Anabaptism and the World of Printing in Sixteenth-Century Germany

Abstract

In 1527 the Augsburg printer Philip Ulhart published a work entitled A Christian Instruction, How the Godly Scriptures are to be Compared and Interpreted . The author, Hans Hut, was not named on the title page (possibly a security measure), and Hut may not have approved or even known about the publication (see Plate 1 ). 1 The former Augsburg Carmelite and pamphleteer Johannes Landsperger was responsible for preparing and delivering the work to Ulhart, claiming in his preface that he did not know the author but that the book was clearly inspired by the spirit of God and could be of use to others. 2 There was little to distinguish it from the other books that Ulhart produced that year, which included works by Luther and the Lutheran preachers Urbanus Rhegius and Johannes Agricola. The typeset was identical, as was Ulhart’s recognisable inverted pyramid arrangement for the concluding paragraph with small decorative symbols underneath to bring the text to a neat apex (see Plate 2 ). Ulhart had even used exactly the same title page decoration for his edition of Zwingli’s response to Jakob Strauss, a reformer in Eisenach, on the question of the Lord’s Supper, also printed in 1527. Nothing about this work as a physical object betrayed its radicalism.