1 Emulating the Past and Creating the Present: Reformation and the Use of Historical and Theological Models in Zurich in

Yet, on the eve of its reformation Zurich was isolated, with few friends within the Swiss Confederation on account of its repeated and largely unsuccessful attempts to dominate this loose political alliance shaped more by a common desire to drive out the Habsburgs than by any vague sense of shared identity.³ During the fifteenth century, in what became known as the Old Zurich Wars, the city on the Limmat made a bid for preeminence and failed, and memories within the Confederation were raw and unforgiving. Without doubt, Zurich’s influence was strong in the east among the semi-rural Confederates and Mandated lands of Thurgau, Appenzell, Glarus and so on, but to the west lay powerful Bern, while on the Rhine was the university city and printing centre of Basel, neither of which would bend the knee.⁴

Schiller’s stirring Wilhelm Tell, a glorious piece of literature and figment of nineteenth-century Romantic imagination, conferred on the medieval Swiss an identity they would not have recognized. In truth, the Confederation was fractured and fractious. Loyalties were intensely local and relations with neighbours pragmatic and dictated by ancient customs. To this day, a few words from the mouth of any Swiss person readily identifies her or his place of origin, and even within a relatively small country a person from one canton can feel like a ‘foreigner’ in another. Swiss history is complex and not easily explained. The expulsion of the Habsburgs valorized by humanists such as Glarean and Vadianus exposed conflicting allegiances and required elegant Latin prose to fashion a compelling and emotive creation story. In short, the emergence of the Swiss Confederation in the late Middles Ages could sustain no easy historical narrative: reciprocal defensive pacts between mountain valley communities were transformed by the entrance of cities that shared few of the concerns and interests of their rustic fellow Confederates, whom they largely held in contempt.⁵

This book is entitled Following Zwingli to convey its period of focus as well as the editors’ understanding of change and consolidation in sixteenth-century Zurich. The most obvious sense of ‘following’ refers to the fact that most of the chapters cover the years after the reformer’s death in 1531 – the time of Heinrich Bullinger (1504–75). More significantly, the case studies deal with the legacy in ensuing decades of the radical break led by Huldrych Zwingli in the 1520s. The examination of historical, literary and human models in the Zurich church requires us to consider how Zwingli understood reformation, its relationship to the historical church and how the past spoke to and informed the present.

The authors in this book explore models and exempla as essential to the creation and formation of a new church and a Christian society in Zurich consonant with the theological arguments that emerged in the years following the theses of 1517. This opening chapter attends to the significance of models to the Renaissance and subsequently to the reformers in Zurich, and how their ways of thinking about the relationship between past and present were profoundly shaped by humanism and biblical interpretation. Zwingli’s embrace of those principles gave the reformation in Zurich its distinctive character, but his inheritance was a troubled one. The leaders of the Zurich church who followed struggled to preserve his legacy while adapting it, often considerably, to a changed world with the different priorites of an established order. The creation and implementation of models was not linear, but a subtle, complex interplay between cherished ideals, emerging knowledge and the brutal realities of Reformation Europe.

But it was on the Limmat not the Rhine that the Reformation stirred, though the principal protagonists emerged from Erasmus’ entourage in Basel.⁹ No persuasive explanation for the genesis of religious change in Zurich exists apart from the preaching and shrewd politics of Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531). Little read or studied today, the Zwingli of Reformation textbooks is repeatedly cast as Luther’s foil and Calvin’s forerunner, a humanist visionary of a Christian community, a drowner of Anabaptists and an iconoclast with a limited, symbolic theology of the Lord’s Supper.¹⁰

What took place in Zurich in the 1520s cannot be defined simply as protest, for however limited its realization the reformation in the city was a vision of a new Christian society – and nothing less. The introduction of a reformed order of worship at Easter 1525 came as result of Zwingli’s preaching in the city, where he had been Leutpriester in the Grossmünster from 1519.¹¹ A compelling speaker, his biblical sermons, his call for reform and his vehement opposition to the mercenary service created a receptive public, though in itself his achievements were little different from notable preachers found in cathedrals and other major urban churches in the Empire such as in Nuremberg, Augsburg and Strasbourg.¹²

The welcome of biblical preaching by congregations should not be confused with the success of the Reformation. Events in Zurich were turned from calls for reform to a new religious order by the success of Zwingli and his circle in cultivating support among the leading families of Zurich, such as the Roists, who proved decisive in realizing change. In the face of considerable and influential opposition the city council narrowly agreed in April 1525 to end celebration of the mass, nullify episcopal authority and sanction a new form of worship, effectively removing Zurich theologically, institutionally and legally from Rome.¹³ The unity of the medieval church was broken in a Swiss city.

In his polemic against the abomination of the mass, Zwingli decried the Roman teaching – arguably not held by his opponents – that Christ’s sacrifice on the cross was repeated in the hands of the priest at the altar. Christ, Zwingli thundered from the pulpit, was not bodily present in the elements of bread and wine but through the Holy Spirit, and the proper response of the people was thanksgiving.¹⁵ Christ sat at the right hand of the Father in heaven, his physical body no longer in this world. It was the nature of Christ that proved most divisive for early Protestantism, and Luther was persuaded that Nestorianism was alive in Zurich.¹⁶ Against this accusation, however, Zwingli believed that in worship gratitude and praise arose from full communion with the triune God, and went far beyond intellectual assent; it was nothing less than renewal of the whole person, soul and body. Word and Spirit, symbolized by bread and wine on the table, created the assembled people into the body of Christ. The Son of God’s work of reconciliation on the cross was complete and in no need of repetition, and from a grateful people he required obedience.¹⁷

What gave shape to the encounter with the divine in worship and godly living was God’s fellowship, a covenant of eternal promise to Abraham fulfilled in Christ. In Zwingli’s eyes the people of Zurich were a wayward folk constantly attracted to idols and easily forgot God’s demand to serve and worship him in purity. They were the Israelites. As with the ancient people of the covenant, God punished but never abandoned.¹⁸ The liturgy of 1525 was for a community in the wilderness. The bond between God and the church was never static, but vibrant, deeply spiritual and daily ‘reforming’. Through preaching and the sacraments the people were called to remember what God had done through. Transformed by memory (not memorialism), they were to respond to God’s sanctification in the imitatio Christi, a relationship of constantly becoming.

What appeared liturgically in 1525 was a creative work of imagination by a man who understood drama. Zwingli was a writer and artist with an aesthetic of space and narrative. As an accomplished artist, he knew the power and emotive force of words and of a story well told.¹⁹ That is precisely why the mass and chants were so objectionable and dangerous.²⁰ With their dramatic force and ability to stimulate the senses they tempted, deceived and enticed the people to perdition. The materiality of medieval worship, so alluring to the human eye, not only told, according to Zwingli, the wrong story, but offended against the ancient biblical command of God that the people worship him in true piety.

If we follow the emerging vision of the Zurich reformers through the maelstrom of the 1520s, we find an understanding in which past and present were united through the Word and by words. The intimacy of the relationship was intimated by placing the elements of bread and wine in the midst of the congregation; they were the symbols of the eucharistic, apostolic community. Zurich’s new liturgy, the spiritual core of its reformation, has not been sufficiently recognized or explained, eclipsed by attention to iconoclasm and the suppression of music in the churches. From 1525 in Zurich the language of memoria and imitatio emphasized a spiritual journey. The intensely Christological reading of the Old Testament, evident from the earliest preaching, found voice in the supplications of a sixteenth-century people cast in the story of the Hebrews brought out of Egypt.²¹ The biblical account of divine promise, freedom from slavery, conquest and the godly kingdom of Israel formed in the 1520s the foundation for a ‘corpus christianum’, a society in which God was honoured through church and political structures that ensured and protected purity of conduct and obedience to his laws.

Citing Augustine’s De civitate dei, Zwingli and his colleagues did not counsel perfection, for they knew the church in Zurich would remain this side of eternity a mixed body of the wheat and tares in which God’s elect dwelt alongside the reprobate without visible distinction. This, however, did not impede the ceaseless pursuit of the kingdom in this world, and if the 1525 liturgy provided the Zurich church with its understanding of past and present, its introduction marked the beginning of an endeavour to create a church and society consonant with religio as right worship of God.

Yet, as much as the reformers believed the roots of their actions to run to an earlier, purer age of the church, there can be no doubt that what was created in Zurich in 1525 had never existed before; it was an unrecognizable church formed from an amalgam of medieval practices and doctrine along with a reading of Scripture drawn from patristic, scholastic and humanist, largely adapted Erasmian, thought. The discourses of the 1520s were full of renewal and restoration, but in truth there was a good deal of creation, if not invention. The Zurich church was the product of a particular moment, of a particular context and of a string of contingencies. Its institutional forms, as we shall shortly observe, were a patchwork of old and new, an accommodation of established practices to reform principles: the clergy in reformation Zurich were former priests, the lucidity of the doctrinal positions belied complex interpretations and appropriations of theological traditions, and, in sum, the existence of the church was grounded in a series of political compromises arising in part from the fraught relationship between Zwingli’s charismatic leadership and the city’s ambitions to extend its influence in the Confederation.

The unfolding of the reformation in Zurich requires us to consider concurrent and often contrary impulses, none of which were inevitable. Perhaps the most difficult question – one that historians of the Reformation rarely ask – is what the various participants in the events of the 1520s thought they were doing. How did you create a church that in structure, theology and worship resembled nothing known, a mediator of the divine with little resemblance to the ecclesial community in which one’s forbearers had lived and died? For all the change, what remained familiar to the people were the parish churches, burial places and chapels of the city and countryside; the typography of reformation everywhere offered a jarring contrast between the new worship and the surviving physical spaces and what was gone. The Reformation had to live in its parents’ house.

The people gathered for worship in the 1520s must have looked around with memories quite different from those intended by the reformers. For many, recollection of the past may have taken them to ancient Israel and God’s saving acts, but more immediately they observed absence and may have wondered how their present connected to the recent past. The reformers had to move from polemic and denunciation to offering the people a way of living in the world, of finding comfort in the vicissitudes of life and of understanding where their beloved dead now dwelt. That would be a long sojourn. In the immediate, how could one possibly defend such actions against the damning critique of novelty? Questions raised by opponents and parishioners lacked clear answers, and although mandates outlining the new order were issued, there was a good deal of extemporizing in response to opposition from various quarters. Whatever the level of anti-clericalism rife in the urban and rural areas of Zurich, nothing could have prepared the people for the sudden disappearance of the mass as the heart of worship, even if its celebration had been petering out and the faithful had observed only the Lateran minimum of yearly confession and communication.

In this new world post-1525 the de facto became de iure: the magistrates sat in unquestioned authority over ecclesiastical institutions, gladly appropriating their land and resources, and the Zurich council was now head of the church. However medieval Christianity had always been comfortable with disparities between practice and decree, and local arrangements between temporal and spiritual authorities were common enough. The unremarkable reality of clerical families in pre-Reformation Swiss churches, despite repeated episcopal censure, is evidence of the force of custom over law. Numerous reformers had priests as fathers and grew up in homes they remembered fondly. One only has to think of Heinrich Bullinger. In the sprawling diocese of Constance the bishop was a distant figure, out of sight and mind for most people in Zurich and its lands, and for the city’s rulers he was little more than an unwelcome claimant to legal authority.

The Reformation church in Zurich was created by a small group of men who acted from a series of theological and pastoral convictions justified in their view by biblical warrant and history. A few had simultaneously wrought seismic, and, for many people, baffling change. The records of the disciplinary records of the Ehegericht and synod reveal how numerous women and men, as well as clergy, had little sense of how the Lord’s Supper differed from the mass. Many in Zurich, possibly the majority, did not support the changes for a variety of reasons that had little to do with doctrine, such as resentment of Zwingli as his band of outsiders tried to impose their will on Zurich. These opponents harboured considerable enmity towards the reformer from Toggenburg and his ambitions, as witnessed in the clamorous responses to his sudden death in 1531. So violent was the reaction against the dead Zwingli and his clerical supporters that Leo Jud had to go into hiding and could only walk through the streets dressed as a woman.²² While Zwingli lived, however, the opposing forces were divided, lacking leadership and ultimately overcome by influential political leaders in the city who backed change for a variety of reasons. Zwingli’s opponents were not merely motivated by anger aroused by his tirades against the lucrative mercenary trade, whose abolition was a serious financial blow, or by the loss of monastic property and ecclesiastical offices. Such changes and the conflict they roused naturally reflected material concerns driven by human nature, but self-interest does not explain the intensity of the resistance; many citizens remained deeply attached to the old faith and were horrified by its demise, or in their eyes, desecration.

The failure of opponents to stop the reformation does not of itself tell us a great deal about how the new teaching and institutional changes were received in Zurich. In addition to Catholic resistance, the rapid emergence of the radicals from within Zwingli’s circle and the spread of their ideas signalled deep dissatisfaction. The Anabaptists, as they would be pejoratively labelled, were impatient with the pace of reform and appalled by the theological and political compromises made by Zwingli.²³ Nevertheless, they were a minority, and although through their criticism they played a significant role in the formation of key theological aspects of Zwinglian thought – such as the covenant and infant baptism – the Anabaptists never really threatened to overturn the new order.

In truth, the vast majority of people, like most clergy, acquiesced and stayed put, changing their religion with little evident enthusiasm or resistance. Even in the religious houses few seemed inclined to leave the territory in order to remain Catholic, as the council required. The reformation in Zurich neither emerged from the people nor stirred them to rebel. The evidence provides a picture in which various forms of conduct were common. Locals remained in their villages in the newly Protestant land, with some slipping to neighbouring Catholic churches to attend mass or visit shrines. Others associated with Anabaptist groups that met in secluded places such as in the woods. Most, however, with degrees of engagement we cannot know, accepted change: just as in other Catholic and Protestant lands, there were some who did not go to church at all for reasons that ranged from objections to the faith, to quarrels with the minister or a preference for a drink in the tavern.

The reformation in Zurich, as in all German and Swiss cities where reform movements gained purchase, drew together theology, politics, personalities and local conditions with the unanticipated. Countervailing forces, internal and external, created a torrid atmosphere, a volatile community in which Zwingli delivered his thunderous sermons from the city’s main pulpit. It is not difficult to imagine how the events of the 1520s could have taken a different turn had circumstances changed even slightly, so precarious was the situation. Zurich’s theology and church institutions were forged in the fires of battle, polemical and, ultimately, military. In a mere six years between 1525 and 1531 the city was convulsed by a change of church, a peasants’ revolt, the rise of radicalism and subsequent executions of its adherents, doctrinal controversy with Luther and the evaporation of any hope of Protestant unity, civil war in the Confederation and a humiliating defeat at Kappel in which Zwingli was killed and his body ritually desecrated. This was not cowbells and Heidi, but a bloodstained religious revolution in which theology and historical identity were the very things for which each side was prepared to put the other to death.

The chapters in this volume explore how Zurich emerged as a distinctive centre of the European reformation with a carefully hewn theology and ecclesiology. The focus of the book is confined to the principal reformers of the first two generations of the reformation and for the most part our project treats the theological, historical and pedagogical thought of the leading figures. Our central question is how a radically new form of Christian community was created in the sixteenth century and how various types of models were employed to form patterns of learning, piety and behaviour. Such transformative authority was not simply identity construction through the appropriation of the past, although that is certainly relevant to the discussion. Our purpose is to examine how the leaders of the Reformation in Zurich looked to the past to makes sense of their present and to give shape to a reformed Christian community. A community, they believed, that even in its imperfections was eschatological. The heavenly kingdom could in part be realized, awaiting its fulfillment at the end of time. The chapters take the view that it is insufficient to consider convictions, theological and historical arguments and attempts at their implementation merely in terms of justification for decisions already made, although none can be entirely exonerated of a degree of opportunism and elastic readings of history. In examining the envisaged community formation, with its selective reading of intellectual, biblical and historical sources, as well as in its accommodation to political and social realities, we take very seriously the beliefs of the protagonists.

We explore the nature of religious change in the early Reformation through the case of Zurich, a site of unprecedented religious change unique in circumstances and persons. Our investigation involves sensitivity to overlapping mentalities, as well as to the interaction of scholarship and attitudes often idiosyncratic, and to forms of piety and Christian living. We pursue the confluence of humanist principles of historical study, textual interpretation and classical education, with enduring expressions of devotional language, practice and literature with origins in late medieval monastic, mendicant and vernacular traditions. At the centre of this book is a group of individuals who shared ideals and whose roles in the Zurich reformation owed much to their distinctive personal histories. Their lives, both as individuals and as members of a humanist sodality in Zurich, put before us a range of human experiences in an age of bewildering change.

Writing shortly before his death, Konrad Pellikan tried to understand how the happy years of his youth as a Franciscan led to teaching Hebrew as a professor in a Protestant church. The fact that he wrote this account for his son was in itself a telling sign of the changes in the life of the one time mendicant priest. Remembrance took many forms. Naturally a reformation movement that drew together talented, passionate and forceful scholars and churchmen from diverse backgrounds and locations created a community in which shared convictions rubbed against personal attitudes with resulting plurality of views and, at times, tensions.

Christian life, the Zurich reformers understood, remained east of Eden, imperfect in a fallen world, yet charged with pursuit of God’s kingdom. The discourses of reform that coursed through the late medieval church had no place for novelty, and the Zurich reformers concurred, at least in principle. Reformatio meant renovatio, all could agree, but the latter could not be realized without degrees of innovatio, especially where history offered ambiguous guidance. The Zurich reformers, we have noted, looked to the past to claim its authority without enslaving themselves to any particular moment as normative. They were fully aware of the complexities of history and the perils of reductionist reading. At the same time their approach was neither random nor self-serving: they sought and found a method for relating past and present, and that was through employing the Renaissance concept of models.

Although an ugly and ungainly word in modern English that all too quickly brings to mind computer programmes or the speculations of economists, models were essential to Renaissance literary, ethical and historical thought.²⁴ As such, they formed a natural framework for the implementation of church reform, where the past laid claim to the present while preserving its integrity and character.²⁵

The Renaissance language of models arose from classical rhetoric, in which Zwingli and his circle had, as humanist trained scholars, been thoroughly educated and which they were able to employ with proficiency.²⁶ The literary work of imitation lay in the ability to write in the style of the greatest classical authors, to learn from models chosen as most admirable and through the discerning choice and order of words to match the elegance and lucidity of past masters. Innumerable works of instruction were printed to teach young men in this art. Students learned to read Cicero and others with the greatest care in order to understand how classical authors crafted their prose and poetry.²⁷ Wisdom and form could not be separated, and all humanists affirmed that eloquence and elegance were most appropriate to teach and persuade, to realize knowledge in the good life. In this endeavour there were plenty of classical exempla, such as the story of Demosthenes copying out the histories of Thucydides eight times to learn the master’s craft. For Renaissance humanists, the balance of analysis and craftsmanship was the essential fare of literary imitation, and it is in that tension that this volume looks to understand reformation in Zurich.

Imitation was a contested art. In part, this was due to the disagreement among sixteenth-century humanists on its nature and purpose.²⁸ Was Cicero alone to be imitated? Was he the standard to which all should aspire? Opinions were divided in this most important debate of the studia humanitatis.²⁹ For many, the valorizing of the Roman orator sat uneasily with historical awareness of the contingency of language, of how the meaning of words changed over time and of the difficulties or legitimacy of recreating antiquity in a very different world. This did not impugn the significance of the past as authoritative, or its role in instructing the present, but it placed in debate the manner in which models should be understood and employed. For many humanists a classical model could not be regarded as fixed; history and change required a different relationship to the past, even if the goal was to claim it. The implications of this conversation for the Zurich reformation only become clear if we turn to the towering influence of Erasmus.³⁰

Erasmus’ understanding of imitation emphasized the place of history and personality in the choice and adoption of literary models.³¹ He preferred, however, the term emulatio to imitatio to stress that the achievements of the past were not simply to be copied, but studied, replicated and ultimately surpassed.³² This required particular skills; the student had to master the techniques and style of ancient writers and determine how they might be improved. In his dialogue on Cicero, Erasmus argued that students should indeed seek to emulate the great figures, emphasizing the multiplicity of masters, and not focus on one particular person, such as Cicero.³³ Collectively, classical writers, with their distinctive talents, should serve as models for the present generation, and students should learn to take what was best from each.³⁴

This is precisely what Erasmus himself practised. He drew liberally from different classical authorities depending on his needs and preferences, weaving together a range of sources and authors. Such literary work, with its view of the past and the role of the contemporary author in mining antiquity, involved historical imagination. It created an imaginary past that was to instruct the present, as well as a lineage of classical thought distinctly Erasmus’ own. The Dutch humanist had little concern to assert the factual authenticity of that past, because he was primarily interested in grasping its genius, what was most valuable, its spirit.³⁵ Past and present converged in his person, Erasmus was persuaded, as he regarded himself as a model for his own time, combining ancient wisdom and style with the needs of his age.

But could the present be better than the past? This was the problem facing humanist authors of the sixteenth century in their search for perfect Latinity. The distinction that came to be made was between any sense of ‘original’, which was rejected, and ‘ornamentation’, in which past arts were not changed but decorated. Erasmus’ position again proved highly influential. As with the others who rejected the determinative place of Cicero, he advocated, as we have mentioned, that writers should emulate a range of authors, choosing that which was most pleasing and making it their own by inwardly digesting the works and learning to find their own ways of expression. Imitation and emulation were not only training in judgement, but also a means of self-discovery through a method of reading and writing that drew deeply from the study of history and historical contexts.³⁶ In pouring over texts with care one learned not only the contexts in which they were written and as much about the author as possible, but one reflected on one’s own critical relationship to the text.

Erasmus gave his pupils a model for interpreting and appropriating the past as well as a means of understanding diversity of interpretation and practice in the history of the church. Along with other humanists, but with especial importance on account of his personal relations with the Zurich reformers, the Dutchman provided not only a way to history, but also the methods and structure of Christian scholarship. Once more we need to attend to the different forms of humanist discourse and how, according to Erasmus, they were the means by which wisdom was shared and truth pursued. At the heart of his dispute with Luther was the German reformer’s contempt for rhetorical forms, which he regarded as worthless word play. Such an attitude was abhorrent to Erasmus, for whom different modes of thought and expression required different genres. The debate between the two men over the freedom of the will was bound for disaster as they were virtually speaking in different tongues and understood debate in entirely different terms.³⁷

That is not to suggest, by any means, that the Zurich reformers simply made random decisions. Rather, Lavater’s comment on the historical character of the liturgy cast in relief a fundamental aspect of the Renaissance use of models to establish patterns of behaviour and forms of worship. In affirming the importance of the past in authenticating and guiding present actions, models point to the alterity of history. The very fact that there was ‘another’ to be imitated or emulated underscored a strangeness and distance to which models were intended to impart meaning. Models linked past and present while revealing separation, requiring those who would employ them to be simultaneously faithful to what once was, as well as creative in making adaptations for the disclosed otherness. To make sense of how the Zurich reformers created and designed in the space generated by this otherness and the ambiguities of history, we need to know how they understood religio.

Religion, for Zwingli, was inseparable from the ‘purity’ of the church and the belief of the faithful that as God is pure, so must they be: ‘God is such a pure and consuming fire that if any one is troubled with the aforesaid defects he cannot stand in His sight’.⁴¹ In the preface to On True and False Religion Zwingli accepted Cicero’s use of the term religio, writing that religion was nothing less than the whole of piety. Indeed, the terms ‘religion’ and ‘piety’ were pretty much interchangeably employed by the reformer. Religion defined human activity, and, therefore, was the defining principle for how the past was to be read and used.

Zwingli’s understanding of true religion (or piety) had a clear rhetorical quality.⁴² It was, in his words, the clinging of the faithful person to God, and to enhance this image of the divine-human dynamic, Zwingli made extensive use of metaphors of speaking and listening. The pious ‘listen to their one Lord’, and from Song of Songs 2:14 he quoted, ‘Sweet is thy voice in my ears’.⁴³ Religion was a creative act of speech from the mouth of God, and Zwingli wrote that true piety existed in hanging on the words of the Lord ‘and not hear or accept the word of any but the bridegroom’. The reformer’s use of this most erotic of biblical books signified a belief in the almost conjugal nature of the divine-human relationship. The linking of religion with marital love imbued Zwingli’s understanding of the relationship of the individual with God with a deeply sensuous quality: the person ‘hangs’, ‘clings’, ‘grips’. Zwingli associated listening with a physical embracing with the heart in which the unity of the senses and affections created true religion.

In explaining religio, Zwingli repeatedly returned to Deuteronomy 12:32 (‘What I command you, that only do to the Lord: neither add anything, nor diminish’). In these words resided Zwingli’s understanding of religion – it was a relationship, a way of living, to which humans could neither add nor take away because it was both gift and command. God’s elect ‘grasp’ at the Word of the Lord – once more note the physicality – ‘as a shipwrecked man grasps at a plank’.⁴⁴ A person simultaneously hears and holds to the Word to avoid perishing at sea, to stay with the metaphor. God had entirely set the terms, for the only acceptable form of response was obedience to his commandments. Yet, we might ask, how does this crystal-clear account of divine human relations translate into the reform of the institutional church and the building of the kingdom in this world? How was the creation of liturgies, institutions and morals mandates possible within the terms of religio – without adding or subtracting? If we return to Lavater’s description of the Zurich liturgy we find the principle of religio as the foundation of reform employed through a delicate interweaving of biblical and extra-biblical sources.

After the people received the bread and wine in the eucharistic service, the minister declared ‘Let us thank the Lord!’ at which point he read Psalm 113, ‘Praise, O servants of the Lord. Let the name of the Lord be praised’. According to Lavater, this moment in the liturgy had its source in old Jewish practice (vetus traditio), when Psalm 113 was read at the celebration of Passover.⁴⁵ The use of traditio reminds us of the enduring significance of non-biblical tradition in the shaping of the Zurich liturgy. The authors of the liturgy were correct: Psalm 113 formed part of the Hallel, which was recited on joyous occasions, such as the first night of Passover.⁴⁶ This Jewish tradition, known in Northern Europe, was appropriated by the authors of the Zurich liturgy to emphasize antiquity in their worship as well as the Christological connection of the Lord’s Supper with Passover. It was precisely this Christological principle that sanctioned the use of a non-biblical Jewish tradition. Theological argument drawn from a biblical hermeneutic became, in Zurich, the key to the preservation of true religio by sanctioning a particular approach to reading history.

The words of the liturgy were pregnant with this theological and historical principle. The bond between ancient practice and the present was explicit in the words of the minister following Psalm 113:

In the chaotic aftermath of Zwingli’s sudden death in 1531 the office of chief preacher in the Grossmünster occupied by Heinrich Bullinger from 1531–75 made the association with the early church even more explicit. His position came to acquire the status of quasi-episcopacy, and he saw himself less as a prophet in Israel than as a sixteenth-century bishop of Hippo locked in battle against heresy.⁵¹ Indeed the English refugees in Zurich long regarded Bullinger as a bishop.⁵² This was a subtle shift of historical perspective and identity. Where Zwingli had looked to the Davidic monarchy as a model for the Zurich polity, his calamitous death left little place for prophets in a city traumatized by defeat and ready to throttle its martial clergy. The exigencies of a changed political and religious situation required adaptation, and with Bullinger’s appointment the scriptural model gave way to the established church of the fourth/fifth centuries. Ecclesiastical rather than biblical history provided the Zurichers with a modus operandi in a world where the church had become an arm of temporal authority.

It is easy to forget how quickly the reformation in Zurich played out. By October 1523 the reform movement had powerful backers, so that the so-called disputations were lopsided encounters in which Zwingli and his supporters were guaranteed victory over rather hapless opponents.⁵³ The implications of these disputations, however, were significant, though it is unwise to assume a clear trajectory from autumn 1523 to Easter 1525. Diverse and divergent interests were at play and we are rightly cautious to assume that Zwingli’s priorities converged with those of the magistrates, or that anyone had a clear sense of what was happening. Zurich was sailing into uncharted waters, and explanations for what was taking place emerged piecemeal, largely in response to opposition. It was, for example, only during the second disputation that Zwingli came to his understanding of the nature of the church and how, consequently, Zurich might be justified in making decisions about its reform – decisions that would reject the hierarchical authority of the bishop of Constance and Rome.

This is not the place to rehearse the events of the Zurich reformation, but we need to recognize that the question of speed weighed heavily on those who espoused reform. There was a shared sense that haste might overwhelm those who were ‘weak in faith’ (die Schwachen im Glauben). Change clearly had many dimensions, and the balance between abrading concerns was uncertain, particularly as various persons advocated different priorities and means of proceeding. Zwingli was never entirely in control, and he had to keep both hands on the wheel. There were numerous voices, most of whom have been dropped from standard accounts and are now long forgotten. Zwingli was working with a small group of colleagues, most notable was his friend Leo Jud.⁵⁴

However, ‘demythologizing’ Zwingli also gets us nowhere, for in addition to his charismatic personality and undoubted status as the best-trained theologian in Zurich, he possessed one major advantage. He was the chief preacher in the Grossmünster and, thereby, occupied the most prominent pulpit in the city several times a week. He was the voice of the church, uniquely able to convey to the people the changing story of the Christian faith and impress upon them his evolving sense of his own prophetic status and role. From the city pulpit, therefore, Zwingli could, through his sermons, take the lead in putting before the people the model of a godly city.

Zwingli was a true disciple of Erasmus, even if they parted ways acrimoniously. A brilliant orator and most elegant writer, Zwingli is often confined to the sideline in Reformation histories because he is rarely read. He was a poet and musician, a master of Latin style and humanist rhetoric, and an experienced preacher. Unlike Calvin, who had to learn how to speak from the pulpit at a relatively advanced age, Zwingli had been delivering homilies since his early years as a priest. And where had he done this? It was in parish churches and later to pilgrims at the great Benedictine house at Einsiedeln who had made perilous journeys to venerate the Black Madonna.⁵⁵ Those who preached to pilgrims at such holy sites knew how to stir and move the faithful; they knew the language of emotive devotion and how to direct the fervent piety of those who were there by choice. Not only Zwingli, but also Jud served at Einsiedeln and could speak the language of the people, telling the story of faith. It was this skill they brought to the pulpits of Zurich and their oratory bore fruit.⁵⁶ These two men made reformation possible through a shared realization that the local church was the true church, and by leading the people to find themselves in ancient biblical stories.

Zwingli and Jud employed the Erasmian principle of imitation/emulation from the pulpit: Christ was the model, and the biblical accounts of the Israelites and first Christians were the stories of the people. The relationship between the faithful and the Bible existed in multiple ways. Naturally, the Israelites and apostolic Christians lived in the distant past and the Bible spoke of another time and place. Nevertheless, when explained from the pulpit, Scripture revealed God in history, recording stories that were instructive, telling of fidelity and idolatry, and providing models for faithful living and worship. Above all, the Bible revealed the nature of the Lord. In both preaching and liturgy the historical/moral and pedagogical were given meaning by imitatio. The people did not simply hear the Bible stories but were transformed to become the people about whom they heard. Rhetoric and hearing through preaching embraced the senses, mind and body; reason and emotion were united, leading to individual and communal response. The preacher was the orator in the classical sense, and the sermon was proscriptive speech by which he sought to persuade the audience of established truth.

To claim the Bible was the centre of Zurich reform sounds rather pious and traditional, yet it was true.⁵⁷ The case, however, is not straightforward, for the Bible had numerous roles. Alongside the liturgy, the symbol of the Zurich reformation, and indeed, one could argue, its embodiment, was the vernacular Bible that appeared in 1531 from the press of Froschauer.⁵⁸ There are several dimensions to this story. The Zurich Bible was the first complete German translation of both Testaments, appearing in the Alemannic of the Upper Rhine and predating Luther’s edition by three years. When the reformation was introduced in Zurich in 1525 the Swiss reformers were dependent on Luther’s translation, which they adapted to make his Saxon comprehensible to Swiss ears. At the same time, in the so-called Prophezei the leading scholars of the city (Zwingli, Jud, Ceporin, later Pellikan and Bibliander) worked their way through the books of the Old Testament, providing both interpretation and translations.⁵⁹

Successive editions of the Bible produced in Zurich during the 1520s, with their increasingly dense marginal notes, cross references and chapter summaries, reflected the distinctive theology of its churchmen as well as growing enmity with Wittenberg over the sacraments.⁶⁰ Each new edition represented, in Zurich eyes, one further step in their emancipation from Luther. The German reformer’s influence was eroded by the removal of his prefaces, marginalia and chapter summaries. The 1531 Bible, with its anonymous preface – clearly by Zwingli – and its forest of notes, references and glossary, was a comprehensive confession declaring reformed Zurich’s place in the Catholic church, how the Bible should be read and interpreted, what the faithful should know and the nature of Christian history. The text, Froschauer’s finest work, was accompanied by stunning woodcuts by Hans Holbein. The printed page of the Bible, in which image and word were in harmony, was the same aesthetic employed in worship. In the churches, although the wall paintings and statues had been removed and naves whitewashed, one could not speak of an absence of visual imagery. The wooden cup and plate at the Lord’s Supper, for example, as well as the baptismal font placed where the altar once stood, were visual stimuli of memoria and emulatio, an intentional arrangement of sacred space in which the eye was drawn to the symbols of a changed, arguably new, understanding of divine presence.

As Lavater commented, the model was the apostolic church, and the simplicity of the carefully chosen images was not intended to convey absence, but the presence of the Spirit and physical experience of the faithful coram deo. The eyes of the people were directed towards the pulpit and the table, uniting the visual and spoken in a manner that returns us to Zwingli’s definition of religio. The arrangement of space in the churches paralleled the printed Bibles. In worship, spoken words and symbols were in unison, as were woodcuts and text on Froschauer’s page.

Printed Bibles and worship as expressions of word and image in Zurich revealed a sense of the sacred that defined reformation in the city. Zwingli’s preface to the 1531 Zurich Bible revealed how the reformers understood models as integral to the development of the church: biblical exegesis inseparable from humanist textual methods, forms of scholarship and historical understanding, as well as to traditional vernacular ideas of friendship. The founding of the collaborative school of biblical interpretation in the Grossmünster in 1525, which came to be known as the Prophezei, was a vision of this ideal unity of scholarship, pedagogy and preaching of the Word.⁶¹ Zwingli and his colleagues divided the tasks of interpreting the Old Testament, examining with care the language of the texts and extracting theological meaning.⁶² The purpose was humanist scholarship in the service of the church culminating in applicatio, the stirring and sustaining of the people in the Word of God. Exegesis of the text in Hebrew (Masoretic text), Greek (Septuagint) and Latin (Vulgate) was followed by a translation into German for a sermon to the people.

The decision to hold the meetings of the Prophezei inside the Grossmünster was telling and rich in symbolism. Scholarship was carried out publicly in the sacred space of the sanctuary of the principal ecclesiastical building in Zurich, signifying the undiminished authority of the church. Without doubt, sola scriptura was professed, and humanist principles of philological study and imitatio declared the lifeblood of spiritual renewal and vitality. All this, however, took place within the walls of the church – literally. The Prophezei’s work of biblical exegesis and its dissemination through preaching in the Grossmünster gave eloquent testimony to the Zurich reformers’ adherence to traditional arguments. The church had been reformed, but it remained the arbiter of divine wisdom. Biblical interpretation, worship, proclamation and ecclesiastical authority found ritual expression in an ecclesial space differently imagined, yet no less authoritative. The redesigning and whitewashing of medieval churches formed part of a culture of rule that never intended diminution of ecclesiastical and clerical authority in mediating God’s Word. Stripped of its economic assets, legal privileges and hierarchical authority, the church of the reformation, like Nathan the prophet to whom it looked, declared God’s intentions.

The inner circle of scholars and churchmen in Zurich formed in effect the new ‘priests’ responsible for interpreting the Bible, and saw themselves as equals bound together by an Erasmian understanding of friendship (amicitia) by which they could work collectively while preserving the freedom to correct and admonish.⁶³ Established humanist understanding of friendship combined in Zurich with vernacular customs of ‘Freundschaft’ to form a theological model for the church. Drawing on traditional Swiss communalism, the Zurich reformers looked to find a way in which the new institutions of the church could embody principles of shared authority and cooperation. The binding principle of amicitia, or Freundlichkeit, that shaped church and scholarship had for the Zurich reformers its source in God’s salvific activity. Christ, in the language of Zwingli, Jud and later Bullinger, reconciled God and humanity through divine friendship, a free gift of a superior that invites a relationship of a certain equality. This friendship of Christ, the restoration of God and humanity, was the model of reciprocity for the church and its scholarship.

Friendship was an essential characteristic of the small circle of influential figures but there were other aspects. Closely related was the figure of Jerome and his Hebraica veritas. Jerome’s importance to the Zurich church was immense.⁶⁴ Whereas Erasmus was a difficult figure for the Zurichers on account of his break with Zwingli and rejection of the reformation, Jerome was regarded as the model scholar of the church, a figure to be emulated.⁶⁵ Hebraica veritas was not only a return to the Hebrew original, but an attitude towards canonicity, rabbinic literature, the communal nature of scholarship and the contingency of translation – all positions adopted in Zurich. Although Jerome was hardly self-effacing about his achievements, he argued that biblical translation was an ongoing activity within the church in which successive generations would produce improved editions based on a wider base of manuscripts and better understanding of languages. This would be best achieved by scholars working in collaboration, an argument readily adopted in Zurich. Indeed, Jerome’s statement in his letter to Pope Damasus of how translation should be carried out was quoted in extenso in the preface to the Zurich Bible.

Bullinger’s choice to open the 1543 Latin Bible with the same passage from Jerome indicated the importance in Zurich of the argument for multiple translations of the Bible within the church. Jerome’s words provided warrant for efforts to produce a new translation. The preface further revealed Jerome’s significance when Bullinger came to an account of the work of Leo Jud in preparing the translation. The portrait of Jud was unmistakably intended as an imitation of Jerome in which the Zurich churchman is described in terms of church Fathers’ ideals of piety and scholarship. The Zurich scholars, therefore, could lay claim to the inheritance, even patronage, of Jerome, whose vision of biblical scholarship in service of the faith they had fulfilled.

Jerome, Augustine and Erasmus provided the Zurich church with a means for establishing authority, as well as to account for difference. The argument that justified work on the Bible in Zurich was employed to defend the legitimacy of different churches in community within a wider body. The Hebraica veritas, together with the model of humanist friendship advocated by Erasmus, were paths to how scholars could work together on biblical texts employing diverse expertise in languages. Both Jerome and Erasmus envisaged scholars working together under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, correcting and encouraging one another through the bonds of rigorous scholarship and friendship. Although unity and harmony were the goals, difference was not a threat, for shared commitment to the Word of God could sustain contesting readings and interpretations of text. As the scholarship of the church developed, the Zurich humanists believed such tensions would be resolved, but until such time translation and interpretation of ancient languages would remain fluid. This perspective was only enhanced by a growing familiarity with rabbinic writings and the Talmud, where multiple voices could coexist on the page.⁶⁶

Veneration of Jerome and the Vulgate accompanied reference to Augustine’s argument that there was no one fixed, authoritative translation of the Bible of the church. On the model of the fifth-century church there could be a multitude of texts used in disparate localities where they were known and loved by the faithful. The Word of God, the preface to the 1531 Bible argued, existed in many textual traditions, and collectively these translations with their particular qualities formed the Bible of the universal church. Augustine spoke of a community of Bibles, and this idea of plurality was adopted by Zurich to legitimate their work on Scripture within the wider church. Translation of Scripture was ever a work in progress, enhanced with growing knowledge of languages and text. Every contribution made under the guidance of the Spirit added to the collective wisdom and therefore had its place. Such a view, deeply Erasmian in inspiration, was a model for local churches within a larger community. The Bible, its translation and interpretation, authenticated church reform. The progressive nature of biblical scholarship belonged to a theology that emphasized the doctrine of sanctification. It was forward movement in the Spirit, just as the people sought the imitation of Christ.

The Bible and its history of interpretation presented the Zurichers with a series of models that addressed different aspects of their nascent church. In Jerome and the Vulgate there was the example of the Christian scholar and of a Bible that was known and loved in the church. Jerome’s knowledge of Greek and Hebrew, together with his classical training, made him a model of Christian humanism, of learning in service of the church. His work gave the legitimacy of antiquity to the Erasmian project pursued in Zurich. He was both an individual scholar as well as an advocate of a sodality of the learned. Augustine, in turn, was the venerator of tradition. In his quarrel with Jerome he had defended the Septuagint as divinely inspired, a view shared by Zwingli.⁶⁷ Further, Augustine was a bishop, and his desire to preserve the vetus latina arose from pastoral concerns. This too the Zurichers wished to claim. With their frequent references to both Fathers in their biblical prefaces they sought to unite in their work that which had divided the leading figures of the fifth century: the distinction between philological correctness and the inspired text of the church (Jerome’s translation and the Septuagint). Thus, in the view of the sixteenth-century reformers they were fulfilling the Erasmian understanding of imitation: the biblical culture of Zurich was founded on the principles of the church Fathers, but ultimately it surpassed the early church.

Following the first celebration of the Lord’s Supper at Easter 1525 the reformation assumed institutional form through a series of mandates from the council issued in rapid succession. The establishment of the marriage court (Ehegericht) terminated the judicial authority of the bishop.⁶⁸ The Prophezei in the Grossmünster was soon followed by the opening of the Lectorium, where ministers were to be trained for the church.⁶⁹ Fundamental changes were made to the organization of care of the poor, the principles behind which were laid out in the ‘Alms Ordinance’ (Almosenordnung).⁷⁰ In 1529 the synod was established in Zurich by which the clergy of the church would be supervised and disciplined by an executive that was controlled by the church. The influence of the late medieval church in these reforms was considerable.⁷¹ In other respects the familiar remained. Parish boundaries and structures were retained, so that although images and altars had been removed from the churches, the buildings remained intact. Another example of continuity was the rural dean, who performed supervisory duties over the clergy. This medieval office became part of the new Protestant order. The morals mandates and instructions for institutional restoration were largely taken from diocesan reform legislation in Constance from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.⁷²

The experiences of the early 1520s brought home to Zwingli that the success of the reformation in Zurich was dependent on the support of the magistrates, who were not prepared to replace one form of independent church authority with another. This coupling of spiritual and temporal proved successful but costly. This alliance made the changes of 1525 possible, but it also led to the devastating split with the radicals and required serious compromise on Zwingli’s part. His theology emphasized God as spirit and was markedly anti-material in character. How was such a vision to be maintained in the quotidian life of institutions? That tension, arguably, was never entirely resolved within the Zurich church.

Nevertheless, without apology and in opposition to the radical opponents, Zwingli developed a clear model for the role of temporal authority in preserving church and community. The biblical model was the monarchy of ancient Israel, where prophet and king (Nathan and David) were in partnership with separate roles.⁷³ The prophet declared God’s Word and the king wielded the sword and upheld the laws of the state. The problem with this model was Zwingli himself. In his prophetic role, and with his charismatic personality, he was not inclined to subordinate himself to the rulers, and his willingness to lead the city into war proved a damning indictment of a polity that had not resolved conflicting impulses. When Heinrich Bullinger became head of the Zurich church in 1531 a new order and relationship was established in which the prophetic office was brought within institutional authority.⁷⁴ The tensions were never resolved and Bullinger himself, despite working closely with the magistrates, would come to harbour bitter feelings about the venality of the ‘godly princes’.⁷⁵

The removal of images from the churches is a particularly fascinating aspect of religious reform in Zurich. The walls were whitewashed, altars removed and organs dismantled, but such dramatic acts were more than an angry stripping of the old religion.⁷⁶ Sacred space was where the battle had to be won. The orderly removal of images and the whitewashing were a clear statement about the nature of worship and a rejection of a certain form of material symbolism. But what happened to those images? Were they destroyed? No, patrons and other leading families were allowed to take the statues, liturgical implements and images to their homes. The material elements of the old faith were ‘secularized’, allowed to have a life in the domestic world separate from their previous symbolic or intercessory roles. Once out of the churches they were no longer seen as a threat. Indeed, years later Bullinger was happy to explain to an elderly patrician woman the meaning of the unicorn and the Virgin on a tapestry she had inherited.

The church in the new reformed order remained a sacred space in which the wrong form of images was dangerous, even infectious. Yet, as we have argued, the new faith made extensive use of the symbolic. Domestic space, however, was distinct, for while the reformers believed that worship and learning should take place in the home, it was a different locus within the godly society. In the Zurich home not only could the former images of the church live, but music and singing, also driven from churches, were encouraged as worshipful activities.⁷⁷ The physical world of religious reform in Zurich was complex, reflecting the coexistence of older and newer perspectives: worship had distinct ecclesial/domestic qualities, while the authoritative interpretation of the Bible took place within the walls of the medieval church (Grossmünster). The ritual urbanscape of the new order reflected the composite nature of its theology, putting the people in a changed order of sacred and secular in which much of the old remained palpable.

We have remarked that in humanist thought the use of models was a reciprocal dynamic in which the person/s looking to the past engaged in self-discovery by continually examining his/her relationship to the exemplum. Imitation was revelatory. The adoption and creation of models demanded the community continually interrogate its own position. Such a relationship could not avoid the issue of change. To what extent did established models admit modification, and what did change say about the character and identity of the church?

Mark Taplin and John Delmas Wood both examine the use of models in Zurich in relation to specific theological-ecclesiastical themes. Taplin uses the Scripta veterum, an anthology of patristic writings with Christological significance that was drawn up by Josias Simler (1530–76), to direct our attention to why reformed theologians in Zurich, like theologians elsewhere, devoted so much of their efforts to patristic sources. Taplin writes that Simler’s aim ‘is at once to demonstrate the unanimity of the Fathers, as witnesses to the Christological teaching of the early church, and to establish the reformed as their legitimate successors’.⁷⁸ For Simler the controversy over Christology that flared up during his own lifetime was the last battle in a long war between truth and error that had begun in the early church. He insisted on the orthodoxy of the reformed and used the Scripta veterum to deliver proof that theirs was the true faith. Patristic sources that stood as witness to the orthodoxy of reformed theology because of their undeniable authority could also be mined for evidence to be used in theological controversies and for terms and material for the fight against heresy in the sixteenth century.

Where for Simler it was the church Fathers who functioned as recognizable landmarks to help him determine his course, Wood’s examination of the little-known Sermones synodales by Bullinger suggests that it was primarily the Old Testament that provided the head of the Zurich church with his bearings. Woods draws our attention to an aspect of Zurich ecclesiology that has received little attention to date – the development of a ‘collective episcopacy’. With reference to the description of the priesthood contained in the Old Testament, Bullinger recognized ‘the positive potential of a re-formed priesthood as a special corps of mentality shapers, turning people of every parish from iniquity by word and example in their office of God’s messengers’.⁷⁹ The Zurich pastors, as members of a collective episcopacy, were to serve as examples of how to lead a good life within both church and society, with their role as ‘priests’ described on the basis of texts drawn from the Old Testament. By drawing on models from the past, living models for the present could be created. The preachers of Zurich understood their own role in terms of the office of the priest contained in the Old Testament, which in turn made them into models for the broader population in both town and countryside.

We find a more complex relationship with biblical models in the eulogy for Queen Elizabeth I of England composed by Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499–1562) and examined by Torrance Kirby. Vermigli, who was Professor of Old Testament at the Zurich Academy from 1556, compared the newly crowned queen of England with Old Testament male figures such as David and Josiah. For Vermigli Elizabeth became queen through the grace of God and was a ruler ‘anointed by God’. She was even comparable to Christ himself, for a king or queen was the intermediary between God and the people. Yet Vermigli employed the comparison of Elizabeth with David and Josiah as a means not just to extol the queen but also to remind her of her duties. The godly rulers of the Old Testament were not simply the equals of the queen in stature; more importantly they were also models of how pious rulers, fully aware of their duties, behave, with their greatest responsibility the maintenance of true religion. The political theology typical of Zurich held the secular authorities responsible for the cura religionis, and it was evidently with this division of duties in mind that Vermigli called on the new queen to recognize that only when she acted as a ‘contemporary Deborah’ who defended the true faith against the attacks of its opponents would she truly fulfil the call to be ruler of her people.

The Old Testament was not just a source of model behaviour to be emulated by the preachers and political masters of Zurich. The deeds of Old Testament figures were also to inspire and guide the citizens of Zurich in leading virtuous lives. One example of this connection is found in the numerous commentaries on the Book of Ruth that appeared from the presses of Zurich in the period between 1530 and 1600. As Christian Moser explains, it was precisely because the protagonists in the Book of Ruth provided such useful models, that this text, relatively neglected elsewhere, was so frequently expounded in Zurich. Boas’ sobriety and loyalty, Ruth’s faithfulness and obedience, but also Naomi’s love for her daughter-in-law turned these figures into models for the readers of this text, providing examples of how they should behave in a variety of daily contexts, in their families, at school or in their relationship with those set over them.

Both women and men could and should be inspired by the virtues of the characters they encountered in the story of Ruth. But there was also concern in Zurich that gender-specific models be developed. In her contribution to this volume, Rebecca Giselbrecht examines the novel interpretations of Mary by Zwingli and Bullinger by means of which the mother of Jesus became a model of behaviour for ‘Christian women’.⁸⁰ In its relationship to Mary, the Reformation again evinces the recurrent tension between continuity and change, for although traditional Marian devotion was roundly condemned, both Zwingli and Bullinger retained the teaching of the Virgin birth and the designation of Mary as ‘the Mother of God’.⁸¹ In her unwavering faith Mary was certainly a model for all Christians, male and female, but her obedience, humility and modesty were deemed specifically female virtues. In this respect there was little difference from Luther’s view of the ‘holy household’. In Zurich, Mary’s intercessory powers were replaced by emphasis on her chastity, which was presented as the virtue of Christian women, who were to engage in sexual relations only within marriage and for procreation.

Church, secular leadership, family and communal life – the Zurich reformers were concerned to ensure that the reformation of theology would leave its mark on behaviour and moral values in all these areas. This goal in itself was ambitious, but an additional sector of Zurich society also fell under the gaze of the reformers as they designed a programme of reform that would shape cultural formation – they turned their attention to the young people of the city. This concern is evident, as Kurt Rüetschi demonstrates, in the sermons on Luke 2:41–52 preached and published by Rudolf Gwalther (1519–86), who held that only if children were raised correctly would the Reformation take root. For Gwalther the model of correct child-rearing was to be found in the story of the childhood of Jesus, from which he drew a number of pedagogical principles. In particular he stressed the fundamental role of parents, for the course for subsequent school-based learning was drawn up initially within the context of the family. Both parents and teachers were to keep constantly in mind that their principal responsibility was as models for the children who had been entrusted to them. Only if they themselves feared God would they be able to generate in these children the fear of God that is the principal component of Christian child-rearing.

It is easy for the modern reader to regard with rolling eyes such ‘back to basics’ views on gender and family relations, but the writing of figures such as Gwalther reminds us of the seriousness with which the reformers took the Bible as normative for Christian behaviour. The stories of the Old and New Testaments were understood to provide the moral exempla for contemporary society, complete with the threat of divine punishment upon transgressors. What the reformers saw in the Bible was a patriarchal society in which the Christian household was a model for larger society. The father was the ‘godly magistrate’ of the household and together with his wife he was responsible for educating and disciplining his children, raising them in the faith and preparing them to serve in their appointed roles. Council, church, school and household were the institutional bodies that moulded and, in turn, were served by the young boys of Zurich, while girls might be educated, but were to be taught the faith and proper conduct from within the household.

Instruction in Latin was one of the central tasks of sixteenth-century schooling. Grammar was taught to students of Latin, but, additionally, the language of Cicero was to be acquired by extensive reading of classical texts, which were themselves models of the style that was to be adopted in both prose and poetry compositions. Yet, as Urs Leu explains, such ‘heathen’ literature also presented a problem in the form of double meanings or even obscenities. Was such Latin poetry really suitable material for the classroom? This question was tackled by Conrad Gessner (1516–65), an educated doctor and teacher at the Schola Tigurina, who in 1544 published a censored edition of Martial’s Epigrams. Not only did Gessner clean up Martial’s work to make it suitable as a teaching aid, but in a dialogue he attached to the edited text he tackled the issue of how to approach material that from a Christian viewpoint was of questionable respectability. He brought into his discussion as a point of reference a further model, Adelphoe, the comedy by Terence, which also addressed the issue of child-rearing. In this dialogue Gessner made the case for the inclusion of authors such as Martial as classroom material but insisted that their texts be purified of anything that could prove a bad influence on young people. This layered treatment of models drawn from the heathen ancient world would, as Urs Leu demonstrates in his chapter in this volume, itself become exemplary, and in later centuries Martial’s work would continue to be published in a highly censored form.

The study of the liberal arts formed one element of the curriculum of the Schola Tigurina. Like students in other institutions of higher education in the early modern period, students in Zurich engaged with logic, ethics and natural philosophy through the medium of the writings of Aristotle, although more recent works such as those by Rudolf Agricola were not ignored.⁸² However, in light of the reformers’ harsh criticism of late medieval theology and its improper combination of revelation and human knowledge, it was essential that the relationship between theology and philosophy be addressed anew. To what extent could Aristotelian philosophy continue to function as a model for the study of the arts as its foundation? This question was tackled by Otto Werdmüller (1513–52) of Zurich in the work examined by Luca Baschera, De dignitate, usu et method philosophiae moralis, published in 1545.

Werdmüller’s remarks were primarily intended to be apologetic, for his principal intent was to show that the harmonization of philosophy – in particular Aristotelian moral philosophy – with theology was not only possible but also desirable. While he agreed that the principles of Christian ethics could be drawn only from the Bible, he also believed that Aristotelian ethics had a role in helping these biblical principles be understood, for Aristotle was more precise and ‘scholarly’ in his definitions of virtues and vices. Additionally, for Werdmüller, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, his principal ethical work, was a highly suitable supplement to study in any field, from dialectics to medicine and law. Werdmüller hoped to use this treatise to prove that Aristotle could legitimately retain his role as a model for the study of the liberal arts at university level. To some extent he was indebted for his arguments to his teacher Melanchthon, but Werdmüller went further than had his former teacher. His lines of reasoning would become commonplace in reformed debates over the relationship between philosophy and theology.

Matthew McLean and Bruce Gordon demonstrate how the Zurich churchmen understood themselves as models for their contemporaries, much as Erasmus had done. McLean considers the relationship between Konrad Pellikan and his student Sebastian Münster, master and pupil, who looked to develop the Erasmian model of scholarly fraternity through their work on Hebrew and the Old Testament. McLean examines the exchanges between Pellikan and Münster, how they wrote to and of one another, and the essential nature of their scholarly contributions. He considers the way in which Pellikan epitomized the ideal teacher: deeply learned, but entirely free with his erudition. This candour, free from pride, was something Münster was sensible to, and which he sought himself to emulate as a teacher, yet it must be considered whether this was a unique connection, or a captured aspect of the setting of their early relationship, within the Franciscan order. McLean argues for how the fraternal model of teaching and learning was affected by their conversion to the Reformation, and how much of it Pellikan brought with him to Zurich and the Prophezei.

Conversely, the way in which Münster represented the epitome of a student further reveals the layers of this Christian humanist relationship. Pellikan wrote of his exceptional diligence, depth of contemplation and prodigal learning, however there was something more: Münster emulated Pellikan’s scholarly interests and methods closely – Hebrew, history, geography – took Pellikan’s lessons and notes and expanded them into syllabi and printed books. This is an intrinsic part of the teacher-student relationship within the Respublica Litterarum: the teacher expected his work to provide a foundation, and for the student to build upon it. As Münster wrote of his debt to Pellikan, so too he wrote, not without poignancy, that others would take up his writings, and take them further. In this sense, the teachers of the Renaissance and Reformation shaped both their institutional replacements, but also the instruments for the further perfection of their scholarly work.

Biographical writings had long proved a preferred method for passing on ideals from one generation to the next. At the time of the Reformation it was not uncommon for funeral sermons for well-known and exemplary figures, both in Zurich and elsewhere, to be developed into such biographies and published, in order that the virtues of such defenders of the true faith could also inspire others.⁸³ Such works were usually composed by friends or former pupils of the deceased.⁸⁴ Bruce Gordon considers two texts that developed out of a less formal context: the Chronicon of Konrad Pellikan (1478–1556), an autobiographical work that the renowned humanist and teacher at the Schola Tigurina composed for his son and his nephew, and the Historische Beschreibung of the life of Leo Jud (1482–1542), written by Jud’s son Johannes.

Both works were originally composed in Latin, but the latter survives only in a German translation, which tends to bring home the differences between the two texts. Pellikan’s goal was to rouse his son and his nephew to throw themselves more deeply into their humanist studies in the service of the church; Jud’s text reads as a memorial book that first and foremost gives testimony to his deep love of his father, whose great humanity and constant suffering made him a model of holy suffering and the way of the cross. Yet whatever their stylistic differences, thematically the two works are similar in their interweaving of scholarship and piety with kinship and memory. Both Pellikan and Jud emerge from their texts as exemplary figures who embodied the ideals of the Zurich church, but never as plaster saints. They appear in their humanity as we read of their studies, friends, families, joys and disappointments. Spiritual and intellectual virtues are enfleshed in anecdotes and memories, a very Zwinglian emphasis on the presence of the Spirit in human existence and the transformative power of faith and learning.

It does not suffice to say that religious change was complex or that it was too complicated to be interpreted by single factors. These commonplaces are no doubt true, but they do not advance the debates about what took place in the Reformation or how we can explain the pluriform character of early modern religion. The chapters of this volume challenge us to say more, to test possible explanations that enable us to speak more confidently about what took place in the 1520s and subsequent decades.

Our focus on Zurich underlines the need to think simultaneously about particular localities and the broader claims and necessities of the Reformation. Although this book largely focuses on humanist trained men, the larger point is how the character of reform was decisively shaped by the actions and beliefs of individuals at certain moments and places. The initial enthusiasm for Luther’s message was primarily among the literate and the urban dwelling; and his assault on papal authority, his affirmation of the Bible as the sole source of authority and his declaration that grace and faith alone save found enthusiastic reception among peasants, knights and humanists precisely because they gave expression, for a time, to diverse aspirations and grievances that ultimately proved irreconcilable.

As the Peasants’ War demonstrated with sword and blood, however, hopes and illusions were quickly dispelled by the emergence of a new form of institutional church buttressed by law, proscriptive doctrine, catechisms and defined worship.⁸⁵ The shift from opposition to implementation marked the Reformation’s turn to the formation of Christian communities that would come to be known as Protestantism. Like their Catholic opponents, these new churches used pulpits, instruction, discipline and the backing of temporal authorities to Christianize, which was to mould educated, professing and practising church members.⁸⁶

Within the story of the Reformation the role of models in imagining religious change and grounding new churches was crucial, though frustratingly elusive for historians striving to define it. The Reformation was about the realization of a new understanding of Christianity in localities: a church legitimated by claims to a right interpretation of the Bible and fidelity to a better age in the past. Embattled reformers found no single argument or means to articulate and defend their claims. The question of why reform movements found purchase in one place and not in others admits of no one answer, and nor would any historian expect as much. These chapters point to the roles played by individual characters and personalities in volatile, contingent and unique circumstances as crucial in success and failure. Such influential figures need not be valorized as heroes to recognize that their ideas and charismatic and canny actions proved influential. Figures like Zwingli and his colleagues were visionary, scholarly, combative, effective communicators, and relentless networkers fully aware that the quotidian demands of institutions could bring about change in communities where supporters were few in number, as in Zurich. The Reformation benefited from a power dynamic that was highly unfavourable for the old church, with its legal privileges and financial resources. Further, the passivity of most subjects allowed change to occur in the face of considerable, though surmountable, resistance.

Yet, as the tumult following Zwingli’s sudden death in 1531 revealed, the relative ease with which the new order was established could not be mistaken for deep attachment to the new church. The creation and use of models as the foundation for the Reformation church in Zurich was integral to religious change, but with no guarantee of success. Certainly, it was a long game. Zwingli’s dramatic changes of 1525 and the following years proved to have a rather sandy foundation, and his successors were compelled to defend, revise and create in the rapidly changing world of the sixteenth century. No model proved to be an unassailable fortress, but the ways of thinking, appropriating and implementing that creatively looked to the past to transform the present remained a hallmark of the Reformation.

The events in Zurich are a bracing reminder of the very human nature of the Reformation, and of what happens when eternal verities land in the world of contingency, compromise and conflict. The reformers made religious change possible by creating an audience and by making savvy alliances, but they did so in the full conviction that what they were undertaking in Zurich was a restoration of the true church. The use of models, and what they entailed in terms of understanding authority, belonged to the Janus-like nature of a movement that gazed upon the past and future. What linked history with the present were the ways in which one understood how humans were able to mediate truth. In this book we argue that the distinctive nature of the reformation in Zurich is only understood when one is able to explain the interaction of theological change, biblical interpretation and understanding of the Bible, veneration of church traditions, institutional and political forces, personalities and contingent events. Religious change was local and can only be explained as such. In this book we consider the emergence of the first church of the Reformation.