First Contacts with Italy

Frank L. Borchardt

["First Contacts with Italy: German Chancellery Humanism in Prague," The Renaissance and Reformation in Germany: An Introduction, Gerhart Hoffmeister, ed. (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1977), pp. 1-16.]

The vanguard of Italy's cultural rebirth knocked at the gates of Prague. Its ruler, Charles IV (1316-1378), king of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor, bemused and surely uncomprehending, granted admission. But the men bearing the new ideas soon departed, disappointed at their failure to win Charles to their grand designs. Disappointed perhaps, but they were also admired and imitated; although only superficially understood or misunderstood altogether, they left behind an indelible impression. The encounter might have proved to be a mere episode, isolated and without consequence, but the future was preparing an important role for the new ideas. Once Charles had opened the gate, there was no closing it.

The first to knock was Cola di Rienzo (1313-1354), commonly known as Reinzi. He was one of those half patriotic, half opportunistic popular leaders hurled into power on a wave of Roman anarchy, only to drown in it. Rienzi had drunk the heady waters of Roman antiquity at the source, one of the first to do so. Perhaps because he was only the son of a Roman innkeeper, Rienzi found it expedient to claim to Charles IV that he had been fathered by Henry VII, Charles's grandfather and the emperor in whom the great Dante had once placed his hopes for Italy. This claim made Rienzi twice imperial: Roman-born and the son of an emperor. Soon after Rienzi's birth his mother died, and his innkeeper father sent him to relatives in the countryside around Anagni to be raised. Rienzi thus grew to manhood in the shadow of the fortress that had humiliated the papacy in the person of Boniface VIII (1217-1303), given victory to the Roman barons, driven the popes to Avignon, and plunged Rome into feudal anarchy, that collapse of restraining authority which the barons relished and required for their petty tyrannies. Upon his father's death, the impressionable young man returned to Rome. There he saw all about him the ruins of the ancient city. He began to read the ancient historians, especially Livy, or what was then known of his work. He collected carved gems, those that had engraved upon them the images of ancient Roman patriots and leaders such as Scipio and Caesar. Rienzi studied the crumbling inscriptions, generally ignored, on the buildings, arches, and columns of Rome that spoke to him of the lost grandeur of antiquity. He was indeed later acknowledged as the expert at deciphering the obscure inscriptions.

His splendid oratory during an embassy to the pope in Avignon won Rienzi and office in the municipal government of Rome (1344). For three years he exploited his office to draw attention to himself. He staged the unveiling of a newly discovered Roman ruin to remind the people of past glories. He held orations before the mob, terrifying them with the prospects of the end of the world in the form of a huge picture painted for the occasion on the outside walls of the Roman Senate. Under papal protection he harangued the marauding nobles with impunity. And in secret he organized an elaborate conspiracy.

On the feast of Pentecost, May 19, 1347, Rienzi heard the mass of the Holy Spirit in the Church of Sant' Angelo in Pescheria. The senatorial militia under Stefano Colonna, the mightiest of the barons, had left the city for Corneto to convey a shipment of grain back to Rome. Rienzi met with his fellow conspirators, sent heralds throughout the city to summon the populace to the Capitol, and made his way there himself. Before a vast crowd Rienzi proclaimed the restoration of the Roman Republic. The mob ratified the proclamation with frenzied approval and accepted Rienzi as dictator with unlimited political powers. Rienzi kept the papal vicar, Raimondo Orvieto, at his side, to give the impression, largely genuine, that the revolution enjoyed ecclesiastical approval.

Rienzi called a general Italian parliament to Rome. Many of the municipalities, particularly those with democratic governments, heeded his call. He clearly aimed at unifying his tragically fragmented country and giving a new birth to Roman glory. But he had many and powerful enemies. The barons trembled in rage and terror at his summary justice, which reached inside their very houses. In Rome their plots and ambushes consistently met failure. In Avignon, however, things were different.

Even as enthusiasm waned--and it was bound to--Rienzi retained popular support. Perhaps to rekindle enthusiasm or to act out his dreams of antiquity, Rienzi performed spectacular ceremonies. He bathed in the baptismal font in which, as legend had it, the pope had baptized Constantine, curing him of leprosy, and receiving from the emperor as a mark of his gratitude the Donation of Constantine, the notorious forgery by which the popes claimed political sovereignty in the West. On that occasion Rienzi styled himself Knight of the Holy Spirit and first instructed the German rivals for the empire--which included Charles IV--to submit to the judgment of the people of Rome. Two weeks later he assumed the ancient Roman title Tribune, carried by the protector of the plebeians, and again summoned the Germans to his tribunal.

These and similar extravagances played into the hands of the barons who were undermining Rienzi's position in Avignon. He had maneuvered the timid papal vicar into the background. Pope Clement VI, who had launched Rienzi on his public career, began to see that Rienzi's patriotic visions threatened papal sovereignty in Italy. Clement flung charges of heresy and usurpation at Rienzi (December 3, 1347)--charges that did less to threaten Rienzi's authority among the people than to erode his self-confidence and sense of mission. Rienzi became indecisive. When his worst enemies fell into his hands, he hesitated. They were not executed, though Rienzi felt they richly deserved such punishment, but merely humiliated and released, only to become more resentful and dangerous. When an adventurer with a handful of soldiers stormed his quarters (December 15, 1347) Rienzi was convinced that it was the Roman mob. He fled to the Castell Sant' Angelo, the refuge of many a deposed Roman despot. From there he vanished into the mountains amidst a company of visionary hermits. His stunned supporters watched Rome revert to anarchy. The Black Death soon followed, then a series of earthquakes. And Reinzi revitalized his shattered spirits on the words of mystics and prophets.

These visionary hermits had withdrawn from the world to await the apocalyptic events of the final days. They brooded over the teachings of Joachim of Fiore (ca. 1135-1202), or a confused version of them that foresaw a total reform of Christendom by a fabled monarch, the "just and peaceful king" (rex iustus et pacificus). Their leader, Fra Angelo, persuaded Rienzi that Charles fit the prophecy. Thus persuaded, Rienzi searched him out, the kind he had so recently and insultingly commanded to Rome.

At every step of his development Rienzi combined two strains of revival, rebirth, renaissance. The one arose out of the ruins of classical antiquity and expected a revival of that golden age.

The other arose at the outer fringes of medieval piety and anticipated a universal spiritual rebirth. Himself reborn among the hermits, Rienzi journeyed quietly to Prague. Charles received him honorably and thrice gave him audience. Rienzi delivered an impassioned oration before the court, naming Charles as the chosen emperor, the monarch of prophecy destined to restore the grandeur of Rome and to lead in the final days with a just and peaceful reign. He placed before the king a vision of imperial Rome to remind Charles of the dignity he would wear and the duties attached to it by history.

But Charles was not to be won over. One aspect of the Italian Renaissance, the treachery and ruthlessness of Italian city politics, thoroughly disenchanted Charles. As a very young man he had gained his first political experience in Italy. Charles's frivolous father, John of Luxemburg, King of Bohemia, preferred the joust to the duties of government and assigned to his adolescent son the pacification of the north Italian cities. Charles extricated himself from the morass of Italian politics only after he had narrowly escaped poisoning. Members of his retinue died in agony, while he was spared by the sheer chance of a communion fast. Charles used some trickery of his own when he had Rienzi commit his speeches to writing and then promptly placed him under arrest.

Rienzi had become an explosive commodity. Clement VI demanded his extradition to Avignon. Charles was negotiating his Roman coronation with the very reluctant pope and had no intention of giving away such a valuable knight, at least not without some sort of concession. Rienzi represented little more than a useful political accident to Charles, but the court seemed dazzled by this revolutionary and his brilliant rhetoric. The imperial chancellor, Johannes von Neumarkt, initiated a friendly correspondence with the imprisoned Rienzi and collected everything he could find of Rienzi's writings. Archbishop Ernest of Prague also took up a correspondence, but more cautiously than Neumarkt. Courageously Rienzi persisted in his pleas to Charles, detailing his program for the great rebirth and Charles's crucial role in it. His daring and persuasiveness caused his friends at court to worry for his safety in Prague, even while captive. And so the Archbishop had him removed to his fortress at Raudnitz on the Elbe. Here Rienzi grew discouraged, prepared his will, and wrote many letters--which passed through the hands of the admiring chancellor. The elegance of Rienzi's style conquered Prague as his visionary policies never could. Charles himself had Rienzi's style employed in a response to an emotional appeal from Rienzi's friend, the first Renaissance man of letters, Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374).

Rienzi's end was no less dramatic than his earlier career. Charles eventually surrendered him to Avignon. A new pope, Innocent VI, more interested in pacifying Rome than in punishing Rienzi, sent him to govern the city. On the anniversary of the declaration of his knighthood (August 1, 1354), he entered Rome triumphantly. The last extant letter from his hands enthusiastically congratulates Charles on the start of his Roman journey and the forthcoming imperial coronation in the city of the Caesars. Within a week of the letter (October 8) Rienzi was murdered by an agent of the Colonna family, his corpse exposed to public ridicule, then burned on dry thistles, the ashes scattered to the winds.

At the beginning of Rienzi's public life, during his embassy to Avignon (1313-1344), he became acquainted with the singer of the praises of Laura, the sonneteer, the most famous scholar and antiquary of his time, Petrarch. Their common love for the ancients and their common sorrow at the desolation of Rome made them fast friends. Petrarch applauded Rienzi's victories and lamented his defeats. They were of one mind on the fate of Italy. When Petrarch took up contact with the imperial court, it was wholly in the spirit of Rienzi's fire-breathing patriotism, and he was identically committed to the rebirth of ancient grandeur. Like Rienzi, Petrarch thrust the imperial past before Charles as a glorious model and a damning reproach.

The full force of historical and legal tradition made the medieval German emperor the successor of the Caesars. Charles understood that perfectly. He was acutely sensitive to the aura of his office, the importance of ritual and splendor, the countless intangibles that constitute majesty. He made them servants, not masters, of his policy. Petrarch's appeals could never convince Charles to sacrifice his state for an impossible dream, but they did provide him with an opportunity to borrow the prestige of genius. Petrarch, then at the height of his fame, had no serious rival in all of Europe as the prince of poets and scholars. Charles had already brought to Prague the best jurists, architects, theologians, artists, and physicians he could find for his new university (1348) and the construction of his new cathedral. To attract Petrarch to Prague would have crowned Charles's cultural politics with glory.

Charles's letter of response to Petrarch politely declines the honor of pacifying Italy but does so wholly in humanistic style, replete with references to classical antiquity. The letter marks a watershed. Henceforth Charles's correspondence and that of the imperial chancellery would gradually abandon medieval Latin and being to follow the new rhetoric of the Italian humanists. Charles's chancellor, Johannes von Neumarkt, whose job was the conduct of the epistolary business of the empire, doubtless determined the adoption of the new style. He engaged Petrarch in correspondence, as he had Rienzi, and included select letters from both correspondences in his official book of models for letter writing, the Summa Cancellariae. It survives in some nineteen manuscripts from all over Germany and moved to Austria with the imperial chancellery when the Hapsburgs succeeded to the empire in the next century. As though the authority of the imperial chancellery would not be enough to guarantee the influence of the new style, Neumarkt sponsored a school that taught it to future civil servants.

Official conducted their business not only in Latin, but also in the various vernaculars of the empire, including German. Neumarkt himself had an obvious interest in the vernacular. The poems of Heinrich von Meissen, called Frauenlob (ca. 1250-1318), appear among Neumarkt's writings. He translated a series of religious works into a form of German that can be read today, without special philological training, by any modern German speaker. At a time when the standard literary form of the language was still strictly medieval, Neumarkt was writing the earliest form of modern German. This language was clearly taught in his school and, within a generation, produced a small masterpiece in Der Ackermann aus Böhmen (The Plowman from Bohemia).

Neumarkt's language reforms were no small accomplishment. Even Petrarch noted the Latin results and cordially commended the chancellor for restoring the ancient dignity of the official imperial correspondence. Petrarch's letters to the chancellor consistently demonstrate pleasure that the New Learning has found admirer in the barbaric north. Neumarkt was not alone in his admiration. He shared news about Petrarch with teachers in the city. Empress Anna exchanged letters with the master. The fashion spread eastward to the court of Jost of Moravia, who maintained active personal contact with the first generation of Petrarch's pupils.

Personal contact between Petrarch and the court had to await Charles's Roman journey. Some two months after the fall of Rienzi, Charles reached Mantua and there he received Petrarch (December 15, 1354). The two enjoyed conversation long into the night. Charles invited Petrarch to attend his coronation in Rome as an honored guest and to teach him the meaning of antiquity, Petrarch was, despite himself, enormously flattered by the imperial attentions. A few weeks later in Milan the two met again. Charles, fresh from his coronation with the Iron Crown of the Lombards (January 6, 1355), renewed his invitation. Petrarch had to refuse for political reasons, but accompanied the court of fifty miles past the walls of the city of Piacenza.

On this same journey, at Pisa, Charles met the most famous jurist of the age, Bartolo di Sassoferrato (1314-1357), named him to his court, invited him to his table, and gave his family a coat-of-arms. Roman law, which Bartolo represented at its most sophisticated, slowly took over the German courts, but the story of its reception belongs to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Within memory of his meeting with Bartolo, Charles promulgated the Golden Bull (December 25, 1356), which provided the empire with a constitution, regulated imperial elections, fixed the electors in their privileges, and helped shape German history until the dissolution of the empire in 1806. The Italian jurist may or may not have influenced its composition directly, but the Golden Bull does cite Roman law (chapter 24) and reflects the authority of the Italian law schools, which educated so many northern jurists.

In the next years Charles repeatedly offered Petrarch the hospitality of Prague and seriously hoped he would settle permanently in the court. In July of 1356, Petrarch appeared in Prague on a diplomatic mission for the Visconti of Milan. The mission failed, but Petrarch won even more admirers in Charles's capital, particularly the Archbishop. Archbishop Ernest was one of the northern jurists educated in the Italian schools. He had spent some fourteen years in Italy before returning to Prague as its first archbishop.

The city did have certain attractions. For one, the climate was healthy. The Black Death that devastated the rest of Europe largely bypassed Prague. Charles's cultural policies had already populated Prague with Petrarch's countrymen, among them the apothecary Angelo of Florence, who gave Prague the first botanical garden in the north. The flourishing university had numerous professors called from Italy. Charles supported it every way he could. He placed students and professors under his special protection and exempted them from tolls and customs whenever they traveled through his realm. Toward the end of his life there were thousands of students in Prague. When a collection of books came on the market and the Charles's attention, he bought it and donated it to the university.

In addition to the university, Charles undertook two other major building projects to give lasting evidence of the grandeur of his reign: the cathedral of Prague to house the relics of Saint Wenzel (good King Wenceslas) and the massive fortress at Karlstein to house the royal and imperial regalia. His patronage drew artists and artisans of great craftsmanship to Prague. The sculpture in the cathedral, the murals there and at Karlstein, the miniatures in the ceremonial manuscripts of the time, the paintings of the Bohemian school, now dispersed across Europe (the best collection is in the Berlin Museums)--all this suggests that Petrarch would not have been at a loss for talented company. Charles had brought the pope's architect, Mathias of Arras, from Avignon to lay the foundations of the cathedral and design the Karlstein fortress. The Parler brothers from Swabia came to finish the task. Charles commissioned no fewer than five historians to uncover the past of his kingdom. One of them was the renowned Italian traveler Giovanni Marignola, just returned from China and Ceylon. Charles himself tried his hand at history by writing a political autobiography of his young years, particularly the bitter lessons of his Italian experience.

This and much more indicates a considerable cultural flowering at the time of Charles IV. Not all of it was connected to Italy, not all of it was housed in Prague, not all of it was Charles's doing. General medical and scientific works of the Middle Ages became available in German translation, as did minor works from classical antiquity and political tracts of some importance. The most modern political thinkers of the time, Marsilius of Padua (ca. 1275-1343) and William of Ockham (ca. 1290-1319)--who proclaimed such revolutionary doctrines as the sovereignty of the people and the legitimacy of tyrannicide--worked and died in Munich at the court of Charles's rival, Louis the Bavarian (ca. 1278-1347). The writing of history in German, as opposed to Latin, arose far from Prague, in the western cities, toward whose independence and power Charles was not favorably disposed. Parenthetically, German city chronicles indicate that Cola di Rienzo's appeal was general and extended well beyond the imperial court. Other universities began to rival that of Prague: Vienna (1365), Heidelberg (1386), Cologne (1388), Erfurt (1392). The most distinguished German among the scholars at the University of Paris, Heinrich von Langenstein (1323-1397), moved to Vienna to reorganize the university there, even though he also had an offer from Prague.

With this diffusion of humanism, the Germans built a hedge against the vicissitudes of history. The unforeseeable future was to condemn the Prague flowering, splendid as it was, to wither under a storm of events. As Charles approached the end of his reign, a quiet monk became Pope Gregory XI. He fulfilled the dreams of Italian patriots by returning the papacy to the city of Peter. He died there (March 27, 1378). When Charles died some months later (November 29), there was one pope in Rome and one in Avignon. The Great Schism (1378-1415) was on. The disastrous division of Christendom was only compounded in the empire by Charles's incompetent son and successor, Wenzel (bad King Wenceslas). The honored tradition of fiery preaching from the pulpit of the Tyn Church in Prague suddenly exploded as Jan Hus voiced a violent Bohemian rejection of German cultural and political hegemony. Within fifty years of Charles's death Prague had turned into a Czech city that could not serve as capital of a transnational empire, let alone of a German nation.

What had begun in Prague, the German reception of Italian humanism, scattered to the winds. It might have vanished without a trace had Germany depended upon a single cultural center so cosmopolitan as to make the competition provincial. When the seeds sowed at Prague struck lasting roots in Germany, they did so at various courts (Hapsburg, the Palatinate), universities (Heidelberg, Vienna, Ingolstadt), monasteries (Sponheim, Maria Laach), and, above all, in the cities (Nürnberg, Augsburg, Strassburg, Basel, Breslau). The roots spread so wide and went so deep that even the cataclysms of the Reformation and Counterreformation could not shake the tree.

The tree was Italian in ancestry. The climate of Germany's cultural history, of course, gave it a distinct shape. The revival classical antiquity comfortably suited the essential patriotic and ethical aspirations of the Italian humanists. This would not do for the Germans. The superior airs of certain Italians (among them Enea Silvio Piccolomini, later to become Pope Pius II, and Antonio Campano, papal diplomat and friend of Enea Silvio) so annoyed many Germans including the imperial chancellor Gregory von Heimburg, an enemy of Enea Silvio, and the humanist publicists and historians Jacob Wimpheling and Franciscus Irenicus) that they reacted with a patriotism of their own, almost unprecedented and, until then, thoroughly uncharacteristic of the Germans. The result was an intense investigation of the German national past, an attempt to revive an alternative antiquity as a rival to Rome. The spiritual needs of the Italians, despite such puritanical outbursts as the fanatical monk Savonarola (1452-1498) visited on Florence, seemed generally satisfied by the Roman Church, while the Italian humanists subtly reinterpreted Christian ethics on the model of the good man as they saw him in classical antiquity. To many Germans (e.g., Ulrich von Hutten) the Roman Church had become an Italian Church, hostile and subversive. And the Italian humanist model of the good man, with its stress on the active life and involvement in the affairs of state, proved to be profoundly alien to German sensibilities, which inclined toward the private, personal, and contemplative. The northern response to this ethic has acquired the name "Christian Humanism" to distinguish it from the Italian prototype.

But none of these seemed to satisfy the spiritual needs of the Germans. With the Reformation, another attempt was made to revive an alternative antiquity, primitive Christianity, as a rival to Rome. The aspect of revival displays itself distinctly in the radical Reformation. But even the middle-of-the-road reformers (Melanchthon, Luther's closes collaborator, and Mathias Flacius Illyricus, author of the Magdeburg Centuries, the pioneering work of Protestant historiography) sought in history noble models they genuinely believed they were reviving.

How can anything as ostentatiously German as national history and the Reformation possibly have Italian antecedents? Strip away the German surface and one finds the characteristic veneration of the past, the will to rescue it from oblivion, the compulsion to reach back to the sources, the gradual development from enthusiastic misinterpretation of the past to the threshold of critical understanding. And there is more to demonstrate the closeness of the relationship. Even classical antiquity--as unserviceable as it was for German patriotism and as alien to the Germans' sense of Christian values--retained in Italy and Germany both, a towering authority as the measure of civilization. In that role it haunted Germany well into modern times. And then the two cultures shared one great portal that opened on the past: the love of language. Language in all its aspects, as art and science, as poetry, eloquence, and style preoccupied the thinkers regardless of differences in geography. The sciences of language distinguished between the ancient and the modern, the true and the false, the authentic and the interpolated, whether in classical or biblical texts. These same studies recognized that time and place determined the word and that the word revealed time and place--all of this long before similar insights passed on to other fields of human learning.

The study of language, the love of the word, philology, survived the Renaissance to become an intellectual force as powerful and formative as its predecessor, theology, and its heirs apparent, science and technology. From the reform of the schools by Luther's humanists, Melanchthon, and by the Jesuits in Catholic Germany, to the end of the nineteenth century, perhaps even until a generation or two ago, philology gave education its form and substance. The love of the word may not have been the most important message of Italian humanism, but it was the most long-lived. When the Renaissance was still in infant, its eloquence was a much as a few open-minded courtiers in Prague could grasp. Grasp it they did and then grafted it onto the German heritage, there to flourish in all adversity down to our own century.

Selected Bibliography

Primary Sources

Bishop, Morris, transl. Letters from Petrarch. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966.

Blaschka, Anton, transl. Kaiser Karl IV. Jugendleben und St. Wenzels Legende. In Geschichtsschreiber der deutschen Vorzeit, Dritte Gesamtausgabe, 83. Weimar: Böhlau, 1956.

Burdach, Konrad, ed. Aus Petrarcas ältesten deutschen Schülerkreis. In Vom Mittelalter zur Reformation, 4 Berlin: Weidmann, 1929.

----. Briefwechsel des Cola di Rienzo. In Vom Mittelalter zur Reformation, 2 Berlin: Weidmann, 1912-31.

-----. Vom Mittelalter zur Reformation. 11 vols. in 17. Berlin: Weidmann, 1893-1939.

Cosenza, Mario E. Francesco Petrarca and the Revolution of Cola di Rienzo. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1913. (Contains English translations of texts throughout.)

Jarrett, Bede. The Emperor Charles IV. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1935. (Contains abridged English translation of Charles's autobiography, pp. 33-68.)

Klapper, Joseph. Johann von Neumarkt, Bischof und Hofkanzler: Religiöse Frührenaissance in Böhmen zur Zeit Kaiser Karls IV. In Erfurter theologische Studien, 17. Leipzig: St. Benno. 1964. (Contains texts, pp. 54-166.)

Müller, Konrad, ed. Die Goldene Bulle Kaiser Karls IV. 1356. In Quellen zur neueren Geschichte, 25. Bern: Lang. 1970.

Piur, Paul, ed. Petrarcas Briefwechsel mit deutschen Zeitgenossen. In Vom Mittelalter zur Reformation, 7 Berlin: Weidmann, 1933.

Voigt, Klaus, transl. Italienische Berichte aus dem spätmittelalterlichen Deutschland: Von Francesco Petrarca zu Andrea dé Franceschi (1333-1492). In Kieler Historische Studien, 17 Stuttgart: Klett, 1973.

Zacour, Norman P., transl. Petrarch's Book without a Name: A Translation of the Liber sine Nomine. Toronto: Pontifical Institute, 1973.

Secondary Sources

Borchardt, Frank L. German Antiquity in Renaissance Myth. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971.

-----. "Petrarch: The German Connection," in Francis Petrarch Six Centuries Later: A Symposium, Aldo Scaglione, ed. Chapel Hill: N.C. Studies in Romance Langs., 3, 1975, pp. 418-31.

Burdach, Konrad. Reformation, Renaissance, Humanismus: Zwei Abhandlungen über die Grundlage moderner Bildung und Sprachkunst. 3rd ed. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963.

Burdach, Konrad. Vorspiel: Gesammelte Schriften zur Geschichte des deutschen Geistes. vol. 1, pt. 2: Reformation und Renaissance. In Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte,Buchreihe, 2 Halle: Niemeyer, 1925.

Friedjung, Heinrich. Kaiser Karl IV. und sein Antheil am geistigen Leben seiner Zeit. Vienna: Braumüller, 1876.

Gregorovius, Ferdinand. Geschichte der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter. 3 vols. 1953-57; rpt. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963. (Gregorovius's masterpiece, originally published 1859-70, is divided into books, of which the eleventh treats Petrarch and Rienzi.)

Gray, Hanna H. "Renaissance Humanism: The Pursuit of Eloquence." Journal of the History of Ideas, 24 (1963), pp. 497-514.

Irmscher, Johannes, ed. Renaissance und Humanismus in Mittel- und Osteuropa: Eine Sammlung von Materialien. 2 vols. In Deutsche Akademie der Wissenchaften, Sektion für Altertumswissenschaft, Schriften, 32 Berlin: Akademie, 1962.

Joachimsen, Paul. Vom Mittelalter zur Reformation. Reihe Libelli, 50. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1959. Rpt. from Historische Vierteljahrschrift, 20 (1920-21), 426-70. (Most important for an alternative opinion of the Prague Renaissance.)

Piur, Paul. Cola di Rienzo: Darstellung seines Lebens und seines Geistes. Vienna: Seidel, 1931.

Wilkins, Ernest Hatch. Life of Petrarch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.

Winter, Eduard. Frühhumanismus: Seine Entwicklung in Böhmen. In Deutsche Historiker-Gesellschaft, Beiträge zur Geschichte des religiösen und wissenschaftlichen Denkens, 3. Berlin: Akademie, 1964.

Background Materials and Bibliographies

Andreas, Willi. Deutschland vor der Reformation: Eine Zeitwende. 4th ed. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1943.

Burger, Heinz-Otto. Renaissance Humanismus, Reformation. Deutsche Literatur im europäischen Kontext. In Frankfurter Beiträge zur Germanistik, 7. Bad Homburg: Gehlen, 1969.

Engel, James E. Renaissance, Humanismus, Reformation. In Handbuch der deutschen Literaturgeschichte, Zweite Abteilung, Bibilographien, 4. Bern: Francke. 1969.

Jantz, Harold. "German Renaissance Literature." MLN, 81 (1966), 398-436.

Jones, George F. Spätes Mittelalter, 1300-1450. In Handbuch der deutschen Literaturgeschichte, Zweite Abteilung, Bibliographien, 4. Bern: Francke, 1971.

Lorenz, Ottokar. Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen im Mittelalter seit der Mitte des dreizehnten Jahrhunderts. 3rd ed. 2 vols. 1886-87; rpt. Graz: Akademischen Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1966.

Rupprich, Hans. Vom späten Mittelalter bis zum Barock. 2 vols. In Geschichte der deutschen Literatur, 4. Munich: Beck, 1970-73.

_------, Das Wiener Schrifttum des ausgehenden Mittelalters, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, philosophisch-historische Klasse, Sitzungsberichte, 228, Abhandlung, 5. Vienna: Rohrer, 1954.

Stammler, Wolfgang. Die deutsche Dichtung von der Mystik zum Barock. 2nd ed. In Epochen der deutschen Literatur, 2, I. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1950.

Strauss, Gerald, ed. Pre-Reformation Germany. New York: Harper and Row, 1972.

Taylor, Archer. Problems in German Literary History of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries. In Modern Language Association of America, General Series, 7. 1939; rpt. New York: Kraus, 1966.

-----. Renaissance Guides to Books: An Inventory and Some Conclusions. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1945.

Wuttke, Dieter. Deutsche Germanistik und Renaissance-Forschung. In Respublica Literaria, 3 Bad Homburg: Gehlen, 1968.