitism that can be noted in the case of, say, Nikolaus von Flue. This fifteenth-century Swiss eremitical superstar was written about furiously by contemporaries of many diverse ideological stripes. Comparing the cases might have set Brant's work in a broader cultural context, but Stieglecker makes only one passing reference. Given the scope of Stieglecker's work this frustration on a reader's part is perhaps inevitable: While his linguistic analysis of the poems was sufficient for me, a Neo-Latinist might find her appetite similarly whetted but not sated.
These criticisms, however, are not meant to detract from the judgment that Die Renaissance eines Heiligen makes a valuable contribution to the study of humanism in Germany, particularly in its religious aspect. It adds to a pool of recent works addressing the murky relationship of Renaissance intellectuals to medieval religion by younger scholars in Germany, including Angelika Dorfler-Dierken on early-modern devotion to Saint Anne, Andreas Freitager on monastic humanism in West-phalia, Ursula Rautenberg on early printing and hagiography in Cologne, and Gabriela Signori on humanist participation in ritual. These scholars have been inspired by their mentors--Frantisek Graus, Erich Meuthen, and Klaus Schreiner, as well as Stieglecker's own doctoral advisor, Dieter Wuttke, among others--to revisit neglected texts and rethink the conventional wisdom about German humanists and their relation to medieval piety and church reform. Anglophone scholars, take note!
DAVID J. COLLINS, S.J.
Northwestern University
