Reforming Saints

Abstract Reforming Saints explains how and why Renaissance humanists composed Latin hagiography in Germany in the decades leading up to the Reformation. Reforming Saints shows that, contrary to scholarly presumptions, there was a resurgence in the composition of saints’ lives in the half centuries on either side of 1500 and that German humanists were among the most active authors and editors of these texts. A goal of Reforming Saints is therefore to shed light on the intersection of a kind of writer (the humanist) and a kind of literature (hagiography) at a defining moment for both. Reforming Saints argues for evaluating this abundant, if overlooked and misunderstood literature on its own terms and against an approach that would denigrate it for not meeting standards drawn from Erasmus or Luther. By exploring salient themes in the humanists’ hagiographical writings and relating them to the general religious culture of the era, Reforming Saints discovers the unexpected yet coherent extent of humanist engagement in the cult of the saints and exposes the strategic ways that these authors made writings about the saints into a literature for religious and cultural reforms that German humanists promoted through much else of their activity. Writing saints’ lives provided these Renaissance scholars a way to investigate Germany's medieval past, to reconstruct and exalt its greatness, and to advocate programs of religious and cultural reform. Reforming Saints proposes that these German humanists thus showed themselves to be much like their Italian contemporaries, many of whom were engaged in similar projects. Moreover, these compositions provided later authors, polemicists, and philologists in Catholic Europe – from Counter‐Reformation preachers in Switzerland to seventeenth‐century Bollandists in Brussels – a legacy to draw from and use for different purposes by the end of the sixteenth century.