Library › Latin: Letters › Epistolae ad Wolfgangum Musculum
These thirteen letters, about 1,200 words, are from Heinrich Bullinger (1504–1575), chief minister of the Zurich church, to Wolfgang Musculus, the reformer who served at Augsburg and later taught theology at Bern. Bullinger acknowledges two letters and thanks Musculus for answering him carefully. Musculus had explained that he had not written because of the sacramental quarrel stirred up by Satan between Luther and Zurich, saying that there is a time to speak and a time to keep silent. Bullinger accepts his explanation, but insists that neither he nor the Zurich churches are responsible for the renewal of the conflict, since Luther had written a book against them.
A later passage analyses the language of ‘exhibitive’ signs: the scholastics taught that sacraments confer grace, and now some say that sacraments exhibit what they signify, so that the Supper presents the very body of the Lord with, in or under the bread. Bullinger argues that this reintroduces what was rejected. The letters show the Zurich church’s effort to keep the trust of south German Protestants such as Musculus while defending its doctrine of the Supper.
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.