On 10 June of 1411 the Bolzano patrician Hans Vintler finished his work on vices and virtues, entitled Die Blumen der Tugend. The work comprising 10,172 verses is in large part a translation of the Italian Il Fiore di virtù by the Benedictine monk Tommaso Gozzadini. Due to numerous translations, Il Fiore di virtù left its traces across all of Europe. Still, Vintler's work is not a literal translation at all. Instead he transformed prose into verse. Toward the end of Die Blumen der Tugend, Vintler also starts incorporating verses from other sources, mainly of Greek and Latin writers, Doctors of the Church, and philosophers. On the six hundredth anniversary of the completion of Die Blumen der Tugend, a three-day symposium was held in Bolzano in September 2011 that resulted in this interdisciplinarity volume with twenty-three essays. The basis for recent studies is laid by Fritz Peter Knapp with a revised version of his 2004 essay on literature of the late Middle Ages in Austria. In this essay Knapp gives account of Hans Vintler and his Blumen der Tugend. Christine Glassner reports on a—so far—overlooked manuscript from the Benedictine abbey of Melk containing unfilled spaces for illustrations. Following this report, the contribution of Margit Krenn deals with the comprehensive iconographic program of the illustrated manuscript (Dip. 877) from the Tyrolese State Museum Ferdinandeum. The work of Walter Neuhauser builds on the surviving manuscripts of Blumen der Tugend. Based on several findings, Neuhauser points out the characteristic features of the manuscript of the State and University Library of Tyrol (Cod. 961) and classifies it as a notebook for personal use. The editor Max Siller examines a possible cause for Hans Vintler's translation work. He arrives at the conclusion that it might have been a feud of Duke Friedrich IV against the Vintler family during the years 1407 to 1409. This feud, possibly having led to his thorough examination of vice and virtue, also left Vintler with lasting emotional scars, leading him to give a self-revelation as a form of self-therapy in his prologue. Despite the connection between historical experiences and the creation of Blumen der Tugend, Siller does not preclude the possibility of other events being the cause for Vintler's work. The reader receives this historical point of view in other contributions to the volume. Klaus Brandstätter places the historical events in Bolzano at the turn to the fifteenth century into a broader context with consideration of the institutional, economic, and sociohistorical problems of the Tyrolese region. Brandstätter's omission of the Vintler family is not overly problematic because Rene Wetzel addresses this aspect extensively in his study of the historical personality of Hans Vintler. The pan-European political dimension of Fiore is underlined by Tracy Adams in her discussion of parallels to Christine Pizan's Epitre Othea. Similar methods are employed by Klaus Amann. He illustrates that Die Blumen der Tugend and another complementary work, Des Teufels Netz, are both didactical texts that draw on recent events to clarify their teachings. Alexandra Ohlenschläger compares Vintler's text with the didactic work Renner by Hugo von Trimberg, pointing out notable differences, especially in the approach to the seven deadly sins, while also highlighting parallels. The essay of Stephen Mark Carey deals with an English translation of Fiore di virtù from 1580. He comes up with the hypothesis that the flower of virtue of John Larke relates to the failed Jesuit Mission in Elizabethan England.

An evaluation of Vintler's skills as a translator is given in Elisabeth de Felip-Jaud's contribution. While acknowledging that the edition of Fiore used by Vintler remains unknown, she concludes that, despite mistranslations and a lack of understanding, Vintler managed not only to bridge the gap from Italian to German but also from the old to the new. In comparing Vintler's work with the translations of Ulrich Putsch and Michael Velser, the contribution by Nigel Harris underlines that bridging the gap like this in the Tyrolian region around 1400 was not exclusive to Vintler. Harris arrives at the conclusion that these translations were of substantial literary-historical and literary-sociological significance and thus demand further research. Michael Gebhardt's chapter includes an analysis of Vintler's linguistic competence while focusing on his vocabulary. He points out that Vintler's vocabulary is characterized by his use of foreign words, Latin loanwords, and the influence of mysticism. Gebhardt criticizes that Vintler's vocabulary hardly found its way into historical dictionaries despite featuring rare, meaningful words. He attributes this oversight to the neglected recognition of the oral aspect and the periodization of Middle High German.

Further contributions deal with different motives and themes Vintler picked up from Il Fiore di virtú and extended upon in Die Blumen der Tugend. Michael Dallapiazza addresses the advice and guidance regarding women, while Winfried Frey writes about money and wealth. These literary studies can be complemented by the contributions of the historian Ute Monika Schwob and the medieval archeologist Helmut Rizzoli. Schwob studies the clothing and jewelry of women in late medieval Tyrol and Rizzoli, identifying a spread of the monetary economy in Vintler's reaction to the pfennig. Following these observations, Armin Troggler's chapter expands information on medieval material culture by examining the content and the illustrations in Blumen der Tugend.

Unfortunately, due to the nature of the short form of this review, not all chapters of this volume can be addressed. Still, all contributions with their interdisciplinary synergy provide new and important contributions to the current state of research, while their brevity invites a more thorough analysis. Notwithstanding, this volume raises the state of research on Hans Vintler and his Blumen der Tugend as well as on the ethics of the fourteenth to sixteenth century to a new level by classifying them in a literary-historical and sociopolitical context on a pan-European tier.