We have translations from all of Albertano’s treatises in German, all from southern Germany and all from the mid-fifteenth century. For all that a century has passed since Germanists began to look at Albertano with any seriousness, we still suffer from poor scholarship. Sundby first identified the German Melibeus as being an abridged translation from Albertano’s Liber consolationis, and Leo Hohenstein made this the chief subject of his 1903 Breslau dissertation. Surprisingly, Hohenstein missed several early prints and at least one manuscript that had been catalogued long before his work appeared (e.g. in Panzer’s Annalen of 1788), and these are not his only errors. The next major scholar to address himself to Albertano in German was Bostock. His 1924 work repeats Hohenstein’s errors and compounds them with more of his own. In spite of claiming familiarity both with Panzer’s Annalen and Zapf’s Buchdruckergeschichte, Bostock nevertheless fails to notice descriptions of three more early prints contained within their pages. Koppitz supplies an entry in the Verfasserlexikon, sub voce ‘Albertanus von Brescia.’ While we owe Koppitz a debt for a number of discoveries, he nevertheless repeats and further compounds several errors from previous scholarship. The best overview is currently supplied by Graham in his vernacular ‘census’ – though he excludes discussion of, i.a., Erhart Gross and of the Leyen Doctrinal as being not immediately derivative of the original Latin. German manuscripts are decribed here, and the prints here.

The works we have of Albertano in German translation without intermediary are as follows^†:

1. An abridged translation of the first half of the Liber consolationis, the German Melibeus, enjoyed the greatest currency. Composed soon after the 1449-1450 Swabian City War probably on the Swabian/Bavarian border, we have ten early prints and fourteen surviving manuscripts. Graham supplies an account of the textual transmission and has prepared a text, available at this site, based on the Stuttgart manuscript and collated with all other known manuscripts and prints. Professor Rüdiger Schnell of the University of Basel has announced an edition of this text which he may be able to offer for publication as soon as 2007. Graham has also published a discussion of this text, cf. Angus Graham, '"Hie noch von Melibeo": The Philosophy of Crisis in Fifteenth-Century Swabia,' Journal of the Early Book Society 8 (2005): 125-142.
2. A manuscript in Alba Iulia is the sole witness to a south-east Bavarian translation of the Liber consolationis, made perhaps for Ortolf von Trenbach, a noble at the Hapsburg court, in 1469 or earlier. This translation is independent of the abridged Melibeus.
3. All three of Albertano’s treatises were translated in an abbreviated form as the first item of an anthology usually referred to as the Lere und unterweisung. Several manuscripts are known and three early prints. There is no relationship between this translation and either of the two Liber consolationis translations mentioned above, though this work is again from the Eastern Swabian region and from the 1450s. Graham has prepared a text based on the Karlsruhe (olim Donaueschingen) manuscript and collated with all other known manuscripts and prints. The first portion of this text, corresponding to Albertano's Ars loquendi, has been published as ed. Joachim Knape, 'Albertanus Brixiensis: Die Räte von der Rede,' in eds. Joachim Knape and Bernhard Roll, Rhetorica deutsch: Rhetorikschriften des 15. Jahrhunderts, Gratia 40, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 2002, pp. 235-252.
4. The Ars loquendi was translated into German in a heavily abbreviated form. Certainly from the 1450s, we have too few manuscripts to say much more about it with any authority. Usually referred to as the Reden und Schweigen, it does appear to be related to the first part of the Lere und unterweisung, and may have been a partial early draft for the translator of this work.
5. Not itself a translation from Albertano, a short text Vom Lesen appears in at least ten manuscripts, usually associated with the abridged Melibeus and/or the Lere und unterweisung. An edition has been published by Wieland Schmidt, Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 95 (1973), Sonderheft: Festschrift für Ingeborg Schröbler zum 65. Geburtstag, pages 309-327. Another edition, based largely on Berlin mgf 1154, is available at this site.
6. In 1538, the Gdańsk businessman Jörgen Lehmann translated the Ars loquendi for the instruction of his daughter. As a Latin source he used GW 563. We have no modern edition.
7. Unrelated to any of the above is an anonymous poem, Meister Albertus Lere, composed in the Wetterau in the mid-fourteenth century. Divided into three sections, the first is adapted from the Ars loquendi, the second from the Liber consolationis, and the third still needs work doing on its sources, though Bostock detects the influence of Berthold von Regensburg and Bruder Peregrinus: John Knight Bostock (1924), Albertanus Brixiensis in Germany, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bostock provides (pp. 79-106) an edition which, now out of copyright, is repeated at this site.
8. The Carthusian Heinrich Haller translated the De amore independently of any of the above in 1466. An edition and full discussion is given in: Erika Bauer (2001), Albertanus von Brescia: ‘De amore Dei et proximi’ in der Übersetzung Heinrich Hallers, Analecta Cartusiana 178, Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg.
   

^† Some German-language texts given here in Microsoft Word format make use of characters from the ‘Mhd. Sonderzeichen’ font. This is a TrueType font available for free from the site ‘Mediaevistik im Internet.’