Marian & Hagiographic
3 texts · 9 editions
Marian devotion (especially the Anne / immaculate-conception tradition), Carmelite hagiography.
Works in Marian & Hagiographic
De Laudibus Sanctissimae Matris Annae
In Praise of the Most Holy Mother Anne · 1494first English
De Laudibus Sanctissimae Matris Annae — "In Praise of the Most Holy Mother Anne" — is Trithemius's treatise honouring St Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary and a focus of intense late-medieval devotion. He wrote it at Sponheim with a dedicatory letter to Rumold Laupach dated 1 July 1494, and it appeared with a cluster of commendatory poems on the Holy Kindred — the extended family of Christ that Anne, thrice-married in the apocryphal tradition, was held to have matriarched. It is a characteristic piece of his early Sponheim Marian-hagiographic output, leaning on the legendary material the Reformation would soon sweep away.
6 editions: Mainz, 1494 · Mainz, 1494 · Leipzig [ca. 1497, 1497 · Liptzk [ca. 1497, 1497 · Liptzk [ca. 1501, 1501 · Liptzk, 1501
De Origine, Progressu et Laudibus Ordinis Fratrum Carmelitarum
On the Origin, Progress, and Praises of the Order of Carmelite Brothers · 1494first English
De Origine, Progressu et Laudibus Ordinis Fratrum Carmelitarum — "On the Origin, Progress, and Praises of the Order of Carmelite Brothers" — is Trithemius's defence of the Carmelite order, written in 1492. It rehearses the order's claimed descent from the prophet Elijah on Mount Carmel — a foundation legend the mendicant orders pressed hard in the fifteenth century against humanist and conciliar scepticism — and catalogues its worthies in the bio-bibliographical manner Trithemius would soon make his own in the De Scriptoribus Ecclesiasticis. It belongs to the hagiographic-defensive side of his early output, and shows the historian of orders already at work a decade before the great chronicles.
Mainz [not before 1494, 1494 · provisional reading text · Latin / English
De Purissima et Immaculata Conceptione Virginis (Buda)
On the Most Pure and Immaculate Conception of the Virgin (Buda edition) · 1497first English
De Purissima et Immaculata Conceptione Virginis — "On the Most Pure and Immaculate Conception of the Virgin" — is Trithemius's defence of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, then a contested theological question rather than defined dogma, with Dominicans and Franciscans sharply divided. Trithemius argues for the Franciscan, pro-Immaculist side in the scholastic manner, and the work is continuous with his St Anne and Marian writings — the devotional-hagiographic strand of his early Sponheim output carried into doctrinal polemic.
2 editions: Nürnberg, 1497 · Argentoratum, 1506