Bertold of Regensburg

Berthold of Regensburg (also known as Berthold von Regensburg) was a German Franciscan friar and the most celebrated popular preacher of the thirteenth-century German-speaking world. He was born in Regensburg, then a free imperial city in Bavaria within the Holy Roman Empire, in the early thirteenth century; later tradition places his birth around 1220, but no contemporary document records an exact year. He entered the Order of Friars Minor, almost certainly at the Franciscan convent in his native city, in the 1240s. There he is generally held to have been formed under David of Augsburg, the well-known Franciscan novice master and spiritual writer. He is described in the sources as a master of theology, though the details of any formal academic career remain sparse.

From about the middle of the thirteenth century Berthold undertook a far-ranging itinerant preaching ministry. He worked across Bavaria, Swabia, Alsace, Switzerland, Austria, Bohemia, and Hungary, and some reports extend his activity still farther. Contemporary and near-contemporary accounts insist that the crowds who came to hear him were extraordinarily large, so that he often preached in open fields or from specially constructed platforms and towers rather than inside churches. Popes Innocent IV and Urban IV authorized or encouraged his work, which included preaching in support of crusading and against heretical groups, notably the Waldensians. He preached in the vernacular Middle High German rather than in Latin, a choice that made his teaching accessible to a lay public that Latin sermons could not reach.

What survives of his preaching is a corpus of some seventy German sermons, together with a smaller body of Latin sermons. The German texts were in all likelihood written down by hearers or secretaries rather than composed by Berthold as finished literary works, yet they preserve a distinctive voice: concrete, pictorial, often humorous, and drawn from crafts, nature, and everyday town and village life. He attacked usury, luxury in dress, drunkenness, and various clerical and lay abuses, while urging repentance, confession, almsgiving, and fidelity to the Church’s sacraments. His moral severity was joined to a popular manner that later readers and historians have regarded as a high point of medieval vernacular preaching and as an important source for the social and religious history of thirteenth-century Germany.

Berthold spent his last years in Regensburg and died there in 1272. He was buried at the Franciscan house in the city, later associated with the Minoritenkirche. He was never formally beatified or canonized, and he has no universally observed feast day, though his fame as a preacher persisted. His sermons continued to be copied in the later Middle Ages and were edited in the nineteenth century, notably by Franz Pfeiffer; they remain central evidence for Franciscan popular ministry and for lay religious culture in the German lands of the high Middle Ages.