Early Writings

xv, 299 pp. Edited by Samuel Macauley Jackson with a new index by J. Samuel Hammond. This volume contains several of Zwingli's important pre-Reformation writings as well as his earliest Reformation treatises. Zwingli defended Christian freedom by attacking the regulations governing Lenten fasts. He argued for clerical marriage and rejected enforced clerical celibacy as a source of priestly immortality and scandal. He warned the Swiss against the danger of serving as mercenaries in the pay of foreign princes. In a truculent essay which Erasmus deplored, Zwingli replied to the admonition of the bishop of Constance which condemned the new ideas advocated by Zwingli. The editor included in this volume the life of Zwingli written by Oswald Myconius in 1532, the year after Zwingli's death.--rear cover