Includes bibliographical references (pages 327-332).
Introduction -- The Renaissance myths of the German past in the fifteenth century -- The Renaissance myths of the German past under the aegis of northern humanism -- The Renaissance myths of the German past : the sources in antiquity and the Middle Ages -- The Renaissance myths of the German past from the interregnum to the Council of Constance -- Retrospective, perspective, prospective.
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Myth and written history share a narrative structure, and have thus been easily knitted into a common fabric. The chronicles or histories of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries often included as a matter of course what are now called myths: stories of national origins that readers expected to find in history. By the Renaissance, scholars began to condemn such practices, but from a modern vantage point they merely exchanged old mythic errors for newer models. This volume examines how these substitutions, re-visions, and re-makings occurred for several 'myths' that were accepted, for a time, as history.