The edition of the Opus arduum valde was originally initiated by the late Professor Romolo Cegna (1924–2018) in Monza, who spent many years collating the manuscripts, verifying citations and references, and annotating the text. During this stage of the research, Cegna was assisted by Dr Pavel Soukup and Dr Pavlína Cermanová of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the Academy of Sciences in Prague and by Professor Gian Luca Potestà of the Catholic University of Milan. In 2013, Cegna and Professor Wolf-Friedrich Schäufele (Marburg) decided to finish the edition together as part of the research project “Monumenta Testium Veritatis: Repertorium und Edition der Drucke evangelischer ‘Wahrheitszeugen’ im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert.” Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation), this project was housed at the University of Marburg under the leadership of Schäufele and Dr Christoph Galle between 2017 and 2019. Stefan Michels served as a project assistant, and André Flimm and Theresa Otto as temporary assistants. Tim Richards translated the introduction into English. The manuscript was revised by Dr Ellen Yutzy Glebe, Ivana Schauß created the indexes. Students in a seminar at the University of Marburg discussed select chapters of the edition during the winter semester 2017/2018.
Romolo Cegna passed away on March 12, 2018, in Monza. To our great regret, he did not live to see the completion of this edition, and we were unable to discuss some important issues with him. Nevertheless, we did our best to complete the edition as he envisioned it, and the final work has profited immensely from the preparatory work he conducted in assembling the text and its critical apparatus. The team in Marburg arranged this apparatus and made necessary corrections. In the end, the explanatory notes were completely rewritten, as was the introduction. We are delighted to present the edition, which itself was in fact also an opus arduum valde, after many years of preparation. We dedicate this volume to the memory of our late colleague and friend Romolo Cegna.
We would like to thank Dr. Falk Eisermann (Berlin) for accepting the volume into the SMRT—Texts and Sources series.
Christoph Galle
Wolf-Friedrich Schäufele
Marburg, January 2021