Briefbuch des Christoph Scheuerl

Description

Until 1530, the lawyer and humanist Christoph Scheurl (1481-1542) occupied a middling position between reformers and old believers. Scheurl descended on his mother's side from the Tuchers, one of the most important patrician families in Nuremberg. After studying in Heidelberg and Bologna and working as a professor in Wittenberg for several years, he returned to Nuremberg in 1512 as legal advisor to the council. From 1517, he belonged to circle of the humanist Staupitz, on which he himself bestowed the name of "Sodalitas Staupitziana". His attitude which for a long time did not clearly declare in favour of either the reformatory or the Catholic side, brought him much criticism, especially from the reformers. It was not until 1530 that he finally broke with the Reformation, after a dispute with Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560). Scheurl maintained a lively exchange of letters with diverse persons from reformatory, humanist and conservative-Catholic circles, including Martin Luther (1483-1546) and Johannes Eck (1486-1543). Scheurl's "Letter Codex" is preserved in its original version in the Scheurl Family Archive at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum (German National Museum) in Nuremberg. Here a print version dated to 1872 is shown, published by the historian Franz von Soden (1790–1869). Particularly revealing are some of Scheurl's letters to Luther and Eck from 1517, in which he attempted to achieve an accommodation and initially even a friendship between the later opponents (cf. pp. 1–3, 11, 12, 14). Datum: 2016