PETER OF ROSENHEIM. - Benedictine monastic reformer, preacher and poet, b. ca. 1380 at Wiechs near Rosenheim (hence he is also called Petrus Vix), d. 7 January 1433 at Basel. Around 1400 he was a student at Vienna; in 1403 he made his monastic profession at Subiaco; in 1413 he was at Mondragone near Capua. He took part in 1416 in the Council of Constance; he was a conciliar orator in the Hussite affair. From 1418 to 1423 he was prior of the reformed monastery of Melk. He spread the observance of Subiaco and of 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 deputation for reform at Basel. P. was the first propagator of Italian monastic Humanism in southern Germany.
His masterpiece is the very widely circulated Roseum memoriae divinorum eloquiorum: a poetic and mnemotechnical summa for preachers on the whole of Holy Scripture, a literary monument of biblical mnemonics in Germany between 1489 and 1570, composed on the pattern of the Margaritha of the Dominican Guido da Ferrara, at the encouragement of the cardinal legate at Vienna, Giulio Branda of Castiglione.
Numerous manuscripts of P. (poems, letters, sermons) from the monasteries of southern Germany ended up in the Staatsbibliothek of Munich and in the Library of Melk. P. is not to 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), Pforzheim (1510); then, under the title Mnemosymon i. e. bibliorum memoriae carmen, at Vienna 1524 and 1532, Strasbourg 1544, Stettin (1570); the verses on the New Testament were also published in the woodcuts of the Ars memorandi coming from the Bavarian monasteries of the Melk reform, and in the early Humanist print (Pforzheim 1502 and 1504), under the title Memorabiles evangelitarum figurae, or Rationarium Evangelitarum (ibid. 1505, 1507, 1508, 1510, Hagenau 1522, Antwerp 1532). Manuscripts of the Roseum are found in the Vatican Library and at Piacenza, see of card. Branda.
Bibliography2 works
Francesco Thoma