BARTOLOMEO di TRENTO. - Dominican, hagiographer of the thirteenth century, b. at Trento, d. c. 1251. In 1233 he witnessed the first translation of the body of St. Domenico at Bologna. He travelled extensively and, as he himself attests, also stayed at the courts of the pope and the emperor.
During intervals he resided in the convent of S. Lorenzo at Trento, where, between 1245 and 1251, he wrote the Epilogus in gestis sanctorum. This work inaugurated a new genre of hagiographical literature, namely collections of abbreviated lives of saints, intended no longer for reading in the liturgical office but, as the author himself says in the prologue, for private use and for preachers as compilations of examples. According to the oldest manuscript (perhaps incomplete), Vatic. Barber. 2500, the collection comprises about 200 notices of varying length, of which only about a dozen have so far been published in various works, indicated in the Analecta Bollandiana, 29 (1910), p. 16. The author shows a certain preference for the saints of Trentino and, in general, for the saints of Italy and Germany.