bavarikon4UEcclesiastical Regulation of the Imperial City of Nuremberg and of the Franconian Margravies, Nuremberg 1533 (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Res/Liturg. 662)
The Reformation also upset the legal structures of the Catholic Church. In order to fill this gap, new guidelines had to be issued, the so-called “ecclesiastical regulations”. They included information on the right doctrine, terms for church life and rules for the church service and for religious ceremonies.
Following individual precursors in Wittenberg and Leisnig (Saxony) from the early 1520s, some of which were written by Luther himself, two influential liturgical “families” emerged: on the one hand, the strand created by the Wittenberg parish priest Johannes Bugenhagen (1485–1558), and on the other hand, the line originating from the Brandenburg-Nuremberg church order.
The latter was created as a joint project of the Franconian margraviate properties Brandenburg-Ansbach and Brandenburg-Kulmbach as well as by the imperial city of Nuremberg. The theologian Johannes Brenz (1499–1570) led the side of the margravies, the reformer and eventual main author, Andreas Osiander (1498–1552), headed the Nuremberg faction.
A long process of coordination and formation preceded the adoption of the order in January 1533. Its most important basis was the 1528/29 church visitation carried out jointly by the territories to examine the spiritual administration and ecclesiastical life. In 1533, the Nuremberg workshop of Jobst Gutknecht (d. 1548) printed three editions of the text. The third, which served as the starting point for many reprints, is shown here.
The joint order had an enormously strong influence on the ecclesiastical orders of the electorate of Brandenburg (1540) and of the duchy of the Palatinate-Neuburg (1543) as well as on some other orders (e.g. in Prussia or Mecklenburg).