Reformation Texts with Translation
New and Recent Titles

Kenneth Hagen, General Editor

Under Dr. Hagen’s editorship, several series will be inaugurated. Each series will feature the original text accompanied by English translation on facing page. One new volume will be published each year. Standing orders accepted

The first series is entitled

Biblical Studies

Franz Posset, Editor

RTT 1. Girolamo Savonarola, O.P. Prison Meditations on Psalms 51 and 31. Introduced, Translated, and Edited from the Latin by John Patrick Donnelly, S.J. Latin and English on facing pages. ISBN 0-87462-700-1. ©1994. 142 pp. Paper, $15.

“In a famous remark Machiavelli dismissed Girolamo Savonarola as a prophet unarmed and hence doomed to failure. He was certainly a political failure, and paid with his life for that failure, but there are many ways to measure success and failure. It was Machiavelli’s own failure in politics that led to his career as a writer and to undying fame. It was Savonarola’s failure in politics that led to his arrest and imprisonment, but he was not a prophet totally unarmed, for in prison he retained the pen, which is often mightier than the sword. There he wrote the two works printed in this volume. They became the most read of all his writings and prove that physical torture did not destroy his literary and spiritual powers.

“Savonarola’s exposition or meditation on Psalm 50 (51) (the Miserere) and Psalm 30 (31) (‘In te, Domini, speravi’) have not been printed in English during the twentieth century. The primary purpose of this book is to make that text available in modern English. The secondary purpose is to help students who are trying to learn to read post- classical Latin. As an undergraduate the translator found the Loeb series, which printed the text and translation of classical Roman authors on facing pages, the best single help to acquire facility in reading Latin. Fewer such volumes exist to help students of post-classical Latin. This series tries to fill that gap for both Latin and early modern vernaculars. Savonarola’s Latin seems well suited to that purpose because it is fluent and powerful but without great grammatical complexity.” —From the Preface by John Patrick Donnelly, S.J.

 RTT 2. Philipp Melanchthon. Annotations on the First Epistle to the Corinthians. Introduced, Translated, and Edited from the Latin by John Patrick Donnelly, S.J. Latin and English on facing pages. ISBN 0-87462-701-X. ©1995. 178 pp. Paper, $20.

“Philipp Melanchthon (1497­p;1560) was one of the most influential lay theologians in the history of Christianity. His Loci communes, published when he was only twenty-four and expanded in later editions, remained for a century the most important synthesis of Lutheran teaching. Martin Luther valued Melanchthon’s ability to write synthetic theology, the more so since his own writings were mainly exegetical, pastoral, or polemical. It was Melanchthon who in 1530 drew up the fundamental confession of the Lutheran churches, the Augsburg Confession. Melanchthon also earned the proud title of praeceptor Germaniae, teacher of Germany, because of his work in curriculum revision, textbook writing, and indefatigable lecturing to packed halls of eager undergraduates. Melanchthon contributed more than anybody except Luther himself to the foundation and consolidation of Lutheranism. This volume makes available for the first time in English one of Melanchthon’s earliest theological writings, his Annotationes in Epistolam priorem ad Corinthios, which was delivered as lectures to students at the University of Wittenberg in the summer and fall of 1521 and was first published by Luther in 1522. The translation is printed side by side with the Latin.” — From the Preface by John Patrick Donnelly, S.J.

RTT 3. Nicholas of Lyra. The Postilla of Nicholas of Lyra on the Song of Songs. Introduced, Translated, and Edited from the Latin by James George Kiecker. Latin and English on facing pages. ISBN 0-87462-703-6. ©1998. 128 pp. Paper, $15.

In an age when doctors of the Church were given distinctive titles, Nicholas of Lyra’s title was the Doctor planus et utilis, “the clear and useful doctor.” It was a fitting sobriquet. The scholar, the preacher, the friar often sought a handy, up-to-date reference book to unlock the meaning of a scriptural passage. And there, from the early fourteenth to the late seventeenth century, were the commentaries of Nicholas of Lyra. Verse by verse, scholarly yet employing simple Latin, offering alternate translations, always going out of his way to be understood, Lyra tried to be of service to his readers. Planus et utilis indeed!

Today Lyra is largely unknown. But things may be changing. A new generation of scholars is showing interest in medieval biblical commentaries, often assessing their impact on Reformation thinking and writing. Such individuals should find the present volume helphd. Besides this, the sheer fact that this volume makes available a medieval Latin text with accompanying translation may arouse the interest of scholars, students, and a general audience in this area of medieval studies, as well as in Lyra specifically. This is our hope.— From the Preface by James Kiecker

The second series is entitled

Women in the Reformation

Editor: Merry Wiesner-Hanks

1. Convents Confront the Reformation: Catholic and Protestant Nuns in Germany. Introduction by Merry Wiesner-Hanks. Translated by Merry Wiesner-Hanks and Joan Skocir. ISBN 0-87462-702-8. ©1998. Paper. $15.

“With the development of women’s history over the last twenty- five years, a number of texts by women in the early modern period have been discovered, edited, translated, and published. This has deepened our understanding of women’s experience in the past, and also allowed us to view major historical changes such as the Renaissance and the Reformation in new ways. The present volume is a contribution to this growing body of literature. The four texts in this volume are all by women who resided in convents or similar institutions, or who had recently left convents, in Germany in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They allow us to hear - with some filtering by their male editors and publishers - women’s opinions about the merits of clerical celibacy and convent life. None of these works has been previously translated into English, and only one of them has been published in German since the early modern period. The primary purpose of this book is to make these texts available in English, but a secondary purpose is to make the German text available in a modern edition with a modern type font. In the German text, the orthography has been modernized, but the spellings have not; punctuation has occasionally been added for clarity, for early modern authors used extremely long sentences punctuated by slash marks rather than commas and semicolons.” — From the Foreword by the Editor, Merry Wiesner-Hanks

The Texts

One of the texts has been reprinted in a modern edition:

Three of the texts are available only in early modern editions, and are held in the collection of the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel, Germany:

The texts by Katherine Rem and Martha Zitter are also held in the Lutheran Brotherhood Foundation Reformation Research Library, a microform collection of primary sources dealing with the religious and social aspects of the Reformation movement from 1500 to 1650. It is housed in the Rare Book Room on the campus of Luther Seminary, St. Paul, Minnesota. Access to the collection is through the Research Library Information Network (RLIN: Library identifier MNLT).

2. This Tight Embrace. Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza (1566-1614). Edited and Translated by Elizabeth Rhodes. ISBN 0-87462-704-4. ©2000. 311 pp. Paper. $35.

Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza was a Spanish noblewoman born in 1566 to wealth and privilege. After a remarkable childhood and youth marred by numerous family deaths and abuse, she rejected her exalted social status to embrace the life of a poor holy woman in the urban centers of Madrid and Valladolid. By 1598, her desires to die for God inspired her to take a vow of martyrdom, and as a consequence of this vow she was granted permission to journey to England, where she joined the Catholic underground. Intimately connected with the Jesuits, Carvajal worked in London and its environs as a teacher, missionary, and leader in charitable service to the poor and “heathen” of Anglican England.Imprisoned twice, once for public proselytizing and once for founding a secret community of Catholic women in London, she engaged in a wide range of subversive activities that eventually led both James of England and the Spanish Council of State to mandate her return to Spain. Defiant to the end, doña Luisa refused to be expelled from England and instead died immediately after their decree was issued in 1614, succumbing to a long endured heart condition.

This Tight Embrace includes a complete biographical study of Carvajal, followed by selections from each of the genres of writing she practiced: her spiritual life story, her religious vows, her poetry, the Rule she wrote for her Society of the Sovereign Virgin Mary, and her letters. Her spiritual life story is riveting for the documentation it provides of an aberrant spirituality practiced in the most noble of Spanish households. Her other writings are equally compelling for the evidence they provide of Carvajal’s strength of character and conviction, and for the complete lack in them of the cowering and obedient woman portrayed in her writings for her confessor. Luisa de Carvajal’s religious and artistic corpus thus provides a remarkable portrait of a woman who aspired to and attained direct contact with the highest of divine and earthly figures, in spite of those who would have held her down. All texts are provided in Spanish and in English, and are edited from manuscript sources.

3. “Elisabeth’s Manly Courage”: Testimonials and Songs of Martyred Anabaptist Women in the Low Countries. Edited and Translated by Hermina Joldersma and Louis Grijp.ISBN 0-87462-705-2. ©2001. 198 pp. Paper. $20.

Among the most moving writings of the Reformation in the sixteenth-century Low Countries are the final words of Anabaptists condemned to death for their faith. Through a series of circumstances we have a significant body of such writings by women: Anabaptists were the most severely persecuted among Protestant groups, Anabaptist women made up a comparatively high proportion of those martyred, and Anabaptists attached great importance to preserving the memory of the martyred, regardless of gender, through the written word. As these women recount the details of arguments with their inquisitors, their feelings during turbulent months in prison, their love for their children, husbands, parents, and friends, their ecstasy at having been found worthy to die for their faith, one cannot help but be moved, and impressed, by their voices and their experiences. Their writings reveal them to be articulate and courageous individuals who show not only “manly courage” but the kind of personal courage which is rooted in a self-assurance uncommon for women, one based on taking personal responsibility for the most important matter in their lives, their own salvation.

4. The Life of Antoinette Micolon. Translated, Edited, and Introduced by Linda Lierheimer.
ISBN 0-87462-708-7. (Reformation Texts With Translation #9). Paper. 144 pp. $17.

About The Life of Antoinette Micolon
Antoinette Micolon (1592-1659) was a remarkable woman who founded six Ursuline convents in the Auvergne region of France in the early years of the seventeenth century. The Ursulines, originally founded in Italy as an uncloistered congregation, were one of the new “active” religious orders for women. Through their work as catechizers, teachers, and missionaries, women like Antoinette Micolon were crucial to both shaping and disseminating the ideals of the Catholic Reformation. Her story gives us a vivid and detailed picture of the creation and spread of the new religious congregations for women during this period, of the motivations of and the difficulties faced by the women who joined them, and of their relationships with their families, communities, and church officials. As an example of the growing genre of religious memoir during this period, her story also provides insight into the fashioning of identity in early modern France. This book makes available in English translation an invaluable resource for the history of women in Counter-Reformation France, and its dual language format make it ideal for use in both history and literature courses.

Dr. Linda Lierheimer, Associate Professor of Humanities, Hawaii Pacific University, received her B.A. from Reed College in 1982 and her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1994. In 1998 she published “Preaching or Teaching? Defining the Ursuline Mission in Seventeenth-Century France,” In Pamela Walker and Beverly Kienzle, eds., Women Preachers and Prophets Through Two Millennia of Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press). She is working on a book-length manuscript entitled, Women of Eloquence: Ursuline Nuns in Seventeenth-Century France, which will examine the spiritual needs of the Ursulines, the first women’s teaching order, and their role as agents of religious reform. According to Dr. Lierheimer, her research “will make an original and important contribution to the history of women and the history of religion during this period.”

The third series is entitled

Theology and Piety

Ian Christopher Levy, Editor

1. Gasparo Contarini. The Office of a Bishop. Edited, Translated, and with an Introduction by John Patrick Donnelly, S.J. ISBN 0-87462-706-0. ©2002. 136 pp. Paper. $15. Latin on facing page.

Just months before Martin Luther posted his ninety-five theses Contarini wrote his treatise at the request of a young Venetian nobleman, who had recently been named bishop of Bergamo. In 1517 Contarini was still a lay scholar on the cusp of distinguished career as a Venetian magistrate. In 1534 Paul III appointed him a cardinal and put him in charge of a committee to draw up plans for reforming the Catholic Church. Later he supervised important doctrinal discussions with Lutheran leaders which led to agreement on some important points but which ultimately broke down.

The Renaissance produced many treatises on how princes, courtiers and bishops should fulfill their duties. Contarim’s treatise stands out because it presents a layman’s view of what a bishop should be. His treatise contains two books. The first book outlines what a good man should be since a good bishop must first be a good man; it relies heavily on the writings of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas and is highly theoretical. The second book is much more practical and explains how a bishop should arrange his day and how he should deal with the myriad of problems confronting a good pastor, effective administrator and a devout Christian.

Few of Contarini’s writings were published in his lifetime. His nephew determined to gather his manuscripts and publish his complete works, which appeared at Paris in 1571, with subsequent editions at Venice in 1578 and 1589. The Catholicism of 1571 was far more defensive than that of 1517. To avoid trouble with the Inquisition Contarini’s nephew and his assistants had to excise several passages which echoed Erasmus’s criticism of popular Catholic practices. The two Venetian editions under-went even stricter censorship. This volume is the first Latin edition since 1589 and the only complete English translation. By presenting the Latin text and English translation on facing pages, it should help students of Renaissance Latin. Footnotes clarify the sources of Contarini’s ideas. Readers will also be able to see how Counter-Reformation censorship worked because differences between the manuscript original, the Paris edition, and the Venetian editions are clearly indicated.

2. Preaching the Reformation: The Homilectical Handbook of Urbanus Rhegius. Translated, Edited, and Introduced by Scott Hendrix. Latin Text and English Translation of Formulae quaedam caute et citra scandalum loquendi de praecipuis Christianae doctrinae locis, pro iunioribus Verbi Ministris in Ducatu Luneburgensi [1535] by Urbanus Rhegius (1489-1541). ISBN 0-87462-707-9. ©2003. Index. 120 pp. $15.

The German reformer, Urbanus Rhegius (1489-1541), wrote this homiletical handbook in 1535 for young Protestant ministers in Germany. His theological guide to preaching on controversial topics of the Reformation exposes the challenge of presenting a balanced evangelical message and the distortions that attended the reception of that message. It also discloses the close relationship between theology and piety that lay at the heart of Reformation conflicts.

Scott Hendrix is James Hastings Nichols Professor of Reformation History and Doctrine at Princeton Theological Seminary.

3. Exemplary Lives: Selected Sermons on the Saints, from Rheinau. Translated and Edited, with an Introduction by James C. Wilkinson. ISBN-13: 978-087462-709-1 & ISBN-10: 0-87462-709-5. ©2006. Paperbound. Bibliography. Index. 191 pp. $20.

About Exemplary Lives: Selected Sermons on the Saints, from Rheinau

Located on an island in the Rhine River in Switzerland, near Schaffhausen, Rheinau was the site of a Benedictine abbey with the original patrons St. Mary and St. Peter, and, at a later date, St. Catherine. Rheinau Abbey was founded around 780 A.D., with monastic activities of varying degrees of intensity continuing there until 1862. The abbey’s scriptorium flourished in the twelfth century.

In a fifteenth-century Swiss-German manuscript there is a collection of sermons associated with Rheinau Abbey entitled Die Rheinauer Predigtsammlung. As it is stated in §50 of the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, “... we seek from the saints examples in their way of life, fellowship in their communion, and aid by their intercession.” Those who listened to the saints’ sermons from Rheinau were given accounts of these twenty-four saints’ lives of heroic faith. The congregation is reminded of the beauty of the communion of saints. Upon the death of a saint, by natural causes as well as martyrdom, the immediate reward for the saints is the reunion with his/her brethren in the beyond. There is a common structural pattern to be seen in all the saints’ sermons from Rheinau, each saint’s life demonstrates a particular aspect of holiness and a unique manner through which the cause of the Church is furthered and/or defended. These exemplary lives deserved their places in the original Rheinauer Predigtsammlung and warrant their inclusion in this selection of Medieval Swiss-German sermons with translation from Rheinau.

Dr. James C. Wilkinson

4. Johann Spangenberg. A Booklet of Comfort for the Sick & On the Christian Knight. Robert Kolb, Editor & Translator. ISBN: 978-087462-710-7. ©2007. German on facing page.Paperbound. Bibliography. Index. 150 pp. $20.

Confronting death—as God’s judgment on sin and as God’s doorway to eternal life—and struggling as a “Christian Knight” against the devil, the world, and human desires: these two topics gave Johann Spangenberg, a close friend and devoted adherent of Martin Luther, the basis for one of the most popular pieces of devotional literature in the early years of the German Reformation. Readers encounter in this pamphlet, published in the early 1540s, an instrument designed to cultivate the piety of the Wittenberg Reformation among the common people, a piety that prepared for death (and thus for daily life!) through daily repentance, casting away sin, casting oneself upon Jesus Christ and his death and resurrection, and then sharing his love with the neighbor. Using a wealth of biblical illustrations and ideas, Spangenberg’s brief treatise was teaching his readers how to use Scripture and how to live enlivened by its message.

Robert Kolb, Professor of Systematic Theology,
Concordia Seminary, Saint Louis

| TOP |

Copyright ©2007 Marquette University -- All rights reserved. Updated: 2 March 2007.