The holy life

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The Holy Life was the most widespread collection of folk-language legends of the European late Middle Ages. It was written around 1400 in the Dominican monastery in Nuremberg as a two-volume legend in prose .

The work has survived in almost 200 manuscripts and 33 Upper German and 8 Low German print editions and was widespread in the entire German-speaking area as in the Netherlands and Scandinavia . It is a major exception among the German legendaries because it is not primarily based on Latin sources, but ultimately almost exclusively on German verse and prose legends (' Passional ', 'Märterbuch', Hartmann von Aue : 'Gregorius', Ebernand von Erfurt : 'Heinrich and Kunigunde', Reinbot von Durne : 'Georg' etc.). It was regarded as a popular hagiographic source work par excellence ( Meistersinger , Jakob Mennel's 'Habsburg Book of Saints' etc. as well as for the fine arts) and, due to its great popularity, was also the target of a derisive pamphlet by Martin Luther in 1537 , Die Liegend von Sant Joh.Chrysostomus .

literature

  • Werner Williams-Krapp: The German and Dutch legendaries of the Middle Ages. Studies of their transmission, text and impact history (= texts and text history 20). Tübingen 1986, ISBN 3-484-36020-8 .

expenditure

  • M. Brand, K. Freienhagen-Baumgardt, R. Meyer, W. Williams-Krapp (eds.): The holy life. Volume I: The summer part (= texts and text story 44). Tubingen 1996.
  • M. Brand, B. Jung, W. Williams-Krapp (Ed.): The holy life. Volume II: The winter part (= texts and text history 51), Tübingen 2004.
  • Severin Rüttgers (ed.), The Holy Life and Suffering, otherwise called the Passional, 2 volumes, winter part and summer part. Leipzig, 1913 (The edition includes 167 illustrations based on the woodcuts of the Lübeck print from 1492; Volume 2 contains an afterword by the editor on the genesis of the work and the woodcuts as well as a calendar index and a list of names.)