This study is the first monograph to attempt a synthetic treatment of the career of Thomas Erastu... more This study is the first monograph to attempt a synthetic treatment of the career of Thomas Erastus (1524-1583). Erastus was a central player in the conversion of the Electoral Palatinate to Reformed Christianity in the early 1560s and a co-author of the Heidelberg Catechism. In the church discipline controversy of the 1560s and 1570s, Erastus opposed the Calvinist effort to institute a consistory of elders with independent authority over excommunication. Erastus’s defeat in this controversy, and the ensuing Antitrinitarian affair, proved the watershed of his career. He turned to the refutation of Paracelsus and a debate with Johann Weyer on the punishment of witches. The epilogue tracks Erastus’s later career and the reception of his works into the seventeenth century.
Profil und Wirkung des Heidelberger Katechismus. The Heidelberg Catechism: Origins, Characteristics, and Influences. Schriften des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte, 215, 2015
The Bubonic Plague struck Upper Germany & Switzerland with ferocity in 1562-66, exacting ... more The Bubonic Plague struck Upper Germany & Switzerland with ferocity in 1562-66, exacting 20-percent-plus mortality tolls in many urban centers. While historical research on plague is currently in an advanced state, especially with the incorporation of new insights from DNA analysis, the major plague waves after the Black Death (1346-53) have received little sustained historical analysis. Given the number of leading physicians of the sixteenth century who witnessed this epidemic (Johann Winter von Andernach, Thomas Erastus, Johann Weyer, Felix Platter, and above all Gessner himself) there is a rich source base to study the mid-1560s outbreak. Gessner tracked the progress of plague across the region and engaged in an active correspondence concerning the epidemic with Achilles Pirmin Gassner, Johannes Crato von Krafftheim, Theodor Zwinger, and others. He likewise served heroically when, by the beginning of 1564, the disease had reached Zurich – famously treating Heinrich Bullinger as the latter teetered on the edge of death. Although Bullinger unexpectedly survived, Gessner himself succumbed to plague in a somewhat isolated case in late 1565.
This article tracts the development of Erastianism from the Heidelberg disciplinary controversy o... more This article tracts the development of Erastianism from the Heidelberg disciplinary controversy of 1568 to the works of Hugo Grotius (1583-1645). Thomas Erastus (1524-1583), a Swiss-Reformed Physician and lay theologian working in the Electoral Palatinate, developed a theory of church-state relations which privileged the magistrate and denied independent disciplinary power to the church consistory. His program served as a counter-ideology to the prevailing disciplining urges of International Calvinism. Such Erastian ideas, whether from Erastus or other Swiss theorists such as Rudolf Gwalther, resonated with Dutch Libertines and Arminians before Grotius wrote his strongly Erastian Ordinum Pietas in 1613. While the Ordinum Pietas reveals only limited dependence on Erastus, other works of
Grotius such as De Imperio display significant engagement or parallel themes with Erastus’s thought. “Grotian Erastianism,” with a healthy measure of Hebraism, is an apt descriptor for the seventeenth-century theories of church-state relations which favored the magistrate.
Conrad Gessner (1516-1565): Die Renaissance der Wissenschaften/The Renaissance of Learning. 2019, ed. Urs Leu and Peter Opitz, 195–309. Munich: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, , 2019
The Bubonic Plague struck Upper Germany & Switzerland with ferocity in 1562-66, exacting 20-perce... more The Bubonic Plague struck Upper Germany & Switzerland with ferocity in 1562-66, exacting 20-percent-plus mortality tolls in many urban centers. While historical research on plague is currently in an advanced state, especially with the incorporation of new insights from DNA analysis, the major plague waves after the Black Death (1346-53) have received little sustained historical analysis. Given the number of leading physicians of the sixteenth century who witnessed this epidemic (Johann Winter von Andernach, Thomas Erastus, Johann Weyer, Felix Platter, and above all Gessner himself) there is a rich source base to study the mid-1560s outbreak. Gessner tracked the progress of plague across the region and engaged in an active correspondence concerning the epidemic with Achilles Pirmin Gassner, Johannes Crato von Krafftheim, Theodor Zwinger, and others. He likewise served heroically when, by the beginning of 1564, the disease had reached Zurich – famously treating Heinrich Bullinger as the latter teetered on the edge of death. Although Bullinger unexpectedly survived, Gessner himself succumbed to plague in a somewhat isolated case in late 1565.
This study is the first monograph to attempt a synthetic treatment of the career of Thomas Erastu... more This study is the first monograph to attempt a synthetic treatment of the career of Thomas Erastus (1524-1583). Erastus was a central player in the conversion of the Electoral Palatinate to Reformed Christianity in the early 1560s and a co-author of the Heidelberg Catechism. In the church discipline controversy of the 1560s and 1570s, Erastus opposed the Calvinist effort to institute a consistory of elders with independent authority over excommunication. Erastus’s defeat in this controversy, and the ensuing Antitrinitarian affair, proved the watershed of his career. He turned to the refutation of Paracelsus and a debate with Johann Weyer on the punishment of witches. The epilogue tracks Erastus’s later career and the reception of his works into the seventeenth century.
Profil und Wirkung des Heidelberger Katechismus. The Heidelberg Catechism: Origins, Characteristics, and Influences. Schriften des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte, 215, 2015
The Bubonic Plague struck Upper Germany & Switzerland with ferocity in 1562-66, exacting ... more The Bubonic Plague struck Upper Germany & Switzerland with ferocity in 1562-66, exacting 20-percent-plus mortality tolls in many urban centers. While historical research on plague is currently in an advanced state, especially with the incorporation of new insights from DNA analysis, the major plague waves after the Black Death (1346-53) have received little sustained historical analysis. Given the number of leading physicians of the sixteenth century who witnessed this epidemic (Johann Winter von Andernach, Thomas Erastus, Johann Weyer, Felix Platter, and above all Gessner himself) there is a rich source base to study the mid-1560s outbreak. Gessner tracked the progress of plague across the region and engaged in an active correspondence concerning the epidemic with Achilles Pirmin Gassner, Johannes Crato von Krafftheim, Theodor Zwinger, and others. He likewise served heroically when, by the beginning of 1564, the disease had reached Zurich – famously treating Heinrich Bullinger as the latter teetered on the edge of death. Although Bullinger unexpectedly survived, Gessner himself succumbed to plague in a somewhat isolated case in late 1565.
This article tracts the development of Erastianism from the Heidelberg disciplinary controversy o... more This article tracts the development of Erastianism from the Heidelberg disciplinary controversy of 1568 to the works of Hugo Grotius (1583-1645). Thomas Erastus (1524-1583), a Swiss-Reformed Physician and lay theologian working in the Electoral Palatinate, developed a theory of church-state relations which privileged the magistrate and denied independent disciplinary power to the church consistory. His program served as a counter-ideology to the prevailing disciplining urges of International Calvinism. Such Erastian ideas, whether from Erastus or other Swiss theorists such as Rudolf Gwalther, resonated with Dutch Libertines and Arminians before Grotius wrote his strongly Erastian Ordinum Pietas in 1613. While the Ordinum Pietas reveals only limited dependence on Erastus, other works of
Grotius such as De Imperio display significant engagement or parallel themes with Erastus’s thought. “Grotian Erastianism,” with a healthy measure of Hebraism, is an apt descriptor for the seventeenth-century theories of church-state relations which favored the magistrate.
Conrad Gessner (1516-1565): Die Renaissance der Wissenschaften/The Renaissance of Learning. 2019, ed. Urs Leu and Peter Opitz, 195–309. Munich: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, , 2019
The Bubonic Plague struck Upper Germany & Switzerland with ferocity in 1562-66, exacting 20-perce... more The Bubonic Plague struck Upper Germany & Switzerland with ferocity in 1562-66, exacting 20-percent-plus mortality tolls in many urban centers. While historical research on plague is currently in an advanced state, especially with the incorporation of new insights from DNA analysis, the major plague waves after the Black Death (1346-53) have received little sustained historical analysis. Given the number of leading physicians of the sixteenth century who witnessed this epidemic (Johann Winter von Andernach, Thomas Erastus, Johann Weyer, Felix Platter, and above all Gessner himself) there is a rich source base to study the mid-1560s outbreak. Gessner tracked the progress of plague across the region and engaged in an active correspondence concerning the epidemic with Achilles Pirmin Gassner, Johannes Crato von Krafftheim, Theodor Zwinger, and others. He likewise served heroically when, by the beginning of 1564, the disease had reached Zurich – famously treating Heinrich Bullinger as the latter teetered on the edge of death. Although Bullinger unexpectedly survived, Gessner himself succumbed to plague in a somewhat isolated case in late 1565.
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Grotius such as De Imperio display significant engagement or parallel themes with Erastus’s thought. “Grotian Erastianism,” with a healthy measure of Hebraism, is an apt descriptor for the seventeenth-century theories of church-state relations which favored the magistrate.
Grotius such as De Imperio display significant engagement or parallel themes with Erastus’s thought. “Grotian Erastianism,” with a healthy measure of Hebraism, is an apt descriptor for the seventeenth-century theories of church-state relations which favored the magistrate.