CORRADO of MEGENBERG (de Monte Puellarium). - Canon, theologian, historian, jurist, and polemicist, born probably at Mainsberg around 1308-10, died at Ratisbon on 14 (according to others 17) April 1374. He studied at Erfurt and then at the University of Paris, where he earned a doctorate in Arts and taught for some time. Returning to his homeland, he taught and directed the school of St Stephen in Vienna (1340); he then engaged in preaching at Ratisbon, where he settled around 1342, becoming parish priest and later canon of St Ulrich.
Various works demonstrate his multifaceted culture and the doctrinal battles in which he took part. Among these are a small treatise on physics, Deutsche Spharea (ed. 1912), and the encyclopedic Buch der Natur (ed. 1950), widely circulated in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Taking the side of the Pope in the regalist or jurisdictional struggles with the Empire (Louis the Bavarian), he wrote: Planctus Ecclesiae in Germania (1337), a work that found an echo in the famous De Planctu Ecclesiae by the Spanish Minorite Alvarez Pelayo (d. c. 1350); Oeconomica (1353), in which he establishes, against Marsilio of Padua and John of Jandun, the true relationship between Church and State; Tractatus de electione Caroli IV sive Tractatus pro romana Ecclesia et pontifice Ioanne XXII contra Guillelmuocen (1355); Tract. contra Mendicantes ad papam Urbanum V; the anti-heretical work Lacrima Ecclesiae, that is, de erroribus Beghardorum et Beginarum; the philosophical-religious Speculum humanae felicitatis in 3 books; various historical-legal studies; and a chronicle of Ratisbon (Statuta et Consuetudines...); De limitibus parochialibus... (ed. 1906); etc.