In contemporary Zürich, Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) remains prominent. Over the main door of the Grossmünster, the ‘great minster’ church where he preached from 1519 until his death, one reads the words: “Huldrych Zwingli’s reformation began in this house of God”.1 Moreover the Grossmünster stands in what is now known as Zwingliplatz; and numerous buildings throughout the city display plaques proclaiming their roles, however minor, in the life of the great reformer. Above all, perhaps, the visitor to Zürich can hardly avoid encountering an impressive late nineteenth-century statue of Zwingli outside the so-called Wasserkirche (‘Water Church’), adjacent to the river Limmat.2
The average visitor to Basel, however, is far less likely to encounter memorials to Johannes Oecolampadius (1482–1531). He is buried in the city’s cathedral, but is commemorated within the building only in a three-panelled epitaph in its cloisters, on which he is given equal billing with the city’s first reformed mayor Jakob Meyer zum Hirzen3 and his own scholarly protégé Simon Grynaeus.4 Outside, Oecolampadius is also commemorated in a relatively modest statue;5 but this is rather difficult to find. It is hidden behind a tree in the cathedral’s close and, in order to see it properly, one has to position oneself strategically between a variety of vigorous plants. Even in the Church of St Martin, the prime focus of Oecolampadius’s preaching and pastoral ministry from 1523 onwards, the reformer is conspicuous only by his absence. A small plaque of recent vintage commemorates Wibrandis Rosenblatt (1504–1564), who was first married to the humanist Ludwig Keller (d. 1526), then to Oecolampadius, and then in succession to the Strasbourg reformers Wolfgang Capito (d. 1541) and Martin Bucer (d. 1551);6 but of the career of her distinguished second husband there is no mention.
Figure 1
Statue of Zwingli outside the Zürich Wasserkirche
On one level, of course, the glorified tourist information with which we have begun is neither here nor there; but it is also highly significant. This is because it reflects the markedly different levels of scholarly attention and understanding that have hitherto been enjoyed by the two men whose correspondence this volume translates and interprets. Zwingli is, quite simply, much better known than Oecolampadius. His complete works have been published in a reliable modern edition;7 he is the subject of several major biographies and other book-length studies, in English as well as German;8 he is the principal focus of an eminent scholarly journal;9 and in 2019 he became the eponymous hero of an internationally distributed biopic, released to coincide with the 500th anniversary of the start of his ministry in Zürich.10 For sure, Zwingli’s profile also needs raising: he is still standardly seen as, at best, the “third man” of the Reformation, lagging some way behind Luther and Calvin;11 and his reputation in the English-speaking world in particular has suffered from the lamentable absence of any systematic attempt to translate into English either his theological works or—still less—his voluminous and thematically rich correspondence.12 A case in point here is the 183-letter strong correspondence between Zwingli and Oecolampadius, only one item of which has hitherto been published in a (partial) English translation.13
Figure 2
Statue of Oecolampadius outside Basel Cathedral
An imbalance remains, however: if, particularly outside Switzerland, Zwingli has suffered at times from a combination of facile pigeon-holing and benign scholarly neglect, Oecolampadius has been consigned to a much deeper level of obscurity. We still owe much of what we know about him to the rigorous research of a single scholar, the eminent Basel theologian Ernst Staehelin (1889–1980). Alongside several articles, Staehelin bequeathed to posterity three books that remain of fundamental importance for anyone interested in Oecolampadius: a two-volume collection of letters and other documents, presented either in full or—as is the case for his correspondence with Zwingli—in German-language summaries; a monumentally learned intellectual biography of the reformer; and a comprehensive and detailed bibliography of early modern works both by and about him.14 That said, hardly any of Oecolampadius’s predominantly Latin writings have appeared in modern editions or been translated, even into modern German;15 and Staehelin remains the reformer’s most recent major biographer. One wonders, indeed, whether the sheer weight and authority of his contributions might almost have deterred others from making serious studies of Oecolampadius’s life and works: certainly for several decades scholarship on him seemed to be in a state of almost complete stagnation.16
It is only in recent years, and thanks almost entirely to American scholars,17 that Oecolampadius has resurfaced as a relatively regular subject of academic publications. Some of these contributions, admittedly, have done little more than revisit the known contours of Oecolampadius’s life and career, at times interpreting these in an uncritical manner that can border on the hagiographical.18 Other work, however, has achieved much more than this. This is true of the late Eric W. Northway’s examination of the relationship between two centrally important aspects of Oecolampadius’s thought: his nuanced and influential views on the Eucharist, and his significant indebtedness to the writings of the church fathers.19 Northway focuses especially on Oecolampadius’s pioneering reception and exegesis of the eucharistic theology of Irenaeus of Lyon. Jeff Fisher, meanwhile, has helpfully illuminated Oecolampadius’s approach to biblical study by highlighting its Christo-centric, or more precisely Christo-scopic nature, another perspective that owes much to patristic influence, and one which arguably enabled the Basel reformer to do an unusual degree of justice to both the “history” and the “mystery” of scripture.20 Most importantly perhaps, Amy Nelson Burnett, in her magisterial study of the eucharistic debates of the second half of the 1520s,21 has demonstrated the key role played within them by Oecolampadius’s 1525 treatise De genuina verborum Domini “Hoc est corpus meum” iuxta vetustissimos auctores expositione liber (Strasbourg: Knobloch). This work not only proved a potent catalyst for printed controversies with both Catholics and Lutherans, but constituted in its own right “a sophisticated and eloquent defense of a symbolic understanding of the Lord’s Supper, far more significant than anything Zwingli had written to date”.22 As we shall see, the Genuine Exposition in many ways crystallized important aspects of Oecolampadius’s unique contribution to sixteenth-century intellectual history: his exceptional erudition and scholarly rigour, his respectful but creative reception both of the fathers and of Erasmus of Rotterdam, and the marked originality of his theological thought. The latter was every inch the equal of Zwingli’s, and fully capable of exerting a direct, independent and powerful influence of its own—as it did, not least, on the intellectual development of Jean Calvin.23
The present volume has been informed and motivated by all these gaps, imbalances and scholarly achievements. Responding especially to the damaging paucity of source texts in English, it translates for the first time the full correspondence of Zwingli and Oecolampadius, as recorded in volumes VII–XI of Zwingli’s complete works (ZW): not least in the light of research into the manuscript copies held in the Staatsarchiv and Zentralbibiothek in Zürich, we are confident that this edition is both reliable and comprehensive. Our translations are accompanied by detailed explanatory and linguistic notes, which—we hope—will enable the reader to navigate the choppy and sometimes confusing waters of the letters themselves. The introduction that follows, however, seeks to provide some necessary orientation of a more general kind, whilst at the same time offering a new interpretation of the individual and joint achievements of Zwingli and Oecolampadius—especially between 10th December 1522 (when Oecolampadius first wrote to Zwingli) and 11th October 1531 (when the latter died in battle at Kappel).
Our introduction works outwards from Zürich and Basel. We begin by establishing the two very different local contexts within and out of which our two reformers wrote to each other. Zürich must be discussed first, because its reformation began earlier and progressed more swiftly than that of Basel, and because it developed, in the first half of the 1520s, a kind of theological and ecclesiastical template—often contested but never ignored—which Basel and other evangelically-minded Swiss and South German cities increasingly followed as the decade progressed.
Having thus considered Zwingli and Oecolampadius’s relationships with their respective cities, we move on to the epistolary relationship of the two men themselves. We take account, for example, of the similarities and differences it evinces between them; of its fascinating mixture of warm personal regard and goal-oriented professional collaboration; and of a certain weakening of their working relationship as their approaches and, above all, preoccupations begin to diverge.
The introduction’s fourth and fifth sections are wider in geographical and intellectual scope. We begin by pursuing a thread that pervades much of the correspondence, namely the existence of a particular closeness between Zwingli’s Zürich, Oecolampadius’s Basel and the Strasbourg of Bucer and Capito. We assess some theological and personal aspects of the relationships involved, and argue that the three cities’ most notable joint achievement was a series of scholarly, in many respects Erasmian commentaries on books of the Old Testament which appeared from 1525 onwards. Section 5, for its part, discusses aspects of the wider influence of the Swiss Reformation, arguing in particular that, while Zwingli’s contribution to developments in Southern Germany, in England and in Geneva is now reasonably well appreciated, that of Oecolampadius—on such matters as the theology of the Eucharist and of church discipline—requires greater emphasis and further study. Then in three further sections we turn to practical issues concerning the letters themselves and our translations of them. We discuss what they tell us about the everyday practicalities and constraints of sixteenth-century epistolography, such as the involvement of scribes and messengers, and the use of codes for security reasons; we give an account of the surviving original manuscripts, and examine questions posed by them and by the edition of them we have used; and we describe our methods of translation, in the light of what is known of Zwingli and Oecolampadius’s own practices.
Figure 3
’t Licht is op den Kandelaer gestelt
Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, RP-P-OB-78.422
All in all, we hope that our volume will make a material contribution to raising the profile of both Zwingli and, above all, Oecolampadius, especially but not only in the English-speaking world. Certainly the classic, in essence Calvinist view of the Reformation portrayed in the much-copied seventeenth-century engraving ’t Licht is op den Kandelaar gestelt (‘the light has been placed upon the candlestick’) is still in need of revision, at least as far as our two Swiss reformers are concerned.24
In this work, they are both positioned towards the back of the space illuminated by the reformers’ candle, some way back from the obvious ‘stars’, Luther and Calvin, and also behind such figures as Jerome of Prague, Girolamo Zanchi and William Perkins. Moreover, they are portrayed as facing each other, rather than the viewer, in a way that seems to suggest an inward-looking focus on the purely Swiss context; and, whilst Zwingli is at least positioned fairly centrally on the horizontal axis, Oecolampadius is literally marginalized—featuring as he does as an apparent afterthought in the extreme top right-hand corner. At least the Dutch engraving names him, unlike its likely source, Thomas Jenner’s The Candle is Lighted, in which he is the only one of the fifteen depicted divines to remain anonymous;25 but his relatively lowly status in the scheme of things could hardly be expressed more clearly in visual terms.
In reality, as both his original German and later Grecized names make clear, Oecolampadius possessed a powerful, distinctive and historically important light of his own;26 but that light has hidden for too long under a bushel, for the design and manufacture of which he himself may have been partly responsible. Translating and interpreting his letters to Zwingli will represent, we hope, at least one stage in the no doubt lengthy scholarly process of enabling Oecolampadius’s light to emerge into a clearer and more widely appreciated focus.
In diesem Gotteshaus nahm die Reformation Huldrych Zwinglis ihren Anfang.
The sculptor was the Austrian Heinrich Natter (1844–1892); his work was first unveiled in 1885. Its presentation of Zwingli carrying both a Bible and a sword remains to some degree controversial.
Meyer was an important lay ally of Oecolampadius; a prosperous and influential figure in Basel, he was Chief Guild Master from 1522 to 1529, and Mayor of the city from 1529 to 1541. On him see Paul Meyer, “Jakob Meyer zum Hirsen [sic] (1473–1541)”, BZGA 23 (1925): 97–142; CoE II, 440 f.; Füglister, Handwerksregiment, 321 f.; Wackernagel, Basel, III, 19.
Grynaeus (c. 1494–1541), a distinguished classicist and evangelical reformer previously based in Heidelberg, was encouraged by Oecolampadius to come to Basel in 1529 as a kind of replacement for the great humanist Erasmus, who had recently fled the city. He was to play a particularly important role in the city’s spiritual life after Oecolampadius’s death in 1531. On him see Walter Rominger, “ ‘Der größte Gelehrte seit Erasmus’—und dennoch zu wenig bekannt und beachtet: Simon Grynaeus (1493–1541): ‘Großer Gelehrte und kleiner Reformator’ ”, BWK 116 (2016): 323–339; CoE II, 142–146; OER II, 200 f.; BBKL II, 377.
By Ludwig Keiser (1816–1890), from Zug, who sculpted the original in 1861–1862; the current copy dates from 1917.
For brief introductions to Bucer, Capito and Rosenblatt see pp. x, xi and xvi respectively.
ZW. Much is also online: see
See especially Gordon, Zwingli. Distinguished earlier studies include Potter, Zwingli; Stephens, Theology; and, translated from the German, Gäbler, Zwingli. The most important recent book in German is Peter Opitz, Ulrich Zwingli. Prophet, Ketzer, Pionier des Protestantismus (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 2015).
Zwingliana: see
Zwingli, directed by Stephan Haupt and with Max Simonischek in the title role.
Astonishingly, this cliché found its way into the title of the best-known French biography of the reformer: Jean Rilliet, Zwingle: Le troisième homme de la Réforme (Paris: Fayard, 1959).
We are aware only of the volumes translated by Jackson, Hinke, Bromiley, Potter (Documents) and Pipkin/Furcha (see bibliography).
See Potter, Documents, 49 f. (part of letter 552).
These are, respectively: OeBA; Staehelin, Lebenswerk; Staehelin. Also still worth reading is Karl Rudolf Hagenbach, Johann Oekolampad und Oswald Myconius: Die Reformatoren Basels. Leben und ausgewählte Schriften (Elberfeld: Friderichs, 1859).
The only translations into English that we know of are: Iohannes Oecolampadius, An Exposition of Genesis, ed./trans. Mickey Mattox (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2013—includes only the first three of sixteen chapters); and Johannes Oecolampadius, Sermons on the First Epistle of John (A Handbook for the Christian Life), trans. Timothy Matthew Slemmons (s.l.: Slemmons, 2017). An edition of selected Latin and German works on the Eucharist has recently appeared, closely based on the relevant sixteenth-century prints: Johannes Oekolampad, Ausgewählte Abendmahlsschriften, ed. Florence Becher-Häusermann and Peter Litwan (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2023). A modern German translation of excerpts from these (as well as eucharistic works by Luther and Zwingli) is in preparation. The Oecolampadius versions are being made by Professor Sven Grosse (Basel), whom we thank for providing us with detailed information about the project.
From between the 1930s and the 1990s one can point only to: Akira Demura, “Church Discipline According to Johannes Oecolampadius in the Setting of his Life and Thought” (ThD diss., Princeton, 1964); Gordon Rupp, Patterns of Reformation (London: Epworth, 1969), 1–46; Hughes Oliphant Old, “The Homiletics of John Oecolampadius and the Sermons of the Greek Fathers”, in Boris Bobrinskoy et al., eds, ‘Communio Sanctorum’. Mélanges offerts à Jean-Jacques von Allmen (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1982), 239–250; Ed L. Miller, “Oecolampadius: The Unsung Hero of the Basel Reformation”, Iliff Review 39/3 (1982): 5–25.
The sole exception of note is Peter Opitz, “The Exegetical and Hermeneutical Work of Johannes Oecolampadius, Huldrych Zwingli and Jean Calvin”, in Saebø, Hebrew Bible, 407–451.
This is true to some extent of Thomas A. Fudge, “Icarus of Basel? Oecolampadius and the Early Swiss Reformation”, Journal of Religious History 21 (1997): 268–284; and especially of Diane Poythress, Reformer of Basel: The Life, Thought, and Influence of Johannes Oecolampadius (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2011).
Northway, “Reception”.
Jeff Fisher, A Christoscopic Reading of Scripture: Johannes Oecolampadius on Hebrews (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016). Cf. p. 53: “Oecolampadius operated by the fundamental principle that Christ is the “goal” or “scope” (scopus) of all of Scripture, and therefore, everything written in Scripture was about him and for the benefit of his church”.
Burnett, Debating.
Burnett, Debating, 105.
See below, p. 40.
Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, RP-P-OB-78.422. The image was first published by Hugo Allart. For a treatment of the vigorous and long-lived tradition to which it belongs see Spaans, “Faces”.
See Spaans, “Faces”, 408–411, 415.
The German name is variously rendered Heussgen, Hussgen or Huszgen, which Oecolampadius clearly took to mean ‘house-light’ (Hausschein):