to suit the occasion. Illustrative are two songs composed
in the 1230s, the fi rst issuing a dire warning to those
conspiring against Emperor Fredrick II (Roethe: No.
137), the second (composed after a change of patrons)
urging willful resistance to the same monarch (Roethe:
No. 149).
Pursuing the tradition of Walther’s political and
religious songs, Reinmar is the link to later singers
of Spruchdichtung in the second half of the thirteenth
century such as Bruder Werner, Meister Alexander,
Meister Stolle, der Marner, and Frauenlob. That such a
rich assortment of stanzas was collected in more than
twenty manuscripts attests to his popularity. For three
hundred years he was venerated by the Meistersinger,
who counted him among the twelve old masters.
See also Frauenlob; Frederick II;
Walther von der Vogelweide
Further Reading
Bonjour, Edgar. Reimar von Zweter als politischer Dichter. Bern:
Haupt, 1922.
Gerhardt, Christoph. “Reinmars von Zweters Idealer Mann.”
Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literature
(Tübingen) 109 (1987): 51–84, 222–251.
Roethe, Gustav. Die Gedichte Reinmars von Zweter. Leipzig:
Hirzel, 1887.
Schubert, Martin J. “Die Form von Reinmars Leich.” Amsterda-
mer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik 41 (1995): 85–142.
Schupp, Volker. “Reinmar von Zweter, Dichter Kaisers Friedrichs
II.” Wirkendes Wort 19 (1969): 231–244.
Peter Frenzel
REMIGIO DEI GIROLAMI (d. 1319)
The Dominican Remigio dei Girolami was a well-known
teacher and preacher in Florence. He was a member of
a family prominent in the wool guild and in municipal
civic life. For many years, he was lector of theology in
the great Dominican convent of Santa Maria Novella. In
addition to his fame as a preacher, he also gained renown
as a welcomer of visiting kings, cardinals, and other
dignitaries; as an exhorter of civic offi cials to promote
the common good; and as an orator at funerals and com-
memorative occasions for local and foreign notables.
There were few types of public ceremony in Florence
or in his order in which he was not at least occasionally
a conspicuous participant. Although some of his closest
relatives were exiled after the triumph of the Black Guelf
faction in 1302, Remigio’s own popularity with those in
power seems to have continued. In 1313, answering a
query from Sienese offi cials about his political sound-
ness, the Florentine government called him “a leading
father to our corporation (universitati).”
Remigio also wrote treatises on a rich variety of theo-
logical, philosophical, and political subjects, but these
seem to have aroused little interest until the second half
of the twentieth century, when a number of them were
edited. Early in the century, G. Salvadori published some
extracts from Remigio’s public sermons and advanced
the thesis that he must have been Dante’s teacher at the
time when Dante tells us he was frequenting the “schools
of the religious.” The theory remains unproved, but it has
been widely accepted and is not improbable, for during
this period Remigio was the principal lector of one of
the two leading schools of the religious in Florence.
Whether he taught Dante or not, Remigio’s teach-
ing was important in the Florence of his own day, and
it was most emphasized by the chronicle or necrology
of his own convent. The entry about Remigio says that
at the time of his death he had been a Dominican for
fi fty-one years and ten months, of which more than forty
years had been spent as lector of Santa Maria Novella.
Remigio was licensed in arts in Paris, entered the Do-
minican Order in the “fi rst fl ower of his youth,” and
made such rapid progress, according to the necrology,
that he became lector at Florence while still a deacon and
before being ordained as a priest. He must have become
a Dominican in Paris c. 1267–1268, since, as Panella
(1982) has shown, he heard Saint Thomas Aquinas dur-
ing Aquinas’s last period of teaching there, from 1269
to 1272. Remigio served in many important positions
in his order, and he was already preacher-general by- He returned to Paris c. 1298 at the express wish
of his convent to continue his theological studies and
qualify for the magisterium. He had returned to Florence
in August 1301 but soon went to Rome in the hope of
receiving the magisterium from Pope Boniface VIII,
but this ambition was frustrated by Boniface’s sudden
death. Remigio fi nally received the magisterium from
a fellow Dominican, Pope Benedict XI, probably in
1304 at Perugia; we know that he preached and disputed
there, and apparently he did not return to Florence again
until 1306 or 1307. This seems to have been his last
long absence from the city and the lectorate of Santa
Maria Novella, though the necrology says that he gave
up teaching and preaching a few years before his death
(probably by 1316, when there was a new lector of theol-
ogy at the convent) and devoted himself to composing
and compiling religious books. This activity seems to
have consisted in large part in the collecting and editing
of his own works.
Remigio’s works are contained in four early four-
teenth-century double-columned folio volumes and a
later collection of Lenten sermons in the Conventi sop-
pressi manuscript collection of the National Library of
Florence, plus two copies of a commentary on the Song
of Songs in the Laurentian Library, also in Florence. The
four Conventi soppressi volumes are C.4.940, Remigio’s
treatises; D.1.937, sermons de sanctis et festis; G.3.465,
questions; and G.4.936, sermons de tempore, and those
REMIGIO DEI GIROLAMI