‘God really hated the hypocrites’: Hypocrisy and Anti-clerical Rhetoric in the Early Lutheran Reformation

Abstract

In 1524, two anonymous pamphlets were published, both professing to be letters written by a married woman to her sister, a nun. Both draw on a range of New Testament texts to express criticism of ‘the hypocrites’, a term the anonymous author uses to refer particularly to clergy and religious. This article examines how the author of these pamphlets constructed and characterized the category of the hypocrite. Drawing on the work of Hans-Christoph Rublack, the article shows that her critique is coherent with anti-clerical rhetoric found in a wide range of early Reformation pamphlets. It then compares her strictures on hypocrisy with references to hypocrisy and hypocrites in the early German writings of Martin Luther and Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt to explore the extent to which accusations of hypocrisy were entwined with anti-clerical and anti-monastic rhetoric in the early Lutheran Reformation. It concludes that while accusations against clergy and religious were often couched in terms of their hypocrisy, Luther's use of the term hypocrite was much broader, extending to all those whom he viewed as presenting themselves as ‘holier than thou’, while Karlstadt made less use of the term.