SOURCE: "The Reception of the Historia von D. Johann Fausten," in German Quarterly, Vol. 59, No. 4, Fall, 1986, pp. 582-94.

In the following essay, Allen provides an overview of Faustbuch scholarship and argues that, by reading the Faust stories as a sort of rreversed hagiography, the Historia can be understood as both a collection of anecdotes and as a unified text.

When Robert Petsch developed in 1911 the hypothesis of a Latin text for the original Ur-Faustbuch, he set up the contrast between a superior but unfortunately theoretical text and an inferior but actually extant text. This Latin Ur-Faustbuch had been a unique Renaissance novel, he concluded, whereas the extant texts had been so tampered with that they had degenerated into mere polemical entertainment fiction. Petsch's flight from the extant texts to a theoretical text an sich, a Faustbuch an sich, created a critical dilemma in the aesthetic reception of the...