This is a study of the intellectual history and religious culture of German‐speaking Europe in the late Middle Ages. Its focus is the bilingual oeuvre of the Franciscan Marquard von Lindau (d. 1392), arguably the most widely read author in the German language before the Reformation. His most successful works were those which were aimed at a broad implicit audience and dealt with pragmatic issues of the Christian life. This book deals with three of those pragmatic issues most central to late medieval religious life: Christ's Passion, the sacrament of the Eucharist, and devotion to the Virgin Ma ... More

This is a study of the intellectual history and religious culture of German‐speaking Europe in the late Middle Ages. Its focus is the bilingual oeuvre of the Franciscan Marquard von Lindau (d. 1392), arguably the most widely read author in the German language before the Reformation. His most successful works were those which were aimed at a broad implicit audience and dealt with pragmatic issues of the Christian life. This book deals with three of those pragmatic issues most central to late medieval religious life: Christ's Passion, the sacrament of the Eucharist, and devotion to the Virgin Mary. Marquard's approach is understood and contextualized in each case in comparison with the works of his predecessors, his contemporaries, and his successors, in Germany and in the wider European world, in order to locate his contribution ‐ and theirs ‐ in this way within a wide temporal framework. It is argued that the dominant approaches hitherto taken towards these aspects of fourteenth‐century religious life, and the patterns of behaviour and thought which those approaches had fostered, represented problematic challenges to Marquard. These were challenges which he met in a distinctive and influential manner, often in direct and remarkable opposition to the affectively charged devotional practices encouraged by many within and without his order, and which have been considered normative for the religious culture of the late Middle Ages in modern historiography. The ethos projected by his works determined a new trajectory for intellectual life in Germany into the fifteenth century and beyond.