BERTOLD VON

See also:

• REGENSBURG (RATISBON)

REGENSBURG (c. 1220-1272)  , the greatest German preacher of the later middle ages, was a native of Regensburg, and entered the Franciscan monastery there . From about 1250 onwards his fame as a preacher spread over all the German-speaking parts of the continent of Europe . He wandered from village to village and town to town, preaching to enormous audiences, always in the open air; the earnestness and straight-forward eloquence with which he insisted that true repentance came from the heart, that pious pilgrimages and the absolution of the Church were mere outward symbols, appealed to all classes . He died in Regensburg on the 13th of December 1272 . His German sermons, of which seventy-one have been preserved, are among the most powerful in the language, and form the chief monuments of Middle High German prose . His style is clear, direct and remarkably free from cumbrous Latin constructions; he employed, whenever he could, the pithy and homely sayings of the peasants, and is not reluctant to point his moral with a rough humour . As a thinker, he shows little sympathy with that strain of medieval mysticism which is to be observed in all the poetry of his contemporaries . The best edition of BertoId's German sermons is that by F . Pfeiffer and J . Strobl (2 vols., 1862–188o; reprinted, 1906) ; there is also a modern German version by F . Gobel (4th ed., 1906) . The Latin sermons were edited by G .

Jakob (188o) . See C.W . Stromberger, Bertold von Regensburg, der grosste Volksredner des deutschen Mittelalters (1877), K . Unkel, Bertold von Regensburg (1882), and E . Bernhardt, Bruder Bertold von Regensburg (1905); A . E . Schonbach, Studien zur Geschichte der altdeutschen Predigt (Publications of the Vienna Academy, 1906) .