Library › Latin: Letters › Epistola ad Henricum Bullingerum
Agostino Mainardi, an Italian former Augustinian friar who became the Reformed pastor of Chiavenna in the Grisons, wrote this letter to Heinrich Bullinger in haste. He warns that Pier Paolo Vergerio is having a catechism printed at Zurich, one he had from Johannes Brenz, and wishes to dedicate it to the churches of the Valtellina without the knowledge of their ministers. Mainardi begs Bullinger, for the peace of the churches, not to allow anything to be printed in their name without their consent, and complains that there has never been peace since Vergerio came to the region. He also points to a passage on the Lord’s Supper in a confession Vergerio translated into Italian.
The letter documents the tensions among the Italian Protestant exiles in the Grisons and the Valtellina, where Vergerio, a former bishop, was an energetic but divisive figure. Mainardi’s concern is the doctrine of the Lord’s Supper, on which the Zurich and Lutheran positions differed, and the risk that Lutheran texts would unsettle congregations that followed Zurich’s teaching. It shows how Bullinger was expected to act as arbiter for the Reformed churches of the region, and how printing in Zurich could become a matter of church politics.
About this edition. The Latin text comes from Corpus Corporum, the Latin text repository of the University of Zurich (edition: Institut für Schweizerische Reformationsgeschichte, Institut für Computerlinguistik, Universität Zürich. The online edition is based on the cited book…), reused with attribution for non-commercial purposes (CC BY-NC-SA). Every word has been analyzed with LatinCy, a neural language model for Latin — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from Lewis & Short’s A Latin Dictionary.