Reformation Sources: The Letters of Wolfgang Capito and His Fellow Reformers in Alsace and Switzerland

“Except perhaps for Wittenberg itself, no place in the German Empire played a greater role in the early Reformation than the free imperial city of Strasbourg. This volume presents the results of a workshop on the correspondence of a major figure in the Strasbourg Reformation, Wolfgang Capito. The collection includes interpretive essays, text editions of two of Capito’s works and documents of a lawsuit that affected his establishment in the city, as well as studies of the problems of producing modern editions of Capito himself and his contemporaries Erasmus, Bucer, Bullinger, and Beza. Readers will find fresh insights into the intellectual, religious, and political world of southwestern Germany in the early sixteenth century.” 

-Charles G. Nauert, University of Missouri, Columbia

“Everyone who studies or teaches the Reformation knows how indispensable good critical editions of manuscript sources are. But only those who take on the responsibility for producing such editions get to know the thorny problems encountered in transcribing, editing, and annotating source texts. Using the examples of editions currently underway of the correspondence of Wolfgang Capito and his fellow reformers in Alsace and Switzerland, Professor Rummel and her stellar roster of collaborators provide a richly insightful survey of the difficulties encountered and the solutions found, as well as the resulting benefits to scholarship and teaching.” 

-James M. Estes, University of Toronto

ERIKA RUMMEL is Professor Emeritus of History at Wilfrid Laurier University and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Toronto. She is the author of The Humanist-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and Reformation (1995), The Confessionalization of Humanism in Reformation Germany (2000), and Erasmus (2004) and is the editor of The Correspondence of Wolfgang Capito (volume 1, 2005).

MILTON KOOISTRA is a research assistant on the Capito Project and collaborator on the first volume of The Correspondence of Wolfgang Capito (2005). He is a Graduate Fellow at the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies and a PhD candidate at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. His thesis examines the rhetoric and purposes of letters of recommendation in sixteenth-century Germany.

REVIEWS
Canadian Journal of History, 43.1 (2008), pp. 32-34. Reviewed by Peter G. Bietenholz.
The Journal of Theological Studies, 59.1 (2008), pp. 397-398. Reviewed by Charlotte Methuen.
Renaissance Quarterly, 61.3 (2008), pp. 939-940. Reviewed by R. Gerald Hobbs.
The Sixteenth Century Journal, 40.2 (2009), pp. 520-521. Reviewed by Susan R. Boettcher.