Michel Beheim (d. c. 1474) was a prolific author, musical composer and promoter of lay spirituality in pre-Reformation Germany who is most closely associated with Habsburg Vienna. His audience was composed of the political elite of his day, the highest lay nobles at ducal, royal and imperial courts. Beheim’s work is important both for his chronicles and historical songs, among which is a song-poem on the fifteenth-century Dracula, Vlad the Impaler, and for his self-conscious and ambitious acts of literary conservation. Author of over 450 works (most of which he scrupulously recorded himself in manuscripts), he recapitulates, synthesizes and preserves the major poetic forms regnant in the German Middle Ages. Besides chronicles, Beheim composed political poems, love songs, fables with morals, moral and ethical poetry, autobiographical song, ballads, advice to princes, exempla, lyrics to the Virgin Mary bordering on Mariolatry, and religious song-cycles. One such cycle, which Beheim calls a Little Book on the Seven Deadly Sins (Buchlin von den siben tat sunden) – henceforth the Little Book – is the topic of the present paper. Here, as elsewhere, Beheim sees his role as compiler and adapter of homiletic texts that he re-frames in the vernacular, in simple and direct speech.

Beheim assumes the mantle of a conservator of faith. Conformist and conservative to the extreme, he introduces himself in one song as the fervent opponent of heresy: