Luca Baschera - Following Zwingli: Applying the Past in Reformation Zurich

Applying the Past in Reformation Zurich

Edited by

LUCA BASCHERA
Universitt Zrich, Switzerland

BRUCE GORDON
Yale University, USA

CHRISTIAN MOSER
Universitt Zrich, Switzerland

First published 2014 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge
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Copyright 2014 Luca Baschera, Bruce Gordon, Christian Moser and the contributors

Luca Baschera, Bruce Gordon and Christian Moser have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9780754667964 (hbk)
ISBN 9781315582573 (ebk)

Luca Baschera (PhD University of Zurich) is wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at the Institute for Swiss Reformation Studies, University of Zurich.

Rebecca A. Giselbrecht (PhD Student Fuller Theological Seminary) is Assistentin at the Institute for Swiss Reformation Studies, University of Zurich.

Bruce Gordon (PhD University of St Andrews) is Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Yale Divinity School, New Haven.

Torrance Kirby (DPhil Oxford University) is Professor of Ecclesiastical History at McGill University, Montreal.

Urs B. Leu (PhD University of Zurich) is Director of the Rare Book Department of the Zentralbibliothek Zurich.

Matthew McLean (PhD University of St Andrews) is a Teaching Fellow in the School of History at the University of St Andrews.

Christian Moser (PhD University of Zurich) is Oberassistent at the Institute for Swiss Reformation Studies, University of Zurich.

Kurt Jakob Retschi (MA University of Zurich) is a retired editor of Heinrich Bullingers correspondence at the Institute for Swiss Reformation Studies, University of Zurich.

Mark Taplin (PhD University of St Andrews) is an independent scholar living in Oxford, UK.

Jon Delmas Wood (PhD Princeton Theological Seminary) is Assistant Professor of Religion at The George Washington University in Washington, DC.

The following collection is a collaborative effort by a group of historians with a shared interest in the Zurich reformation. From different perspectives we were struck by the various roles played by exemplarity in the doctrinal, institutional and educational formation of a new reformed polity.

We would like acknowledge with gratitude the translation work done by Rona Johnston Gordon, who also expertly edited the manuscript. Jon Delmas Wood expertly translated the contribution by Urs B. Leu. Andrew Pettegree and Bridget Heal from St Andrews Studies in Reformation History read an early version of the text and made helpful suggestions, and generously invited us to include the book in the series. Tom Gray at Ashgate was, as ever, supportive throughout. We were most fortunate in having Claire Bell as our copyeditor with the press. Part of the work in this volume arises from a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and we happily acknowledge the support.

This volume is dedicated with affection to a friend and colleague who over many years with the Bullinger Correspondence Edition in the Institute for Swiss Reformation History in Zurich has been a generous and wise guide to the sixteenth century.

Luca Baschera, Bruce Gordon and Christian Moser,
Zurich

The Swiss city of Zurich was never a likely centre of the European Reformation. Lacking university and bishop, it was middling in size and relatively unremarkable.

Yet, on the eve of its reformation Zurich was isolated, with few friends within the Swiss Confederation on account of its repeated and largely unsuccessful attempts to dominate this loose political alliance shaped more by a common desire to drive out the Habsburgs than by any vague sense of shared identity.

Schillers stirring Wilhelm Tell, a glorious piece of literature and figment of nineteenth-century Romantic imagination, conferred on the medieval Swiss an identity they would not have recognized. In truth, the Confederation was fractured and fractious. Loyalties were intensely local and relations with neighbours pragmatic and dictated by ancient customs. To this day, a few words from the mouth of any Swiss person readily identifies her or his place of origin, and even within a relatively small country a person from one canton can feel like a foreigner in another. Swiss history is complex and not easily explained. The expulsion of the Habsburgs valorized by humanists such as Glarean and Vadianus exposed conflicting allegiances and required elegant Latin prose to fashion a compelling and emotive creation story. In short, the emergence of the Swiss Confederation in the late Middles Ages could sustain no easy historical narrative: reciprocal defensive pacts between mountain valley communities were transformed by the entrance of cities that shared few of the concerns and interests of their rustic fellow Confederates, whom they largely held in contempt.

This book is entitled Following Zwingli to convey its period of focus as well as the editors understanding of change and consolidation in sixteenth-century Zurich. The most obvious sense of following refers to the fact that most of the chapters cover the years after the reformers death in 1531 the time of Heinrich Bullinger (150475). More significantly, the case studies deal with the legacy in ensuing decades of the radical break led by Huldrych Zwingli in the 1520s. The examination of historical, literary and human models in the Zurich church requires us to consider how Zwingli understood reformation, its relationship to the historical church and how the past spoke to and informed the present.