David Chytraeus: Epistolae ad Henricum Bullingerum

This text preserves Latin correspondence from David Chytraeus (1530–1600), the Lutheran theologian and pupil of Melanchthon who taught for most of his career at Rostock, to Heinrich Bullinger. Writing as a young man after a journey through Germany and Switzerland, he says the chief fruit of his travels was to have seen the principal churches of Germany and to have met learned and godly teachers. He recalls with gratitude a long conversation in which Bullinger instructed him on the parts of Christian doctrine, and quotes Greek verses on the beauty of concord. Later he reports on the siege of Magdeburg, quiet in the Saxon cities, and the University of Wittenberg.

The letter is of interest because it comes from a figure who later became one of the leading Lutheran theologians of the century and an author of the Formula of Concord, yet here speaks warmly of the agreement of teachers on the chief articles of faith and of his respect for Bullinger’s writings. It records the contacts that young scholars made with Zurich before confessional lines between Lutheran and Reformed hardened further. It also offers contemporary news from northern Germany in the years after the Interim. The Latin is polished and humanist in style, with Greek phrases.