BERTHOLD von REGENSBURG. — He was the most famous German preacher of the 13th century, born in Ratisbon about 1210 and dying there in 1272. Having entered the Franciscan Order about 1240, he soon became renowned throughout Central Europe as a powerful and effective preacher.
His sermons, delivered both in Latin and in German, were often held in the open air because of the vast number of listeners (it is said that 40,000 attended!). Their popular style and the dramatic or humorous vividness of the images employed were far removed from the intellectual abstraction of the models then in vogue.
BIBL.: G. Jacob, Die lateinischen Reden des seligen B. von R., Ratisbon 1880. For the German sermons V. the 2-vol. edition by F. Pfeiffer and S. Strobl, Vienna 1862; K. Rieder, Das Leben B. von R., Freiburg in Br. 1901. Alda Manshi