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  • De viris illustribus ordinis praedicatorumA “Classical” Genre in Dominican Hands
  • Anne Huijbers (bio)

Introduction

The literary form De viris illustribus (On illustrious men), first used by contemporaries of Cicero, enjoyed a widespread popularity in the Renaissance. The theme became so popular that the Florentine humanist Matteo Palmieri wrote that “history is nothing but the celebration of illustrious men.”1 During the second half of the fifteenth and first half of the sixteenth century, various Carthusians, Cistercians, Benedictines, Carmelites and Dominicans adopted the same title for institutional writings on their respective orders. Strangely enough, the Observant Franciscans, while engaging in various types of institutional history around the same time, were more hesitant to adopt the title for such institutional writings, for reasons that are, as yet, not fully understood.2 In any case, the involvement of any religious order in the De viris illustribus tradition in the Renaissance has hitherto been underexplored. In fact, some of these institutional narratives by religious authors are only accessible in manuscripts or old editions and still await a first study. [End Page 297]

Why should we study these texts? Every self-respecting religious order created hagiographical accounts of their saints and exemplary members. Raimondo Michetti already pointed out that these collections of biographies of religious men and women constitute a suitable instrument for a comparative study of religious orders.3 Before a comparison is possible, some preliminary studies are needed. This paper wishes to shed some light on this neglected tradition and focuses on the example of the Dominicans to see what kind of texts actually are hidden underneath the De viris illustribus façade. Moreover, the portrayals of illustrious Dominicans, produced by Dominicans to serve a predominantly Dominican audience, enable us to observe the abstract concept of the collective identity of a religious community. The texts reveal which friars were thought worthy of remembrance: this indicates who the Dominicans (or at least the authors of these texts) wanted to be identified with. The authors of these texts were propagators of a Dominican collective identity and their texts reflect and at the same time produce the collective identity of their religious community.

In this paper I will look more closely at the first two Dominicans who wrote a De viris illustribus ordinis praedicatorum:4 order reformer and confessor Johannes Meyer from Zurich (1422-1485) and Sicilian humanist and poet laureate Tommaso Schifaldo (c. 1430- c. 1500). The comparison of these two narratives entitled De viris illustribus ordinis praedicatorum demonstrates the great diversity of texts bearing this title, and thus warns against characterizing these texts too swiftly. Before turning to these Dominicans, it is important to recall the tradition they continued and transformed. [End Page 298]

De viris illustribus: Between Collective Biography and Literary Catalogue

Modern scholars of medieval texts entitled De viris illustribus have emphasized their bibliographical character. They consider the medieval De viris illustribus to be gates of access to literature: a literary genre that consists of “short portraits of authors, almost exclusively Christian and mostly Latin with synthetic notices on their works,”5 or a work of reference: “a kind of dictionary of Christian biography” and “a means of keeping alive the literary tradition of Christianity.”6 Koeppler asserts that in the Middle Ages “a vir illustris was often seen as a synonym for a writer or scholar.”7 This view is confirmed by the Dominican Stephan de Salagnac (d. 1291), who stated that “those who Jerome and Isidore call illustrious men are they who have left the Church perennial and useful writings.”8

However, when reading the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Dominican texts entitled De viris illustribus ordinis praedicatorum, it becomes clear that the goal of these texts was not to offer a catalogue of Dominican writers. The texts were primarily meant to edify, which was in line with works of contemporary humanists such as Francesco Petrarch. In the preface of his De viris illustribus he emphasized his goal, paraphrasing Livy: “to draw those things to the readers’s attention that are to be followed and those to be avoided, with plenty of distinguished examples provided on either [End Page 299] side.”9 The emphasis was placed on the (moral) virtues...

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