11 Fathers and Sons: the Exemplary Lives of Konrad Pellikan and Leo Jud in Reformation Zurich

The autobiography was written with the intention that it should ‘prick’ the ears of the reader, above all those of his son, whom he hoped would inherit and continue the family concern. But it was more than that. Bräker wanted the story of his life to teach his son of God’s mercy, to impress on him the achievements and virtues of his ancestors and to instruct him in the ways of human nature. His own life he offered as exemplary but by no means perfect. Bräker made no attempt to conceal his faults, even revealing at one point that he had never really loved his wife, though he regarded her with affection. Bräker’s intense self-interrogation accorded with his faith, yet, as Bettina Volz-Tobler has observed, his account holds in uneasy balance the Enlightenment search for happiness with a Pietist sense of sinfulness.³

Ancestors loom large in The Poor Man of Toggenburg. His forefathers and mothers, Bräker reflected, were neither criminals nor blasphemers. ‘On the contrary, I can honestly say I knew among them many an upright, pious man of sensitive conscience. That alone is what I pride myself on, and I wish that you too, my children will also take pride in not sullying the renown, but seeking to propagate it further. And this is the thing I would like constantly to impress upon you during the course of my life, my life story’.⁴

Memory and virtue, the complex ways in which lives well lived inform the present and guide the future, and the claims of past generations on the living all shape the story Bräker tells his son. The presentation of self as model has a rich history in the early modern period, equally indebted to the humanist revival of Greek and Roman life writing and to vernacular and ecclesiastical traditions. This chapter opens with the eighteenth-century world of Ulrich Bräker but returns to an earlier generation to explore the significance of biography and autobiography in the Zurich reformation, to consider how life writing expressed emergent theological and historical identities and to explore the role of memory. The two accounts at the centre of our consideration are works of literature intended to instruct, edify and guide, but most powerful is the sheer force of their humanity, of the empathetic manner lives are recounted in which frailty, loss and failure form an economy of virtue.

The writing of autobiography and biography in Zurich served several concurrent purposes, as Irena Backus has recently investigated.⁵ She has drawn our attention to how vitae were often prepared by friends as obituaries memorializing good lives that embodied the distinctive qualities of the Zurich church. My purpose is to investigate the character of exemplary writing in Zurich through the lens of two intimate portraits in which the author-reader relationship was familial: fathers and sons. Konrad Pellikan (1478–1556), the renowned Hebraist, wrote his Chronicon for his son Samuel and his nephew (also named Konrad),⁶ while Johannes (or Hans) Jud provided a portrait of his father Leo (1482–1542), Huldrych Zwingli’s close companion and fellow reformer. Konrad Pellikan and Leo Jud both lived to a good age, and their lives took them from the world of late medieval Christianity through the crucial decades of the Reformation – remarkably Pellikan lived to see the Peace of Augsburg. Konrad and Leo grew up in the intellectually rich Upper Rhineland, studied and worked in the Basle of Erasmus, and finally became senior churchmen in Zurich, where they were colleagues for almost 20 years. Their sons were best of friends, and following the death of Leo in 1542 Johannes went to live with the Pellikan family, in accord with his father’s wishes.⁷

At first glance the two works considered in this chapter appear to have little in common beyond time, place and characters. Pellikan’s Chronicon was written in Latin as a stylized, paternal exhortation to persevere in humanist studies, and was full of didactic admonition. Johannes Jud’s Historische Beschreibung was an affectionate portrait of his father inflected with hagiography and the language of piety, almost devotional in nature. The Historische Beschreibung was also originally in Latin and likely intended for the circle of scholars and friends in Zurich, but only the sixteenth-century Alemannic translation has survived.⁸ Once translated, this vernacular text had a different audience, one that would read the account of Leo Jud as a work of edification, as offering a very human example of Christian living. For in the Beschreibung the son portrays his father as a man who imitated Christ through a life of suffering and humility. In so doing, Johannes made a conscious connection with his father’s role in Zurich as the translator and editor of devotional works for the laity. Leo had produced an edition of Thomas à Kempis’ Imitatio Christi.⁹

In Pellikan’s Chronicon we find an account of a life journey in which autobiography is combined with pedagogy and apology for the Zurich church.¹⁰ As a literary work it drew heavily on Erasmus’ use of exemplification in which the moral authority of history was emphasized. Indeed, for the Dutchman the force of examples and their ability to persuade trumped historical accuracy, and, as Peter Bietenholz has argued, Erasmus was not shy about providing rather creative accounts of the past when they served a higher purpose.¹¹ That purpose was to persuade the reader of truth. In Zurich this approach was adopted in modified form. Pellikan departed from Erasmus’ view in part by attending in his Chronicon to factual accuracy, but he did follow the Basle humanist’s conviction that exempla do not have to be great figures, but can be less exalted and familial figures. In reading the Chronicon it is not difficult to see how the language and vision of Erasmus inflected Pellikan’s account of the past: the world is a beautiful place, the manifestation of God’s creation in which one can be optimistic about the spiritual transformation of the individual and society.

There is no moral perfectionism in the Chronicon, nor is the tone polemical. As the aged Christian Hebraist reflected on the people he had encountered and known, he found the hand of a providential God in his life. He had witnessed first hand bitter confessional strife, but that was not how he chose to remember the Reformation or the Franciscan Order he had left. Conflict and vilification of opponents did not form the story of renewal of church and learning he wished Samuel and Konrad to read.

Unlike Pellikan’s Chronicon, a humanist and Latinate autobiography, Johannes Jud’s Historische Beschreibung was assembled from personal memories, the testimonies of friends and witnesses and information directly from Heinrich Bullinger, who died in the year (1575) the biography is dated.¹² Yet, as we shall see, the work is no mere inchoate bundle: the vita of Leo Jud has a distinctive character formed by its different parts and by its purpose. In some respects it follows an Erasmian model in which the life story is less concerned with factual narrative than personality and manner. Biography is combined with excurses on Jud’s children, the provenance of the name ‘Jud’ and, finally, with the testimony of others to Jud’s character.¹³ Certainly an element of hagiography is evident, perhaps no more than the genuine affection of a son for his father, but the holiness of Leo Jud is incarnated in a life that reflected the spiritual and intellectual ideals of the Zurich church. Written in the 1570s during the Catholic revival, the Historische Beschreibung offered its readers a reformed approximation of sainthood, of a man who embodied virtue and lived a godly life without either the miraculous or the intercessory. It was an understanding of spirituality with a sacramental quality; flesh and spirit were united in the Christian life properly lived. To tell this story, however, Johannes had to deal with those elements not congenial to the model he was creating. Leo Jud was purged of the undesirable: the name ‘Jud’ could not be Jewish, nor was the father’s foreignness in Zurich anything other than an accident. The model Zurich churchman was native and purely Christian.

The Historische Beschreibung and the Chronicon drew on Erasmian themes of memory and spiritual renewal, but their purpose was only partially mimetic. Readers participated in the texts through a spiritual imitatio through which the divine was encountered in daily life. Every anecdote was transformational, a form of reading shaped by the signification embedded in these exemplary texts. As Jennifer Herdt has argued, the role of exempla is discursive. Examples were not simply pieces of reality that functioned to teach moral character, but read in light of God’s providence. They were moments in which the material and spiritual came together; moments that shaped the narratives.¹⁴ In Pellikan’s Chronicon the reader follows a journey in which notable characters, whether family, teachers or friends, together with adverse situations, mark transitional moments in the formation of a spiritual and intellectual model. That model was the author Pellikan. Johannes Jud, in turn, shared the conviction that through imitatio one became more Christ-like, a change described with his favoured image of a mirror.

Both authors shared the intention of persuading their readers of the Christian life, and both used life stories as models. They focused on the humanity of the principal characters, thus making sin, error and frailty significant elements of the lives recounted. Konrad Pellikan and Leo Jud were not one-dimensional examples, but flesh and bone figures essential to the Chronicon and Historische Beschreibung precisely through their involvement in the world. The exemplary qualities of the two men were not limited to great achievement or virtue, but included weakness and fear, the domestic as well as the academic and ecclesiastical. The authors’ purposes were not simply homiletic or didactic, but to convey spiritual lessons through lives that were notable yet led within a world known to the readers. The endless details, whether concerning physical appearance, the shape of a house, a beard or not, or a musical instrument, are not incidental. For both Pellikan and Johannes Jud, God acts in the particular circumstances and localities in which the people live, and it is in those places that they must become ‘Christ like’. Such an ‘in the world’ understanding of the faith, not to be confused with the materialistic, was characteristic of Zurich.

Pellikan betrayed little concern or anxiety regarding the ‘false church’, but rather focused on the fidelity of family and friends as Christians, whose blood flows in the veins of the living. His overarching message was clear: the young can learn much from the virtuous dead, and true piety is not hereditary but the family was the means by which it was inculcated. Emulation of model lives was neither self-glorification nor undue reverence towards ancestors, and therefore depended on the power to discern the divine in the human. God’s presence can be found in the quotidian lives of one’s ancestors, but only with spiritual discernment can divine purpose be detected in past lives that were at once illustrative and sinful. The bond between spirit and flesh, and the presence of the divine in the midst of human lives, was revealed in Pellikan’s evident delight in the details of action and character in the stories he recounted.

The interplay of ancestry and Christian living weighed on Pellikan’s mind, and doubtless with particular persons in mind he reflected on the impossibility of a spiritual legacy where fathers had not lived honourable lives and wrongly confined inheritance to money and material matters, not virtue. True legacy of family was spiritual; that was what he had received in his youth and regarded as his duty as an old man to pass to his son and nephew. At age 66 he wrote the Chronicon for Samuel not from sentiment, but as something ‘useful’, a view shared by Ulrich Bräker. Pellikan saw his own life, in its achievements and failings, as a model for the young men to become Christian scholars, to live lives of rigorous study shaped by piety and service to the church. This was not, in his view, pride, but the self-discovery of imitation. What he had become was what his past had made him. He was a model because he has been transformed by God’s actions in those people he had known. As they had formed him, so too would he instruct the youths.

Sensing death at his shoulder, Pellikan wrote without bitterness. The painful years of the Reformation had left intact a belief in the transformational power of scholarship and true religion. Indeed, he seemed rather astonished by his life, in which he had committed 50 years to scholarly labours and along the way had been entranced by innumerable objects of wonder and new subjects, such as astronomy and geography. All learning, he believed, was the manifestation of God’s Word, and they lived in special times. Rather than offer his young readers fixed conclusions, Pellikan sought to convey the possibilities for discovery offered by scholarship. Every thought, every text, every translation will one day be overtaken by the work of a new generation, but this was God’s continuous revelation of knowledge. Providence, Pellikan was certain, shaped his world of learning: ‘Never did God abandon me, for the numerous wonders of his words sustain and protect against the many dangers of this world’.¹⁶ There are in the Chronicon moments of self-reproach when Pellikan lamented how little he had made of the opportunities God had given him. Nevertheless, rather than dwell on failure he presented his shortcomings in the expectation that his memories would enable Samuel to surpass his achievements. That, in the end, is what emulatio should bring: the model should be improved upon.

Pellikan was full of optimism, expressing to Samuel his hope of a better age for scholarship, a time in which his son should lead a blameless life and enjoy the peace given by God. It was to help realize this hope that a series of figures, all dead, were summoned to reveal their exemplarity. Pellikan drew from experience, for his Chronicon was modelled on a diary kept by his uncle Jodocus Gallus (1459–1517) that had come into his hands.¹⁷ To Pellikan’s great disappointment, only a fragment of the diary survived, but it was enough to learn the method his uncle employed.¹⁸ Gallus himself played a central role in the Chronicon: his life and scholarship were the embodiment of virtue.¹⁹ Pellikan poured forth laudatory adjectives: Gallus was benevolent, generous without being wasteful, and tireless in friendship. In his diary Gallus had recorded everything about his friends, detailing their background, future lives and fates; he took an especial interest in the lives of the nobility and their worldly achievements, the events of the imperial diets and when and where he preached. Indeed, the anecdotal quality of Gallus’ diary seems to have influenced Pellikan’s approach to the Chronicon.

Pellikan offers a rare glimpse into the late medieval educational world, and in particular how it was experienced by a young man from a humble background. Books were difficult to obtain and generally copied by hand, including the Latin grammars or ‘donats’ of Aelius Donatus. Instruction was largely oral and lessons were written down by students to be learned by rote. His account of his school days and entrance into the Franciscan Order in 1493 marked the beginning of a spiritual journey that took him from the house of his parents, who struggled with too many mouths to feed. Pellikan recalled the love of both his parents and of the Franciscans who took care of him. The warmth with which the brethren received him remained an abiding memory, and long after he left the Order Pellikan refused to traduce his former colleagues.²⁰ He attributed to the Franciscans the rigorous spiritual training and scholarly habits that became his life-long discipline: their emphasis on humility and fraternal love remained, for him, essential qualities of the Christian life. Humility is a principal mark of those who appear in Pellikan’s account as men of virtue. As a boy he had loved the Order, and once when his uncle Gallus suggested that Pellikan should leave the Franciscans the young novice responded that he would serve God in the place he had been sent, and that was as a mendicant. We know from later in the Chronicon that even after he broke with the Order he continued to wear the habit.²¹

Pellikan was grateful for his teachers in the Order, among whom were Paul Scriptoris (c. 1460–1505) and Kaspar Waler (d. 1527) from Strasbourg, who, it was noted in the Chronicon, preached for six years on the book of Job.²² Scriptoris and Gallus became spiritual and intellectual mentors, the first exemplary figures to emerge in the Chronicon after Pellikan’s parents. Scriptoris was an excellent scholar and preacher, and it was in working through his Romans commentary that Pellikan began both to acquire the skills of textual editing and to learn the ways of the printing business.²³ His master, however, was a controversial figure, and in 1498 Pellikan accompanied Scriptoris to Alsace to attend a disciplinary process undertaken by the General Vicar of the Order.

On the journey to Strasbourg, providence showed its hand when Pellikan met a Jewish convert seeking to join the Franciscans. It was through this encounter, Pellikan writes, that he came to the study of Hebrew. The convert spoke of how in Mainz he possessed many Hebrew texts inherited from his father, and that he would give them to Pellikan if the young man promised to learn the language.²⁴ Konrad emoted: ‘Never in my life did I ever experience such joy as when I gazed upon this new codex’. Written on pergament in beautiful lettering with the Masora (the textual criticism), the Bible was so large that the binding, Pellikan reckoned, must have required half a calf. On each page there were three columns – not the usual two – and the text was Isaiah, Ezekiel and the Minor Prophets.²⁵

The codex was so heavy that Pellikan could hardly carry it, so Scriptoris shared the load as they travelled to Tübingen, all the while engaging in learned conversation. For the young Franciscan, such generosity confirmed his master’s modesty and virtue (‘vir ille piissimus et sanctissimus’). In these scenes from his youth Konrad compared his own undisciplined energy and exuberance with the humility, gentleness and nobility of a man who had recently faced accusations of false doctrine from within his own Order. Pellikan did not name the theological controversy, though Scriptoris emerged as a critic of Transubstantiation and would subsequently pay dearly by losing his teaching position at Tübingen. Later in the Chronicon, Pellikan tells of Scriptoris’ unhappy death while exiled in Basle, where, cut off from his Swabian friends by the opprobrium of the Franciscans, he was banned from preaching and lecturing. Although Scriptoris’ misery in his final years continued to haunt Pellikan, even as an old man he refused to accept the rumour that it was the Franciscans who had driven him to the grave.²⁶

Pellikan’s zeal in learning Hebrew brought him to the attention of the great Johannes Reuchlin, who was astonished by the young man’s industry in preparing a lexicon.²⁷ Reuchlin interviewed the Franciscan, testing him with philological questions, and was, apparently, well satisfied with what he heard.²⁸ The success of his meeting with Reuchlin led to a collaboration, and the renowned Hebraist loaned Pellikan a manuscript of David Kimchi (1160–1235) with a request for aid in the preparation of his dictionary. This was a singular honour, and Pellikan’s admiration for Reuchlin became boundless, leading to a declaration that he knew of no greater scholar of Latin, Hebrew and Greek.²⁹ Such praise fit a pattern. In the Chronicon Pellikan repeatedly extolled particular virtues: Reuchlin was generous as a teacher and patron, and in his willingness to seek the aid of a young scholar demonstrated the humility of a true Christian scholar.³⁰

The Chronicon overflows with Pellikan’s fascination with the intellectual ingenuity of his age, and he recalled with relish the ways in which his curiosity was aroused. At Basle he studied, among other texts, the Breviloquium of Bonaventure and the Margarita philosophica of Gregor Reisch (c. 1467–1525);³¹ while in the city he read a historical text by the monk Friedrich Krafft, whose brother was the renowned Nuremberg sculptor Adam Krafft. What astonished him most about Friedrich was his astrolabium, which, according to Pellikan, was so accurate that it confirmed the movement of the three planets, the teaching of Georg von Peuerbach (c. 1423–61) and the wisdom of the Margarita.³² With one’s eyes, he marvelled, the movements of the heavens could be explained and understood by the astrolabium, though in Basle he had only seen a wooden replica of the original. What would it be like if he could, like Gregor Reisch, see the originals, of which there were only two?

Pellikan’s time in Basle occasioned his entry into the world of printing through an encounter with Johannes Amerbach (1444–1514), who had arrived in the city 40 years earlier from Reutlingen.³³ Their meeting came at a propitious moment as Amerbach was engaged in his edition of Augustine and was in need of accomplished Latinists to correct the text, though Pellikan claimed that he had to be persuaded by the printer to take on the task. In the end, he carefully edited more than 150 works of the North African Bishop, above all providing summaries of the texts and critical notes for the reader. It was painstaking work, but the relationship was good, and Pellikan admired his employer.

Joining the ranks of Gallus, Scriptoris and Reuchlin, Amerbach was described by Pellikan as a man of great virtue, though of slightly different hue. He possessed the qualities of a humanist printer, which differed somewhat from the religious and academic figures; Amerbach was an educated man of enormous energy who spared neither effort nor cost in the production of his books. Such was his concern for accuracy that should he find a print error he was prepared to have the passage redone, an expensive remedy not readily undertaken by other printers. Pellikan remarked that he and Amerbach quickly became friends, as he did with the other significant Basle printer, Johann Froben, who worked with Erasmus. Among the fruits of this relationship, which Pellikan attributed to his own talent as corrector and scholar, were good relations between the Franciscans and the printer, which led to a constant supply of valuable books.³⁴ Virtue in this case extended to the world of commerce, which Pellikan understood as essential to the renewal of learning. Amerbach’s mixture of prudence with a canny sense of marketing was praised in the Chronicon, and the relational dynamics between scholar and publisher/printer were impressed on Samuel. A scholar must understand the workings of the print shop.

These early years illustrated Pellikan’s purpose and method in instructing his son through autobiography. The established qualities of true religion found expression in the distinctive characteristics of individual human lives. Gallus and Scriptoris embodied the late medieval (perhaps more specifically Franciscan) ideals of humility and learning, and were both scholars and churchmen, though in different senses. In Gallus, familiar piety and model scholarship flourished, while Scriptoris was the visionary theologian. In Reuchlin we find humility and charity linked to the humanist skills of language and textual scholarship, while Amerbach, in turn, was a skilful printer who demonstrated the unity of learning and trade. Pellikan delighted in the peculiarities of personality and the contingency of particular moments in which God’s providence was revealed. The human dimension of the stories is never collapsed into the divine by the erstwhile Franciscan, who with age lost neither the spiritual ideals of his Order nor the gift of the mendicant preacher to be engaging.

Pellikan’s reputation rose quickly, and he combined preferment within the Franciscan Order with developing his expertise in editing humanist editions of patristic and philosophical works. He did not see these two directions as divergent; the new humanist learning emanating from Basle was encouraged within the Franciscan houses of the German southwest. After an aborted trip to Italy during which he fell desperately ill, he returned to Basle to work on Lefèvre d’Étaples’ edition of Aristotle, and Erasmus’ Jerome edition.³⁵ As a leading member of the Franciscans, he was asked by his bishop to write an introductory work (summam brevem) of theology for the clergy. This commission, however, proved problematic. The bishop was pleased with Pellikan’s effort, but it was not accepted by the synod, and the talented Franciscan experienced first hand the venal politics of reform.

The years 1508/9 brought change. No longer the youthful apprentice, Pellikan increasingly assumed positions of leadership both as scholar and within his Order. He returned to his native Rufach to a Franciscan house, where he taught the entire Margarita philosophica as well as the work of the Frenchman Nicolas d’Orbellis, a Scotist.³⁶ This return home brought him into contact with a young man who would become his most significant disciple and close friend, Sebastian Münster (1488–1552).³⁷

Pellikan interrupted the narrative flow of the Chronicon at this point in his life to recall an earlier visit to Rufach when he had been required to preach in Latin in front of the provincial chapter of the Franciscan Order, the prospect of which caused him to be overcome with anxiety.³⁸ Nevertheless, the event signalled a transition from novice to teacher, and within the text of the Chronicon it marked his emergence as an exemplary figure, possessing the virtues previously enumerated. Pellikan’s autobiography was a spiritual journey of discovery, an intensely personal examination of his spiritual and intellectual growth in the true Renaissance sense of imitation, in which he mapped an increasing awareness of how he had internalized that which he had learned from others. His sermon was a form of inaugural address as well as a confession of faith from a man now assuming a position of authority, and it dwelt on learning, church reform and the Christian life. Pellikan argued for the unity of Franciscan spirituality and humanist scholarship, employing a tripartite structure with three themes of love, humility and discipline that mirrored the division of his audience into monks, friars and Observant.

There was no attempt in the Chronicon to conceal the abrading influences of Pellikan’s life, and nowhere was this more evident than in his conversion to the Reformation, which he described as a prolonged and painful separation from the Franciscan Order that began before he had heard of Luther – a chronology intended, perhaps, to reinforce the Zurich position that Zwingli had come to his views independent of Wittenberg. In 1511 he encountered Wolfgang Capito in Speyer, and the two men fell into a discussion of the sacraments, in particular concerning the Body of Christ.³⁹ Pellikan offered an interpretation he believed to be in line with the teaching of Scotus, while Capito probed with unsettling questions. Pellikan told Samuel and his nephew Konrad that they should understand that he underwent a protracted crisis of conscience brought on by study. In turning to the church Fathers he could not find warrant for many of the practices of the Roman church and became increasingly doubtful of such doctrines as auricular confession. In Augustine and Chrysostom there was no comfort. They were pillars of the church, yet he could locate in their writings no defence of Rome’s sacramental theology.⁴⁰

After a journey in France, where he met Lefèvre, Pellikan resumed his scholarly and ecclesiastical activities in Basle, working with Erasmus’ printer Froben on a trilingual edition of the Psalms (the Greek of the Septuagint, Hebrew and Latin).⁴¹ Pellikan compared the Latin carefully against the Greek and Hebrew, producing a text unique in German lands. In order to protect his work, Froben asked the Franciscans to permit Pellikan to remain with him for several months to correct the Hebrew, while responsibility for the Greek was given to Basilius Amerbach.

It was at this moment that the Basle circle became aware of the Complutensian Polyglot being prepared in Spain under the leadership of Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros (1436–1517). As Erasmus would later make clear with his Novum Instrumentum, commerical interests were wholly compatible with a providential view of scholarly advances. Of the work in Basle, Pellikan writes, ‘So prepared the Lord through such admirable books, which in the area of theology were appearing particularly in German lands, the progress of the church to the reformation of errors in scholarship, faith, and morals that was in those days extraordinarily widespread’.⁴²

Six years later Pellikan read Luther.⁴³ On a journey he passed through Mühlhausen and at the table of a noted commander of his Order met a priest who gave him a copy of the Ninety-Five Theses. His initial response caught the ambivalent feelings of many. Concerning the first 25 theses on purgatory he was in full agreement, for he had found nothing in Scripture or Augustine to support the doctrine, but on indulgences and papal authority he was less certain, arguing that Luther would have to express himself with greater precision. Until such clarification appeared Pellikan had no intention other than to remain as Guardian of the Franciscan house in Rufach.

When Pellikan’s uncle Gallus died he was charged with settling the estate.⁴⁴ It was a good medieval death of a good man and fine scholar, who at his end made a full confession of sin. Gallus left his affairs in order, with enough money for the construction of a church and provision for Pellikan’s mother and sister. Beyond any other figure in the Chronicon, including Reuchlin and Erasmus, it was Gallus whom Pellikan held as the model of Christian learning.⁴⁵ He explained to Samuel and Konrad how Gallus worked, including his method of taking notes and manner of teaching. ‘At the commencement of each lecture Gallus would question those present about the contents of his previous talk; all sat in suspense as no one knew who would be called upon. When he encountered indolence he was relentless, and against impudence and absentmindedness he was firm. In such a way he made great progress with his students’.⁴⁶ Without doubt, in a text directed to his son and nephew it was Gallus’ status as family member that made him particularly exemplary.

Gallus was no plaster saint, but like all the characters of Pellikan’s story, a person of his age and fallible. As a friar he had fathered a child and held more than one benefice, all common enough even among the most faithful clergy. He was, however, generous as a host, good to the Franciscans and severe towards the dishonourable. Loved by bishops, whom he frequently counselled, Gallus was actively engaged in the reform of worship. Above all, according to Pellikan, he feared God.⁴⁷ When he died he did not adopt the clerical custom of being buried in priestly garments, but chose those of a simple layman. He was laid beside a friend and hoped to rise at the Last Judgment not as a priest or doctor, but as a Christian. The witness of family members still alive, Pellikan assured his son and nephew, would corroborate all of this.

Pellikan’s growing sympathy for the Reformation movement led, inevitably, to conflict with the Franciscans. The story is provided in detail, but of particular note was his letter of 1523 to his superior in Mainz describing both his conversion to the evangelical cause and the state of his conscience.⁴⁸ Whether the letter was ever received or read, we have no idea, but Pellikan included the text in the Chronicon. He complained of the malicious gossip and slander suffered from fellow Franciscans, who had branded him a ‘Lutheran’. The pejorative tag was not without warrant, he admitted, as he had diligently read Luther’s works with a mixture of astonishment and spiritual benefit. Luther had written much that was good and deservedly praised by leading figures, yet, Pellikan hesitated, certain aspects left him uneasy. He was not able to defend all of what he read from the Wittenberg professor, yet as there had been no official process against Luther there was no reason why he should not be printed. As for his own position, he claimed to stand by those doctrines and teaching firmly rooted in Scripture, and, with regard to disputed points, he awaited the judgment of those guided by Scripture and true religion, not by self-interest or sense of personal gain. Pellikan described the effect of Luther’s works being printed in Basle, commenting that such had been the impact that it would not be possible to wind back the clock.

Pellikan recognized how the sheer number of Luther’s works printed in Basle created both controversy and a readership, and that the harder opponents tried to staunch the wound the greater the interest. As for his own position, it was precarious, but as he explained to Samuel and Konrad his principles were clear and he saw no inevitable break with the church: the reading of Scripture was fully in accord with the teaching and rules of the Franciscan Order. He refused the name ‘Lutheran’, finding it limiting as his reading covered writings by others and, above all, the Bible in the ancient languages. In the end, however, he could not avoid the conclusion that Luther deviated from the church Fathers less than the scholastics, and his letter to his superior in Mainz concluded with an appeal for understanding. It failed. He was replaced by another brother and continued, in his words, to suffer attacks from others. Despite these depredations, however, he was not minded to leave the Order and asserted that his letter was proof enough that his deliberations were neither levis nor perfida.⁴⁹

There is no sudden conversion moment to be found in the Chronicon. Pellikan had no interest in identifying a particular moment when the heavens opened. Whatever may have happened, to Samuel and Konrad he explained his turn to the evangelical faith as a protracted experience in which faith and intellectual endeavour were never uncoupled. Spiritual enlightenment and rigorous study of Scripture and the theological tradition drove Pellikan to separate himself from his beloved Franciscans and ultimately embrace the reformation. He emphasized the time this change took, that he did not act rashly and that he had preserved from his past all that was not offensive to God. His repeated remarks that he only gradually came to be persuaded by Luther were certainly to underscore his broader purpose of teaching the boys how God’s free gift of wisdom demanded the tough graft of faithful scholarship that cannot be hurried.

Pellikan’s ultimate and inevitable expulsion from the Franciscans formed a key moment in the spiritual development chronicled in the text. The rhetorical contours of the account are unmistakable: Pellikan presented a Leidensgeschichte, a form of imitatio Christi, in which he suffered for adherence to the biblical faith. With its emphasis on suffering as a mark of the Christian life, the Chronicon, written in the 1550s, fit within a body of religious writing in Zurich, Latin and vernacular.⁵⁰ We have already noted that Leo Jud edited a German translation of Thomas a Kempis’ Imitatio Christi, which appeared in Zurich.

Although formally estranged from his Order, Pellikan decided to remain in Basle, and continued to live in the Franciscan house: His position had clearly changed. Fully identified with the evangelicals, he chose to live by what he called the rule of Christ (Christi regulam), a life of rigorous study and worship according to his conscience.⁵¹ It was a liminal state, experienced by many others in the chaos of the years after 1517, for a man who had not yet left the church of his birth and family but was increasingly aware of the implications of the new faith.

Basle was not to remain his home. Huldrych Zwingli invited the distinguished Hebraist to Zurich, and Pellikan’s departure from the Rhine city marked his break with the Roman church. It is at the point of his arrival in newly reformed Zurich that the Chronicon changed focus. The largely chronological account gave way to a focus on his scholarly work, although here and there we catch glimpses of his household, the desire of his new colleagues that he marry and sundry moments of daily life.

The change is intentional and reflects the two parts of the work. The first follows his spiritual and intellectual journey from youth to the Reformation: it is the conversion story. The second part is the life of the Christian scholar, more like a literary version of Holbein’s portrait of Erasmus. It was the work to which his journey, guided by exemplary figures, had brought him.

Pellikan did get married, and the happy marriage was frequently celebrated in the Chronicon. He and Anna had one child, Samuel, named for the prophet. His small family was a source of spiritual joy, and one of the most moving passages in the text was his prayer for his son that the prophet for whom he was named would be a life-long example: ‘May he [his son] through the grace of God possess a holy character like the prophet Samuel! That is today and always my greatest wish, as I had always implored the Lord. Only God should he serve in piety whether in a long life or one that ends in youth in holiness. I shall never cease to call upon the Lord to grant a pious inheritance to God’s honour! Amen’.⁵²

Pellikan saw the biblical work flourishing in Zurich as the spiritual and intellectual vocation for which his Franciscan and humanist mentors had prepared him. Although loyal to his friend Zwingli and stunned by the reformer’s sudden death in 1531, Pellikan understood the dead reformer’s teaching as part of an on-going reform of the church, and was not prepared to valorize him excessively or be uncritical of what was unfolding in Zurich. Pellikan was not entirely satisfied with the emphasis on philology, and in the 1532 preface to his commentary on the Old and New Testaments claimed a different form of exegesis was required.⁵³ The concentration on grammar characteristic of the Bible scholars in Zurich was, Pellikan argued, insufficient for the theological and pastoral needs of the church. It fell to him, he realized, to provide a Bible commentary that served the urgent need to instruct both ministers of the Word and the laity in the essentials of the faith.⁵⁴ This concern was shared by Leo Jud, whose 1529 commentary on Revelation had focused on such pastoral questions.⁵⁵ Nevertheless, Pellikan’s commentary was no rehash of established themes, but an astonishing achievement unlike anything in early Protestantism. It was a multi-volume, extraordinarily detailed commentary, and in the Chronicon he provided an extensive account of his working methods. In preparation he had summarized each chapter of the Bible on small pieces of paper, a laborious task that he struggled not to allow to interfere with his other duties, such as lecturing on Hebrew. Having begun in April, by June he had made his way through the Pentateuch, and completing the Old Testament took well over a year.

Once the summaries were completed, Pellikan wrote notes to accompany the texts and explain difficult passages, making use of Jerome, Oecolampadius and Rabbinic sources. By the end of 1531 he had a text he could share with the inner circle of scholars in Zurich before it went to the printer Christoph Froschauer. Nevertheless, troubled by ambivalent feelings about the project, he discussed with Froschauer the possibility of having the commentary printed posthumously. His reluctance, unexplained in the Chronicon, was overcome in 1531 when his commentary on the book of Ruth was printed in 800 copies to considerable acclaim.⁵⁶ Pellikan intended his commentary for those beginning studies in theology (studiosis theologiae iunioribus), and believed it should form his testamentum to the church. His Latin is clear and accessible, as, he argued, is the language of the Holy Spirit, and his commentary was to serve ‘communem piorum et simplicium devotionem’.⁵⁷

This enormous undertaking taxed Pellikan’s scholarly skills to the limit. In one case, when he came to the notoriously difficult passage in Ezekiel (chs 40–48) concerning the vision of the temple, he had to turn to Theodor Bibliander for help. The Hebrew proved impenetrable for even one of the most prominent Christian teachers of the language, and he handed the work over to his colleague, who later turned it into a separate publication.⁵⁸ The Commentaria bibliorum, despite Pellikan’s reticence, proved another scholarly success and remained in print for much of the sixteenth century.⁵⁹

Humility, the quality so admired in his teachers, was regarded by Pellikan as essential to Christian scholarship. Yet, in reflecting on his life, he did not see humility and scholarly success as irreconcilable. For all his praise of communal scholarship in Zurich and the achievements of others, Pellikan never lost sight of his own pre-eminence as biblical scholar in the city. Not only the dead were models of Christian learning, and Pellikan was highly aware of his status, alongside his admired colleagues Heinrich Bullinger and Theodor Bibliander.

The emergence of Pellikan as a model scholar takes place in the Chronicon in a subtle way, partially through what was left unwritten. In his detailed account of his own biblical work, Pellikan offers little on his relationship with Jerome, whom he not only praised in the preface to his Commentaria, but whose Latin text he used. As with Erasmus, who appears only indirectly as a model, Jerome’s absence points to something significant about Pellikan’s purpose. The model scholars most prominent in the Chronicon are people with whom he had a close personal relationship. Pellikan was writing for his son, and as a father he offered himself as a model. Central to that relationship was the intimacy of family and friendship. It was this closeness that he stressed throughout the Chronicon, and even Reuchlin was treated as a paternal figure in a manner not granted Erasmus. Jerome did not belong to a life story about those whom Pellikan had known during his journey.

The 1530s were a fruitful time for biblical commentaries in Zurich as Froschauer’s press worked at capacity to satisfy supply and demand. Pellikan listed in the Chronicon the works that appeared in rapid succession, not to impress ‘dead examples’ on the boys, but to encourage them to enter the scholarly sodality in the city. This guild of Christian humanists was based on Erasmus’ understanding of emulatio, a relationship between imitator and imitated that connected past, present and future. Pellikan was adamant that the boys were to embrace the learning and piety of those who had gone before them – to acquire their manner of reading texts, their language and style of writing. Imitation, however, did not mean the youth should become their teachers. Masters, ancient and contemporary, were examples, but they belonged to their time and could only be appropriated to the present. Above all, what was to be emulated was their virtue, and that was achieved through godly lives and ceaseless study. Ultimately, the present generation would surpass its teachers, and Pellikan was adamant that it fell to the boys to improve on the work of exemplary figures, to plumb Scripture more deeply, to find better ways to reveal the perspicuity of the Bible and to ensure the conformity of the church with the will of Christ.⁶⁰ Samuel and Konrad would journey on their own paths as he had done, but, as the father reflected, they would win little praise if they failed to overtake him.⁶¹

Pellikan did not limit his labours to the Bible. He took pride in his translations of Aristotle, Cicero’s Tusculanae quaestiones (which Erasmus had edited in 1523 and used as the model for his De libero arbitrio), and Nicholas Cusanus’ Theologica concordantia, among others. The Cusanus text he claimed to have completed in ten days.⁶² Sensitive to any objection that translating philosophical works was unnecessary, and unchristian, Pellikan’s defence reflected his wider view of the curriculum. Students needed not read works of philosophy in Greek and Latin when satisfactory German translations existed; study in original languages was better directed to the Bible, Roman law, Pliny’s natural history and the classical historians, all of which he valued more highly. As to the place of classical literature in the building of a Christian society, the textbooks of Aristotle in German were, according to Pellikan, integral as long as one offended neither God nor church. Pellikan argued that Rome was a model for Zurich in the prudent use of vernacular translations. When the wisdom of the Greeks was not available to the people of Rome, it was decided that ignorance was best dispelled by Latin translations of moral philosophy and natural law. German was the modern Latin: far from barbaric, it was the noblest of languages, conveying the style and learning of classical languages.⁶³

In the closing part of the Chronicon Pellikan increasingly punctuated his account of the Reformation and his own life with admonitions to Samuel and Konrad to pursue the life of a Christian scholar. The model they should emulate was none other than Heinrich Bullinger (1504–75), chief minister of the Zurich church and for Pellikan the embodiment of Christian learning, preaching and pastoral care. Bullinger was no less than Moses, ‘who speaks clearly to our people’, illuminating for the faithful the darkest passages of Scripture.⁶⁴ Bullinger stood among the church Fathers, a great preacher in the tradition of Chrysostom, Augustine and Gregory, able to proclaim true doctrine in the language of the people. He had preached all the books of the Bible, and although he held no university position, he far surpassed the doctors of the Sorbonne. It was Bullinger above all, including Zwingli and himself, who for Pellikan represented the ideal of the Zurich church.

The title page of the Beschreibung quotes Revelation 5:5: ‘the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered’. The ‘Lion’ and ‘Judah’ referred to the names ‘Jud’ and ‘Leu’ or ‘Louew’, signalling Johannes’ dual purpose to provide an account of his family as well as their eschatological role.⁶⁶ The reference was not accidental: his father had prepared a commentary on Revelation in 1529, beginning a tradition in Zurich of work on the visions of John of Patmos.

Like Pellikan, Johannes began with his ancestors. Leo Jud’s father was an educated priest in Alsace with a master of arts, and lived in a common-law relationship with a woman who bore him several children. She was Elsa Hochsang from Solothurn, and Johannes presented her as a spiritual model. In addition to Leo, he adds, there was at least one other son and daughter, and perhaps more children. Leo’s sister Clara married a butcher and had a son named Johannes Fabritius, later called Montanus, whose life becomes central to the Beschreibung.⁶⁷ Fabritius was from the same village as Konrad Pellikan, Rufach, while Leo had been born in 1482 in nearby Guémar – reminding us that the creation of model Zurich reformers required the domestication of foreigners.

Johannes offers a rather breathless account of his father’s youth and education, pausing only to mention how when he became a priest in St Pilt (Alsace) he was beloved for his learning and manner (Kunst). Otherwise there was little remarkable about him until he went to study at university in Basle, where he read the works of Reuchlin, Erasmus and Luther.

The role of Leo’s mother in the story was, we have noted, crucial. Elsam was literate and frequently wrote to Leo, seeking to protect him from the evils of the world (spil, weibeeren and boeser gesellschaft). According to her grandson, she ‘experienced the time of Luther and the change of religion’, and Leo sent her books, including Luther’s explanation of the Lord’s Prayer.⁶⁸ She lived until 1520, the year her son became ‘Leutpriester’ at the Benedictine house at Einsiedeln. Her exemplary role in the text was most striking in her death, which Johannes described at some length: she lay in bed for ten weeks and passed away with her wits about her (grosser vernunft) and with patience (gedult). It was a good death, full of prayer and related to Leo by his sister Clara, who informed her brother of their mother’s wish that he should fulfil God’s purpose as a priest and pray for her without cessation.⁶⁹ Pellikan and Jud were close to their mothers, and in the Chronicon and the Beschreibung maternal influence was crucial to the formation of piety. Although Jud’s mother was the better educated, both women were remembered as devout and wise figures who from piety instructed their children in the interiority of the faith.

The Beschreibung dwells at length on members of the Jud family, and no detail is incidental: places of birth, occupation, studies and marriages are carefully recorded to establish exact lineage. Seemingly random stories reveal the author’s purpose. Clara’s son Jacob found himself in trouble with a local nobleman and was forced to flee execution, only to die together with his wife and children in Bingen, on the Rhine, where they were buried. Jud’s nephew Fabritius, in whom he took a special interest, was sent to Strasbourg to study under Bucer, but after the falling out between Zurich and Strasbourg over the Lord’s Supper was brought home, where Jud cared for him ‘as his own son’.⁷⁰ Such incidents are neither chronological nor form a chronicle, but they tell of the fates of ordinary men and women, of people with whom readers could identify. The anecdotes emphasize human responsibility and the consequences of sin, as well as God’s providence. Even the humblest of folk are cast in roles as models.

The interweaving of biography and anecdote reveals the rather loose connection to historical chronology in the Beschreibung. Johannes attends to individual lives, often leaping from one decade to another depending on the subject. The two young cousins Johannes and Fabritius were close, having grown up together in the Jud household. Leo did not send them to school, but taught them Latin, Greek and Hebrew at home, an exemplary relationship in which paternalism and pedagogy were closely linked.⁷¹ When Leo died in 1542 the boys in the family were separated: Johannes went to the school in the Fraumünster in Zurich, his brother Dietrich to Kappel and Fabritius was kept at home by Jud’s wife. The mother seems to have had a decisive say in this arrangement, for she determined that the young Fabritius ‘had no one’ and possessed a remarkable ‘ingenium’ (‘character’) and ‘Gmut’ (‘soul’), and hence would stay with her.⁷² Johannes pairs his father and half-brother by attributing to both the quality of ‘ingenium’.

In time, Fabritius was provided with a stipendium to supplement the meagre inheritance left by his parents, but the scars of being an orphan were unhealed. He ultimately left Zurich to study at the University of Marburg, where he claimed to having felt embarrassed by his lack of sophistication in comparison to the learned students, masters and doctors of the German university. The issue was not ignorance, as his learning was prodigious, rather a sense of social inferiority.⁷³ Of Fabritius Johannes wrote that he was serious and gallant, a person who kept few companions. He was quiet and calm, characteristics often mistaken for haughtiness, and his manner, according to Johannes, owed much to being ‘foreign’ and having few friends and patrons. Foreignness is repeatedly presented as a condition to be overcome, an impediment to Christian living in Zurich, and Johannes was determined to purge his family of any sense of being outsiders. Those closest to Fabritius were the sons of reformers: Huldrych Zwingli (the younger), Samuel Pellikan, Johannes Jud and Sebastian Guldibeck.

Fabritius returned to Chur to serve as a preacher, and was much admired for his learning and rectitude. Johannes celebrates him as an ideal pastor whose ministry was marked by spiritual care for common people and nobility, and the treatment of all as Christians. He repudiated the mercenary service and gifts were returned with consummate politeness. Fabritius hated warfare and resisted the French agents who travelled through Swiss lands seeking willing young men. Good relations with the evangelically minded bishop of Chur were preserved, though he was forceful in his dealings with heretics, such as Anabaptists, whom he referred to as ‘Arians’. Fabritius’ living was poor, forcing him to petition the authorities in Chur, who improved his lot, largely, it seems, through the beneficence of a widow. However, she died shortly thereafter, returning him to near penury. His condition was partially alleviated by his prolific literary output: he wrote poetry, theology and pastoral works to comfort the sick and dying. Johannes writes that his half-brother never fled plague nor feared illness, and his reputation as a pastor was widespread. Yet, the wages of virtue were grim, and Fabritius fit Johannes’ model of the loyal servant suffering for his faith. Fabritius, he writes, was a brave man who performed his office with constancy (Treue), but who ultimately paid a high price. Plague took his wife, several of his children and, finally, him in 1566.

Johannes’ account of Fabritius was the personal recollection of a beloved cousin and friend, but one with flesh and blood, not merely sentiment, and it did not end well. Fabritius was survived by two sons, one of whom was described by Johannes Jud as a ‘Stockfisch’, or blockhead, who tried various trades without success. Ultimately he disappeared to war and never returned. The story of Fabritius’ wayward son illustrated that models could fail. Fear that the next generation would depart from the teaching and example of their elders runs through both the Chronicon and Beschreibung, not without cause. There was no guarantee that sons would emulate virtuous fathers.

The sad stories of Fabritius’ children were reminders that the Christian life required constant attention and cultivation, and of the fragility of even the most faithful lives. Piety was both a gift from God and a habitus formed by discipline; imitation was a skill, and ancestry would not save the indolent. Both the Chronicon and Beschreibung present the family as the natural channel for the transmission of piety because love binds generations. The connection between family and true religion made by Pellikan and Johannes Jud was, however, tempered by the actions of those individuals in their stories who through their lives served as counter-models and reminders that no human institution or relationship could be the source of virtuous living. Familial relations, together with church, school and friendship were the media through which God worked.

Johannes presents his father’s years at Einsiedeln (1519–22) as a turning point. After extensive study of patristic sources, Erasmus and Luther, and close contact with Huldrych Zwingli, Leo emerged as an exponent of evangelical ideas. As a preacher to pilgrims at Einsiedeln, his father held office at Einsiedeln with the ‘highest dignity’; he proclaimed the Word and disputed at table with the monks. Such was his influence that the Benedictine abbot embraced the faith, and at his death rejected the last rites, the sacraments and all other ‘papal ceremonies’. Johannes claims to have heard in 1571 from the elderly Heinrich Bullinger that the abbot ‘died most devoutly’.⁷⁴ Johannes resolutely defended his father against any accusation that he had been negligent as a priest. His conversion to the Reformation cause had not revealed bad character but a man of such conviction that he transformed the lives of others.

In 1522 Jud arrived in Zurich at Zwingli’s invitation, and the following years are briskly treated in a brief account of the Reformation. Johannes’ primary interest was to focus readers’ attention on the friendship between Zwingli and Jud and their commitment to the gospel. The danger in which they lived, risking ‘life and limb’ for their convictions, was emphasized, as was their suffering. It was not uncommon, the Beschreibung relates, for the two men to have their windows broken at night by stones thrown in anger.⁷⁵ This bond in adversity, Johannes left the reader in no doubt, established his father as Zwingli’s true successor. That he did not choose to take up the position of chief minister after Zwingli died in 1531 was a sign of Leo’s modesty and concern for the welfare of the church. It was during this torrid time that Leo married Katharina, who had come from the convent at Einsiedeln and was the daughter of a weaver from St Gall. Johannes gives considerable attention to the marriage of his parents, which publically took place on 19 September 1523, though, in an aside, Johannes suggests that it may have been 9 November.⁷⁶

Central to the narrative was the litany of accusations faced by Zwingli and Jud, who were denounced for opposing the mercenary trade, as well as for being heretics, false prophets, forerunners of the end times, scholastics and general miscreants (boswicht). They were ridiculed in song and verse, and Johannes quoted one example: ‘Zwingli and Leuw have a common paramour (Buhlschaft) who eats oats (haber) and hay (heuw)’, doubtless a reference to Zwingli’s known sexual past. Supporters, however, used Leo’s name more favourably, rhyming ‘Leuw’ with the ‘freuw’ (joy) brought by gospel preaching.⁷⁷ According to Johannes, the worst slanderer was the former Franciscan Thomas Murner (1475–1537).

Johannes wrote that his father proved himself Zwingli’s closest friend not only by standing shoulder to shoulder, but also by faithfully preserving the teaching of the reformer after his death. Leo was the authentic voice of Zwingli because he had known him best:

The first appearance of this refashioned ideal is found in Heinrich Bullinger’s preface to the Zurich Latin Bible of 1543.⁸⁰ Johannes’ Beschreibung followed in this vein, and his father appeared as the paragon of Zurich scholarship and piety. In his Latin preface, Bullinger cast Jud as a modern Jerome, a translator of Scripture who combined deep learning and humanist scholarship with piety and rectitude. Unlike the prophetic figure of Zwingli, a biblical model rendered too controversial by the First Kappel War and the ensuing anticlericalism, Jud is praised for his collaboration with other Zurich churchmen. He attended Theodor Bibliander’s lectures on the whole of the Old Testament and made extensive notes, a bound copy of which had found its way into Johannes’ hands, a physical testament of that community of scholarship. Jud consulted with Pellikan and Bibliander in his translations, acknowledging their superior gifts, and accepted correction with gratitude and humility. In sum, Jud became the model of the Christian scholar who served the church through translation, preaching and pastoral care, and who made no claims for himself, submitted to the wisdom of the community and combined humility, devotion and scholarly rigor.

Jud’s distinctive contribution lay in the cultivation of reformed spirituality through the appropriation of ancient and medieval texts and literary genres.⁸¹ During the 1530s he prepared translations of texts such as Augustine’s De spiritu et litera, Thomas a Kempis’ Imitation of Christ and Zwingli’s work on the providence of God.⁸² In addition to translation, Jud appropriated a form of late medieval piety into the reformed tradition by producing a Leidensgeschichte Christi based on a harmony of the Gospels.⁸³ This reformed passional was strikingly distinctive in form, but it was part of the broader endeavour to create a vernacular piety drawn from Scripture and tradition. Translation for the Zurich scholars was a devotional activity, a transformation of the purely spiritual into the realm of flesh and community.⁸⁴ It formed the link between scholarship and holy living, and Jud emerged as its principal model.

This was the portrait painted by Bullinger and copied by Johannes in the Beschreibung. In the 1543 Latin Bible preface the account of Jud was intended to represent the Zurich church abroad in the wider community of Protestant churches. Johannes’ work was, as we have already noted in other cases, intended for devotional purposes. Leo Jud was the model for Christian living to be imitated by the people. Both works, however, draw upon particular events and virtues. Bullinger writes of the great cost to Jud of his work on the Bible, arguing that it brought on the final illness that took his life.⁸⁵ Jud’s doctors told him that his impending death was only in part due to age: it had been his ceaseless work on the Bible that broke his body, and they could offer little hope of recovery. A few days before his end Jud summoned the teachers and ministers of Zurich for his last words. He spoke of his 20 years of work in Zurich and of the inauspicious beginning he and Zwingli had endured with their preaching. He then made a confession of faith before his brethren:

Jud was the essential bond between the origins of the Zurich reformation and its place among the established Protestant churches of the sixteenth century. He provided historical and personal continuity, but also sanction for a new model of church, Erastian in construct, theologically defined, ecclesiologically ordered and grounded in the preaching of the Word. The prophetic, reforming friendship of Jud and Zwingli became the church-building friendship of Jud and Bullinger:

The latter part of the Beschreibung shifts from Jud’s life to his person – physical appearance, habits and temperament. Leo was not tall, but of middle stature with healthy colouration, although he suffered from a bad stomach and ‘doctoriert mehr dann im gut was’.⁸⁹ He went beardless and retained the appearance of a priest, continuing to wear a clerical cap (Spitzhut), as Zwingli had done – Pellikan continued to wear the Franciscan habit. His father’s appearance, Johannes remarks, was no longer the fashion as reformers were generally bearded. Leo’s gown was torn, though clean, and he was a friendly, gentle and kindly man who loved music and played various instruments, including the hammered dulcimer (Hackbrett) and the lute a little. He had a good voice for descant and he would frequently get together with other ministers to sing. He composed settings for the psalms.

The quotidian of Jud’s life was of great interest to his son in demonstrating his father’s virtue in all things. His living at the church of St Peter in Zurich was meager and Jud was poor, though he avoided debts. He shared what he had with the poor of his parish, in particular mothers with children. He never complained and feared causing complaint by his conduct. His wife contributed to the household income by weaving day and night. She seems to have made more money than Leo, and her pay purchased goods for the home (Husplunder). Johannes saw the simplicity of his father’s life as condemnation of the waste and venality of his own time: the bedding (Bettgewand) was good quality, but not luxurious, as was often the case in Johannes’ day, and there were never more than one silver goblet and a dozen spoons. The modesty with which Leo lived was the reason the city council improved his benefice, while the leading reformers of Basle were eager to lure him to their city.⁹⁰

Leo was a fine preacher because he was well read and a good theologian. He possessed character (scharff ingenium – the term used by Pellikan to describe Fabritius) and sound judgement (iudicium); his voice was clear and comprehensible, and he could preach for an hour or two from the pulpit without notes. Johannes claimed that he had not found amongst his father’s possessions any notes or copies of sermons. He had heard from others that he would preach well if he could have to hand a supply of his father’s sermons:

Johannes concluded the Historische Beschreibung with an account of Leo’s children. He married Katharina at 40 and she was ten years younger and already pregnant, giving birth to a daughter in 1525. The following year brought twins, a boy and a girl. The boy lived eight days and the girl about a year. In 1527 a daughter, Elisabeth, was born and outlived her father, though only to the age of 21. Her end was tragic. On a Sunday in 1548, while her mother lay ill Elisabeth rose from her bed and somehow fell to her death from an upstairs window. Her body was found in front of the house the next morning.⁹⁴ Johannes wrote that he was not home at the time of this terrible event, but away preaching in Hirtzel. There were several other children born to Leo and Katharina: a son, Leo, in 1528 and a daughter, Susanna, in 1530. Konrad Pellikan was Susanna’s godfather. Another son and daughter followed in 1533 and 1535.

The final part of the Historische Beschreibung is an extended discussion of the name ‘Judae’ and whether it denoted a Jewish background. Many people, Johannes writes, took the name to indicate that the family stemmed from baptized Jews; an assumption, he added, especially prevalent among Catholics.⁹⁵ Johannes admits that it was entirely possible, as the family came from Alsace, where there are many Jews. Johannes made no apologies:

The complexity of Johannes Jud’s attempt to uncouple the memory of his venerable father from unwanted associations makes us sensible of the difficulties in speaking of models in an embattled church buffeted by internal and external pressures. The magnitude of the task facing Bullinger and the Zurich council in reforming the church in a sprawling hinterland with few trained ministers, a population on the edge of destitution and hostile neighbours was extraordinary. The 1530s and 1540s saw unremitting enmity from Lutherans and the growing religious and political isolation of Zurich following the rejection of its sacramental theology in the Wittenberg Accord of 1536 and later exclusion from the Confession of Augsburg.⁹⁸ Konrad Pellikan and Johannes Jud, separated by a generation, belonged to a period of definition for the new Zurich church in which the reformers who succeeded Zwingli sought to come to terms with unresolved theological and historical issues of the 1520s. In the years before the firm establishment of the educational and ecclesiastical institutions that took place in the later decades of the sixteenth century, the place of exemplary figures was crucial to the humanist formation of models for Zurich.

Zwingli’s sudden and disastrous death and the hostility of his opponents greatly burdened Zurich, freezing its theological arguments, such as the Lord’s Supper and worship, which became identity markers not to be betrayed through negotiation and compromise. Yet, under Bullinger and his circle there was at least tacit recognition that Zwingli’s incomplete reformation was not an adequate foundation for a church. Charismatic prophecy and even personality cult needed replaced by collaborative models that emphasized historical continuity, theological consensus and institutional stability. This vision was realized in the Zurich Latin Bible of 1543, which was the fullest expression of Zurich polity. It is no coincidence that the two names most closely associated with that Bible were Leo Jud and Konrad Pellikan – on his deathbed Jud charged Pellikan with the final editing of the whole text, and it was Pellikan who provided the crucial theological marginal notes. In his preface to the Bible, Bullinger presented the life and death of Leo Jud as the model of the reconstructed Zurich church. In a brilliant move, Bullinger’s appropriation of Leo Jud enabled him to claim the original goals of the reformation in Zurich while discretely reconfiguring it away from Zwingli. Models not only allowed one access to the past, they could correct it.

The Chronicon and Historische Beschreibung provide in their anecdotes incarnational lives in which divine providence was manifested in human events, encounters and personal traits. They served multiple complementary purposes: they were apologies for Zurich reform, chronicles of events, exempla of Christian scholarship, pedagogical aids, testaments of familial piety and the bonds between generations, claims to historical memory and cautionary tales.

Konrad Pellikan and Leo Jud lived through the tumult of the Reformation; they belonged to that generation that did the unthinkable – they left the church to join something new. Their stories remain compelling accounts of the transition from the late Middle Ages to the early modern world, but to those who knew them or who lived in the fledgling Zurich church, they were much more. Pellikan wrote for his son and nephew, while Leo Jud was remembered by his son. The dialogues in the Chronicon and Historische Beschreibung between generations were those of a church and society grappling with what they were and what they believed. More than mere identity construction, these texts are about the search for meaning in a changed world.