PIETRO di ROSENHEIM. — Benedictine monastic reformer, preacher, and poet, born ca. 1380 at Wiechs near Rosenheim (and therefore also called Petrus Vix), died on 7 January 1433 at Basel. Around 1400 he was a student in Vienna; in 1403 he made his monastic profession at Subiaco; in 1413 he was at Mondragone near Capua. In 1416 he took part in the Council of Constance; he was a conciliar orator in the matter of the Hussites. From 1418 to 1423 he was prior of the reformed monastery of Melk. He propagated the observance of Subiaco and Melk as co-visitor in the Austrian monasteries. From 1426 to 1428 he reformed the monasteries of southern Bavaria; in 1430 he was in Rome; in 1431 he was an orator at Salzburg. In 1432–33 he was a member of the commission for reform at Basel. P. was the first propagator of Italian monastic Humanism in southern Germany.
His masterpiece is the widely disseminated Roseum memoriae divinorum eloquiorum: a poetic and mnemonic compendium for preachers covering the whole of Holy Scripture, a literary monument of biblical mnemonics in Germany between 1489 and 1570, composed according to the scheme of the Margaritha by the Dominican Guido da Ferrara, at the encouragement of the papal legate in Vienna, Cardinal Giulio Branda di Castiglione.
Numerous manuscripts by P. (poems, letters, sermons) from the monasteries of southern Germany ended up in the Staatsbibliothek in Munich and in the Library of Melk. P. must not be confused with Petrus Rosenhaymer O. P. (active in Regensburg, 1464).
The Roseum was printed in the humanist printing houses of Bologna (1489), Nuremberg (1493), Leipzig (1505), and Pforzheim (1510); later, under the title Mnemosymon i. e. bibliorum memoriae carmen, in Vienna in 1524 and 1532, Strasbourg in 1544, and Stettin (1570); the verses on the New Testament were also published in the woodcuts of the Ars memorandi originating in the Bavarian monasteries of the Melk reform, and in the early humanist printing tradition (Pforzheim 1502 and 1504), under the title Memorabiles evangelitarum figurae, or Rationarium Evangelitarum (there 1505, 1507, 1508, 1510, Hagensu 1522, Antwerp 1532). Manuscripts of the Roseum are found in the Vatican Library and at Piacenza, the seat of Cardinal Branda.