Library › Latin: Letters › Epistolae ad Rodolphum Gualtherum
These five letters are from Heinrich Bullinger (1504–1575), chief minister of the Zurich church, to Rudolf Gwalther the Elder, his close colleague and eventual successor as head of the Zurich church. The first, written while Gwalther was at the baths, forwards letters about the affairs of the widow of Butler, an Englishman who, Bullinger notes, had first come to Zurich for religion’s sake in 1536, and about an imprudent young man whose marriage plans had foundered because the other party would not discuss them until his inheritance was moved to Germany. Bullinger says he has no faith in the proposed Anglo-French marriage, given the haste with which a coronation was to follow it.
Another letter, dated 25 August 1571, reports that the matter has been laid before the council, laments the price of wheat, and says he is busy writing letters to be carried by the printer Froschauer, who leaves at the end of the month. These letters show Bullinger’s late years: family and pastoral business, concern about famine prices, and close interest in English and French affairs. They also show the warm intimacy between Bullinger and the man who would succeed him.
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.