13
Bruce Gordon
With plenty of well-organized archives and libraries, and an enviable survival rate of its sources—largely through the absence of war—Switzerland offers Reformation scholars extraordinary opportunities for research into institutional, social, and theological history. The possibilities are only enhanced by the relatively small amount of scholarly attention that has been paid to this crucial area of the European Reformation. It is hard to imagine a situation in England, Germany, the Low Countries, or France similar to that which exists for the Swiss, where the principal characters await fresh (or, often, any) biographies, and the largest urban centers (Zurich and Berne) lack modern studies of their reform movements. Where such accounts do exist, the narratives are often based on primary sources published over a century ago and reflect old agendas. The landscape, however, is by no means uniformly bleak. Befitting the character of the country, scholarship on the Swiss Reformation has been extremely patchy: while certain areas have witnessed considerable activity in recent years, others have lain fallow. This article will attempt to draw attention both to advances and lacunae. The current prospect reveals Heinrich Bullinger, church discipline, local studies of religious cultures, and Anabaptism to be the most active research areas. At the same time, an increasing number of sources are being made available electronically, through microfiche collections, and by traditional printed means. Much of this work is being carried out in energetic research institutes in Switzerland that have developed effective clusters of historians and theologians working within wider networks of international scholarship. The principal problem is not with the sources, but rather the shortage of scholars willing to take up the cudgel and deal with the Latin, Alemannic, and French materials that exist in such abundance.
Resources
Those wishing to engage in research on the Swiss Reformation are well served by research institutes committed to new scholarship and the fostering of international contacts. In Zurich, there is the Institute for Swiss Reformation History, which, for the most part, concentrates on the Zwinglian tradition. Currently, the Institute is very much focused on the life and work of Heinrich Bullinger. The editing of his massive correspondence remains an ongoing project, while recently there has also been a welcome return, after a long hiatus, to the production of critical editions of Bullinger’s writings. The first fruit will be the publication in 2008 of the first critical edition of the Latin text of his Decades by Peter Opitz.1 Many of Bullinger’s key writings have been made available in modern German through a six-volume series edited by Emidio Campi, Detlef Roth, and Peter Stotz for the Theologischer Verlag Zurich. Other projects include the production of an electronic database of Zwingli’s writings and a critical edition of the Baden Disputation of 1526. In Geneva, the Institut d’histoire de la Réformation Université de Genève likewise offers a combination of expertise and resources for scholars. Naturally, here the focus has been more on Calvin and the French Reformed tradition. The activities of both institutes are detailed on their websites.2 In Basel and Berne there are no institutes of Reformation studies per se, but both have strong traditions in early modern Swiss history and are home to a number of important projects. The websites of both historical departments list the current range of research.
The major archives of the Swiss cantons are, as expected, extremely well organized and user friendly. Over the past few years, they have invested heavily in putting their resources on microfilm for purposes of preservation. While this can occasionally be irritating for those wishing to see the documents themselves, it does have the benefit of making it easier to obtain copies of material for consultation at home. In my experience, all the principal libraries and archives are well equipped to assist foreign scholars and make information available. Once again, it is advisable to check their websites and make contact before arriving.
Each year the journal Zwingliana produces a bibliography of recently published work on the Swiss Reformation. The editors do not limit themselves to sources and literature directly on the Swiss Reformation, but also list related material pertaining to other parts of Europe that will be relevant. For those not able to access the journal itself, the bibliography is available online through the home page of the Institute in Zurich.3 Zwingliana itself, which dates to the early years of the twentieth century, was traditionally a journal of Protestant church history of the Swiss Reformation. It has become a modern scholarly publication and is indispensable for those working in the field.
One of the initial obstacles facing a scholar is the paucity of critical editions of the major reformers. At the end of the nineteenth century, it was decided to undertake an edition of Zwingli’s works and, almost a century later, this has been largely completed. Published in thirteen volumes, Huldreich Zwinglis Sämtliche Werke is part of the Corpus Reformatorum and remains one of the major intellectual achievements of Swiss Reformation scholarship. Huldrych Zwingli Schriften is a modern German translation of Zwingli’s works edited by Thomas Brunnschweiler and Samuel Lutz. The consequences of this focus on Zwingli for the other reformers, however, have been dire. Only Johannes Oecolampadius’ work received similar attention in the hands of Ernst Staehelin (Briefe und Akten zum Leben Oekolampads).4 As mentioned above, there are now ambitious plans to relaunch the editions of Bullinger’s works, while Peter Martyr Vermigli’s writings are being translated with commentaries by a team of scholars.5 Otherwise, one can easily list a long line of prominent Swiss reformers whose works remain unedited. The work is there for willing hands.
Apart from the writings of the reformers, there has been some important work done on other key theological sources. Of considerable importance is the recent publication of the Reformed Confessions in Reformierte Bekenntnisschriften, edited by Heiner Faulenbach and Eberhard Busch. The first three volumes covering the period 1523 to 1558 have appeared. These scholarly editions provide not only the texts, but a wealth of historical and theological information.
The situation for the collections of correspondence is somewhat better. In Zurich, as mentioned above, a team of scholars continues to edit and publish the massive correspondence of Heinrich Bullinger, whose collection is amongst the largest of the sixteenth-century reformers.6 There have been editions of the correspondence of other leading figures of the Swiss Reformation, most notably the Blaur brothers, Vadianus, and the Amerbach family.7
IDC’s publication of texts has made works of the Swiss reformers much more readily available. The most relevant collections are Reformed Protestantism, Geneva/Switzerland; Early Printed Bibles; The Anabaptist, Mennonite, and Spiritualist Reformation; Works by and about Huldrych Zwingli; and Thesaurus Hottingerianus: Zentrabibliothek Zurich. The last contains a vast body of manuscript material. Although these collections were first made available on microfiche, it is now possible to obtain them in digital format. For sixteenth-century translations of the Swiss reformers into English, it is now possible to access all the works listed in the Short-Title Catalogue through Early English Books Online (EEBO). Ad Fontes is also making electronically available works of the reformers, and among the Swiss figures included are Bullinger, Oecolampadius, Vermigli, Vadianus, and Zwingli. This system is particularly good for searching texts electronically, but it is expensive, which means that it will be largely limited to institutional subscriptions.8
General Works
Because the Swiss Reformation has not, on the whole, been treated as a discrete subject by German- and French-speaking scholars, there have been few attempts to provide overviews of the whole of the confederation in the sixteenth century. Two older, although key, works remain useful: Rudolf Pfister’s Kirchengeschichte der Schweiz (vol. 2), and Gottfried W. Locher’s Die zwinglische Reformation in Rahmen der europäischen Kirchengeschichte. The only book-length historical study is Bruce Gordon’s 2002 The Swiss Reformation. Gordon provides an extensive examination of the various reform movements, the theologies of the Swiss reformers, and the counter positions of the Anabaptists and radicals, as well as a list of printed primary and secondary sources. Gordon’s article “Switzerland and Reformed Protestantism” provides valuable information on the historiography of the Swiss Reformation. A shorter and very useful summary of the Swiss Reformation is “Switzerland” by Mark Taplin. Philip Benedict has provided a helpful outline of the Zurich church in the first chapter of his Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism.
The Reformers
Any basic textbook on the Reformation will invoke the name of Huldrych Zwingli as one of the key reformers of the 1520s. Founder of some sort of humanist theology and opponent of Luther, he is generally regarded as the opening act for Calvin and the more mature subsequent Reformed theologians. Zwingli, however, has all but vanished from the radar screen of Reformation scholarship over the past twenty years.9 New books recycle old nostrums, and we continue to exist with a comforting sense of a man who fits a certain pattern and place in the Reformation story. The admirable biography of Zwingli by G. R. Potter (1976) is over three decades old and the field desperately requires a replacement. Learned and beautifully written, Potter’s book inhabits an older world in which history and theology kept a polite distance. More recent works on Zwingli, urban history, the Anabaptists, and the wider European Reformation, have not so much undermined Potter’s conclusions as demonstrated the need for a fresh approach.10
That said, at least Zwingli has a relatively modern biography. Johannes Oecolampadius, Simon Grynaeus, Oswald Myconius in Basle, Berchtold Haller, Johannes Haller, Vadianus in St. Gall; and Theodor Bibliander, Konrad Pellikan, Leo Jud, Rudolf Gwalther, and Peter Martyr Vermigli in Zurich—to name a few—await scholarly assessments of their lives.11 In the nineteenth century, a series of biographies was prepared, including Carl Pestalozzi’s study of Heinrich Bullinger, but the twentieth century yielded little. Most recently, the flood of research on Heinrich Bullinger has been enriched by the publication of a two-volume biography of Bullinger by Fritz Büsser, who has devoted much of his career to the life and work of the Zurich reformer. Theodor Bibliander, an extremely important figure of the Zurich reformation, has finally received some attention with the publication of Christine Christvon Wedel’s Theodor Bibliander: Ein Thurgauer im gelehrten Zürich der Reformationszeit. On Vadianus, Ulrich Gaier’s important new study surveys his central place in the field of Swiss humanism.12
Such work on individuals does, however, mask the reality that Swiss theology and reform movements were largely about networks of scholars. The Swiss Reformation was never a mass or popular movement; its progress was due to the cooperation of clerics and magistrates. It was an uneasy, and largely urban, relationship and dependent on the dynamics of personal relations. There were circles within circles: the reformers themselves worked together in humanist-style sodalities in which they shared studies, church duties, and education. A recent study of Anabaptism by Andrea Strübind has recognized the importance of these circles among the Anabaptists, but among the reformers, they await investigation. The Swiss reformers, most of whom were not Swiss, did not work in isolation, but as part of fraternities that need to be examined collectively. These networks are essential to understanding the character of the movement. They also crossed the clerical-lay boundary, which points to the urgent need for a better understanding of the roles played by the leading families in the reform movements. The Roists in Zurich, the Amerbachs in Basle, and the Tillmanns in Berne crucially supported the reform movements at moments in the 1520s when they might have failed, yet very little is known about these families. It is clear that their agendas did not always square with the aspirations of the preachers, but to what extent there were differences remains a fascinating set of tales to be told. The multiple and divided loyalties of these families reveal the complexities of the reform movements, detailing the variegated relations between religion, commerce, and familial and civic sympathies. In this respect, the publication of the Amerbach correspondence in Basle, for example, offers a gold mine of information.
Theology
Although research continues to appear on individual reformers, scholars await a comprehensive examination of the theology of the Swiss Reformation. Over the past twenty years, works such as Peter Stephens’s Theology of Huldrych Zwingli, Frank James’s Peter Martyr Vermigli and Predestination, and, most recently, Peter Opitz’s Heinrich Bullinger als Theologie, a study of Bullinger’s Decades, have deepened our understanding of certain figures and themes, but for the student seeking an integrated examination of what might be loosely termed Zwinglian theology, there is nothing. This would be an ambitious undertaking, fraught with complications, and would entail the tracing of influences and the charting of reception. Any examination of the theological culture of the Swiss reformers would need to be particularly attentive to recent trends that have identified the significant influences of Melanchthon and Oecolampadius on the early Swiss reformers. Swiss theology did not have a single source and Zwingli was not the only authority. Scholars are only beginning to understand the complexities and crosscurrents of religious thought in the 1520s. The current attention to Heinrich Bullinger reveals the extent to which he was independent of Zwingli. Likewise, centers such as Basle and the southern German cities were crucial to the formation of directions of thought that were similar to without being identical to Zwingli’s theology. This is clearly demonstrated in the dissertation of James Ford, “Wolfgang Musculus and the Struggle for Confessional Hegemony in Reformation Augsburg, 1531–1548.” The conference volume on Musculus edited by Rudolf Dellsperger, Rudolf Freudenberger, and Wolfgang Weber is also useful on this point.
On Zwingli the key works remain those of the Swiss scholar Gottfried W. Locher, especially his 1979 Die zwinglische Reformation and his 1981 Huldrych Zwingli: New Perspectives. In addition, Reformiertes Erbe, the two-volume festschrift produced for his eightieth birthday, contains a wide range of useful essays. In English, Peter Stephens’s The Theology of Huldrych Zwingli remains the most comprehensive overview, although not very historical. Much undervalued, yet worthy of attention, are the studies of Berndt Hamm, particularly his Zwinglis Reformation der Freiheit and “Laientheologie zwischen Luther und Zwingli.”
The start of the twenty-first century has seen the publication of outstanding work on Swiss reformers by Martin Sallmann, Daniel Bolliger, Peter Opitz, and Olaf Kuhr. The fact that all are from the German-speaking world is telling of the paucity of research, except for the above-mentioned on Vermigli, in English. What distinguishes these works are their rigorous attention to the texts and sensitivity to the place of Swiss theology within the wider matrix of Protestant thought of the sixteenth century. Sallmann’s Zwischen Gott und Mensch: Huldrych Zwinglis theologischer Denkweg im De vera et falsa religione commentarius (1525) is a welcome and full reassessment of Zwingli’s crucial early writing at the moment of the formation of the Reformed Church. Bolliger (Infiniti Contemplatio: Grundzüge der Scotus- und Scotismusrezeption im Werk Huldrych Zwinglis) examines Zwingli’s understanding of Scholasticism, in particular Duns Scotus, and reveals the Zurich reformer to be a much more complex thinker profoundly grounded in late medieval thought. Zwingli was by no means any mere humanist rationalist. This book is far and away the most important study of Zwingli in the last thirty years. Opitz (Heinrich Bullinger als Theologe: Eine Studie zu den Dekaden) has studied Bullinger’s Decades and places this most well-known of Bullinger’s works within the broader scope of his enormous body of writing. Opitz provides a forensic study of how Bullinger worked with the loci method, and Opitz’s conclusions reflect a growing trend to move away from Bullinger as the covenant theologian. Kuhr (“Die Macht des Bannes und der Busse”: Kirchenzucht und Erneuerung der Kirche bei Johannes Oekolampad (1482–1531)) has produced the first major work on Oecolampadius since Staehelin in the 1930s. Although his book concentrates on the issue of church discipline, it opens a topic that needs further investigation: the pivotal influence of the Basle reformer in the early years of the Reformation. Kuhr has an English summary of his arguments in “Calvin and Basel: The Significance of Oecolampadius and the Basel Discipline Ordinance for the Institution of Ecclesiastical Discipline in Geneva.”
Other especially noteworthy studies to appear recently include Irena Backus’s Reformation Readings of the Apocalypse: Geneva, Zurich, and Wittenberg; Achim Detmers’s examination of the relationships between the reformers and Judaism in his Reformation und Judentum: Israel-Lehren und Einstellungen zum Judentum von Luther bis zum frühen Calvin; and Peter Opitz’s Calvin im Kontext der Schweizer Reformation. In her study of interpretations of the book of Revelation, Backus gives a great deal of attention to the work of Bibliander and Bullinger, detailing their approach to biblical texts and their readings of the material. Detmers’s work makes striking use of unfamiliar sources to bring an entirely fresh approach to the discussion of Christian-Jewish relations in the sixteenth century. The Opitz volume volume contains a large collection of essays, both historical and theological, that help place Calvin within the context of the Swiss Reformation.
In addition, recent conferences marking anniversaries of reformers have produced collections of essays that map out new directions of research. Most notable are Alfred Schindler, Hans Stickelberger, and Martin Sallmann’s Die Zürcher Reformation: Ausstrahlungen und Rückwirkungen; Emidio Campi’s Peter Martyr Vermigli: Humanism, Republicanism, Reformation; and Bruce Gordon and Emidio Campi’s Heinrich Bullinger: Architect of Reformation. The papers of the 2004 conference marking the five hundredth anniversary of Bullinger’s birth have been published in Campi and Opitz, Heinrich Bullinger: Life-Thought-Influence.
Until recently, scholarship on Swiss Reformation theology (which has meant, for the most part, Bullinger) has focused on the issues of the covenant, predestination, and the Eucharist. The role of the covenant in Swiss Reformed theology remains contested. The key work is J. Wayne Baker’s Heinrich Bullinger and the Covenant: The Other Reformed Tradition. On the Eucharist, the best work remains Paul Rorem’s Calvin and Bullinger on the Lord’s Supper. Recently, Cornelius Venema has examined predestination in his Heinrich Bullinger and the Doctrine of Predestination. A welcome new departure in the examination of other crucial theologians connected with the Swiss Reformation is the two-volume edition with commentary of Girolamo Zanchi’s De religione Christiana fides—Confession of Christian Religion prepared by Luca Baschera and Christian Moser.
Such works have been invaluable to our growing understanding of the character of theological discourse in the Swiss Confederation, but the picture remains extremely partial as long as other important areas remain untouched. Worship, liturgy, and spirituality are just three areas that urgently require attention. There have been some isolated investigations, such as Kenneth H. Marcus’s “Hymnody and Hymnals in Basel, 1526–1606” and Bruce Gordon’s “Transcendence and Community in Zwinglian Worship: The Liturgy of 1525 in Zurich.” An important advance will be made with the publication of Roland Diethelm’s Zurich dissertation on Bullinger and worship. Some of his early findings are published in Gordon and Campi’s Heinrich Bullinger: Architect of Reformation. Another research subject to be mined is biblical scholarship in the Swiss Confederation. A major work to appear in the last decade is an extensive study of the 1531 Zurich Bible by Traudel Himmighöfer, Die Zürcher Bibel bis zum Tode Zwinglis (1531): Darstellung und Bibliographie.
The Cities
Next to the holes in work on the major reformers, it is perhaps most surprising that the major urban centers have not been studied, given the richness of archival material. There is an older literature that is still widely used, including Geschichte des Kantons Zürich; Karl Dändliker’s Geschichte der Stadt und des Kantons Zürich; Richard Feller’s Geschichte Berns; and R. Wackernagel’s Geschichte der Stadt Basel. Hans Guggisberg has provided a more recent study with his Basel in the Sixteenth Century, but in comparison to the work that has been done on Strasbourg or Augsburg, for example, the situation for the Swiss cities is curious.
Lee Palmer Wandel has opened the door with some important work on the nature of religious reform in Zurich and Basle in Always Among Us: Images of the Poor in Zwingli’s Zurich and Voracious Idols and Violent Hands. For Berne, Glenn Ehrstine’s excellent study of drama in the context of urban culture, Theater, Culture, and Community in Reformation Bern, 1523–1555, is essential reading and offers a new perspective through its examination of the place of drama in the civic life of Berne in the pre- and post-Reformation periods. Alongside Ehrstine’s study should be placed the collections of essays brought together for the exhibition on iconoclasm held in Berne and Strasbourg in 2000. Bildersturm: Wahnsinn oder Gottes Wille? is a lavishly illustrated volume that contains important essays by leading scholars on iconoclasm in Swiss and German lands in the early Reformation.
The pioneering work of Richard Heinrich Schmidt (Reichsstädte, Reich und Reformation: Korporative Religionspolitik 1521–1529/30) and Thomas Brady Jr. (Turning Swiss: Cities and Empire, 1450–1550) demonstrated the close relationship between the Swiss cities and their southern German cousins in the late medieval period. The spread of the reform movement put all of the cities under extreme pressure as the magistrates attempted to balance the demands of their guilds and populace with those of the patricians and the emperor. The relations between the Swiss and the empire are further explored by Brady in his magisterial Protestant Politics: Jacob Sturm (1489–1553) and the German Reformation, which is essential reading on the evolution of confessional relations in the 1530s and 1540s. Yet, despite the recognized kinship between the urban cultures of the Swiss confederation and southwestern German lands, this discussion has largely remained in general terms; detailed case studies of the reformations in Basle, Berne, Zurich, St. Gall, and Schaffhausen are lacking. Such work would be entirely possible in light of the archive material, but it remains a desideratum.
For Zurich, the situation after Zwingli is considerably brighter with the outstanding study of Bullinger’s relationship with the magistrates by Hans Ulrich Bächtold (Bullinger vor dem Rat). This was followed by Pamela Biel’s Doorkeepers at the House of Righteousness; and more recently by Andreas Mühling’s Heinrich Bullingers europäische Kirchenpolitik, which explores the political culture in Zurich in relation to the wider European developments. Two recent studies that have continued to explore the relationship between the Zurich church and England are Carrie Euler’s Couriers of the Gospel: England and Zurich, 1531–1558 and Torrance Kirby’s The Zurich Connection and Tudor Political Theology.
Churches and Communities
Without doubt, one of the most important developments in the study of the reformation in the Swiss lands was the work of Peter Blickle and his students, Communal Reformation: The Quest for Salvation in Sixteenth-Century Germany, which has been perhaps the most controversial book on the Swiss Reformation of the last half century. Blickle examined the trend toward communalization in the late medieval period and put forward the thesis that Zwingli’s preaching found a much more receptive audience in these lands than in Luther’s, on account of his support of local autonomy. This idea of a communal reformation, Blickle argued, held sway until the brutal events of the Peasants’ War of 1525, which then led to the princely reformation. Since the publication of the book, Blickle has revised some aspects of this position and his students have developed it in new directions, but it remains central to debates about Anabaptism and the early Reformation in the Swiss lands.
A project of major importance to emerge from the Blickle circle in Berne is André Holenstein’s examination of rural and urban history in the late medieval and early modern periods with an emphasis on the Bernese context. Holenstein’s expansive Berns mächtige Zeit: Das 16. und 17. Jahrhundert neu entdeckt is part of a new direction in research that is examining rural religious cultures in the Swiss Confederation in innovative ways. Francisca Loetz, in Mit Gott handeln: Von den Zürcher Gotteslästerern der Frühen Neuzeit zu einer Kulturgeschichte des Religiösen, explores the power and role of language through an examination of swearing and blasphemy. Her study offers a fresh perspective on popular religious mentalities in Zurich long after the establishment of the new church order. The layers of interaction between official and popular religion are explored in Frans Mauelshagen’s Johann Wicks Wunderbücher: Reformierter Wunderglaube im Wandel der Geschichtsschreibung. Wick collected accounts of natural disasters, wonders, and strange stories from across Europe, and Mauelshagen’s book offers the first scholarly examination of this fascinating source.
Recently, important archive-based studies have greatly enhanced our understanding of the diverse ways in which the church and its clergy engaged with local communities. Randolph C. Head, in his work on the Graubünden and Thurgau, has been exploring relations between different confessions that had to live in close proximity.13 This work also includes a useful discussion of the communalization debate. Two other areas that have drawn attention are clergy-lay relations and church discipline. Amy Nelson Burnett’s Teaching the Reformation Ministers and Their Message in Basel, 1529–1629 is the first major study of the Basle church, supplementing her earlier articles, “Preparing the Pastors” and “Controlling the Clergy.” More recently, in “A Tale of Three Churches,” Burnett compares clerical functions and relations in pastors and parishes in Basle, Strasbourg, and Geneva. Randolph Head examines this topic for the Graubünden in “Rhaetian Ministers, from Shepherds to Citizens.” For Zurich, Bruce Gordon’s Clerical Discipline and the Rural Reformation examines the relationship between Heinrich Bullinger and the clergy of the hundred parishes of the Zurich rural territories. On discipline, the most significant recent work is Heinrich Richard Schmidt’s Dorf und Religion: Reformierte Sittenzucht in Berner Landgemeinden der Frühen Neuzeit, an extensive examination of the disciplinary processes in Bernese lands.14 Roland E. Hofer, in his Uppiges, unzüchtiges Lebwesen, has examined the records of the disciplinary body in Schaffhausen, which in many ways was similar to Zurich’s. Scholars working on church institutions will be well served by a new project supported by the Swiss Nationalfond to publish the church ordinances of Zurich and Basle from the Reformation to 1675. It is hoped that the project will ultimately extend to the other Swiss Protestant churches, opening the way for important comparative work.15
French-Speaking Areas
For the Reformation in the French-speaking parts of the Swiss Confederation, Henri Vuilleumier’s Histoire de l’Eglise Réformée du Pays de Vaud sous le Régime Bernois remains essential reading. On the conquest of the Pays de Vaud by Berne, there is a more recent study: Charles Gilliard’s La conquête du Pays de Vaud par les Bernois. On the imposition of the Reformation in the Vaud by the Bernese, see Michel Campiche’s La Réforme en Pays de Vaud and Eric Junod’s La Dispute de Lausanne (1536): La théologie réformée après Zwingli et avant Calvin. These volumes highlight the fractured world of the Vaudois Reformation as the Protestant reformers, led by Guillaume Farel, pursued an agenda too radical for both their Bernese political masters and the local population. The interactions of politics, theology, and traditional religion are usefully discussed. The architecture of the Reformed churches in the Pays de Vaud is admirably examined in Marcel Grandjean’s Les temples vaudois. The most important recent work, however, is Michael Bruening’s Calvinism’s First Battleground. Bruening’s study, based on detailed archive research, demonstrates the crucial role played by Berne and the Vaud in the development of Calvin’s Reformation in Geneva.
Anabaptism and Radicals
Since the mid-1970s, research into Swiss Anabaptism has undergone a sea change through the involvement of secular historians in what was previously a highly confessional area of research. In the following decades there has been a flourishing of scholarship aided by the appearance of critical editions and source materials. As the recent study by Andrea Strübind has demonstrated, there is no consensus on key issues of the movement. Strübind’s Eifriger als Zwingli is perhaps the most striking contribution to the field in the last decade. The very nature of Swiss Anabaptism—its relationship to Zwingli, the genesis of the movement in Zurich, the place of the Schleitheim Articles, the influence of Zurich Anabaptism on other areas, and the connections with the Peasants’ War—remains active and contested in the field of scholarship. There remains a fundamental debate over how the sources should be read and interpreted.
The field is well served by works that provide both comprehensive studies of the subject and guides to historiographical issues. Of the more recent studies, most useful are C. Arnold Snyder’s Anabaptist History and Theology; W. Packull’s “The Origins of Swiss Anabaptism in the Context of the Reformation of the Common Man”; and James M. Stayer’s The German Peasants’ War and Anabaptist Community of Goods. A particularly helpful work to appear recently is C. Arnold Snyder’s Biblical Concordance of the Swiss Brethren, 1540.
Some extremely important studies of religious dissent in the Swiss Confederation during the Reformation have appeared recently. The most notable are Hans Guggisberg’s biography, Sebastian Castellio: Defender of Religious Freedom; Carlos Gilly’s study of Basle printing (Spanien und der Basler Buchdruck bis 1600); and Mark Taplin’s The Italian Reformers and the Zurich Church c. 1540–1620. Taplin’s book is a study of the covert nature of opposition to mainstream religious thought and his book provides an exhaustive bibliography of primary and secondary sources.
Communication and the Arts
The past two decades have seen the appearance of important work on cultural elements of the Swiss Reformation. Particularly notable are Peter Pfrunder’s Pfaffen Ketzer Totenfresser: Fastnachtkultur der Reformationszeit, and Glenn Ehrstine’s Theater, Culture, and Community in Reformation Bern, 1523–1555.16 Other recent significant studies to appear include Manfred Vischers Zürcher Einblattdrucke des 16. Jahrhunderts, Peter Blickle’s Macht und Ohnmacht der Bilder, and Werner Meyer and Kaspar von Greyerz, Platteriana. The combination of Swiss and foreign writers, humanists, and artists who lived in the Swiss Confederation made it a center of cultural achievement during much of the sixteenth century. Many of these figures, such as Vadianus in St. Gall and Konrad Gesner in Zurich, offer an abundance of material for those interested in the wider dimensions of Renaissance culture.
Bibliography
ELECTRONIC RESOURCES
Ad Fontes: http://www.ad-fontes.com/aboutus.asp.
Basle University Library: http://www.ub.unibas.ch/.
Burgerbibliothek Bern: http://www.burgerbib.ch/d/index.html.
Canton Archive Basle: http://www.baselland.ch/docs/archive/main.htm.
Canton Archive Berne: http://www.sta.be.ch/site/staatsarchiv.
Heinrich Bullinger correspondence overview:
http://www.irg.uzh.ch/hbbw/datenbank_en.html.
IDS Basel Bern (linked catalogue of two of the major libraries of the two cities):
http://www.zb.unizh.ch/.http://www.ub.unibas.ch/ibb/.
Institute for Swiss Reformation Study, New Literature on Zwinglian Reformation: http://www.unizh.ch/irg/biblio.html.
Schaffhausen City Archive: www.stadtarchiv-schaffhausen.ch.
Staatsarchiv Zurich: http://www.staatsarchiv.zh.ch/index.php.
Stadtarchiv Zurich: http://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/prd/de/index/stadtarchiv.html.
University of Geneva, Institut d’Histoire de la Réformation: http://www.unige.ch/ihr.
Universität Zürich, Institut für schweizerische Reformationsgeschichte: http://www.unizh.ch/irg.
Zurich Central Library (serves as university library): http://www.uzh.ch/services/libraries_en.html.
PUBLISHED SOURCES
Arbenz, Emil, Hermann Wartmann, and Joachim Vadianus, eds. Die Vadianische Briefsammlung der Stadtbibliothek St. Gallen. 7 vols. St. Gallen: Huber, 1890–1913.
Bächtold, Hans Ulrich. Bullinger vor dem Rat: Zur Gestaltung und Verwaltung des Zurcher Staatswesens in den Jahren 1531 bis 1575. Bern: Peter Lang, 1982.
Backus, Irena. Reformation Readings of the Apocalypse: Geneva, Zurich, and Wittenberg. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Baker, J. Wayne. Heinrich Bullinger and the Covenant: The Other Reformed Tradition. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1980.
Baschera, Luca, and Christian Moser. Girolamo Zanchi: De religione Christiana fides—Confession of Christian Religion. Leiden: Brill, 2007.
Benedict, Philip. Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed. A Social History of Calvinism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.
Biel, Pamela. Doorkeepers at the House of Righteousness: Henrich Bullinger and the Zürich Clergy. Bern: Peter Lang, 1991.
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