Jerome was whipped not for reading pagan literature in general and poetry in
particular but for taking anexcessiveinterest in it to the point of neglecting
sacred letters, or for reading the non-Christian writingsnimia curiositate,as
he put it.^17
Still in the same volume, Murner also published theflorilegium of extracts
drawn mainly from Augustine’sDe doctrina christiana, which I have men-
tioned already and which I shall return to. In the same year, he began to
publish works in the vernacular. After a short spell as guardian at the friary of
Speyer in 1510, Murner worked as preacher and reader in Frankfurt am Main,
in 1511–13. His engagement as guardian of the Strasbourg friary was also
short-lived because he was accused of self-profit after ten months. In 1515
Murner taught for a short time in Trier, where he gave thefirst law lectures in
German. In 1515 his German version of theAeneidcame out, and in 1519 he
obtained his law doctorate from Basel despite the objections of Ulrich Zasius,
who was rector at the time. Murner’s German translation of Justinian’s
Institutiones(1519) marks the beginning of the use of vernacular German
for legal treatises. Some of Murner’s most famous vernacular satires also date
from the period 1509–19. He is known particularly for his creative use of the
fool (Narr) motif to mock the ways of courtesans, the greed of merchants, and
other social phenomena of his time.
Despite his interest in social reforms, he was opposed to the Reformation
and wrote several pamphlets against Luther in the 1520s, thus becoming the
object of Lutheran polemics in his turn. The best known of his anti-
Reformation satires is hisVon dem grossen Lutherischen Narren(1522),
which was banned by the Strasbourg Council. After an unsuccessful attempt
to seek refuge in England at the court of Henry VIII, Murner had toflee
Strasbourg because the city had adopted the Reformation and went back to
Oberehnheim, his birthplace, which hefled in disguise in the face of the
Peasants’War. Until 1529, he lived in Lucerne and wrote against Zwingli’s
Reformation. In 1526 he acted as Catholic secretary at the Baden Disputation
and published the Proceedings in 1527. During peace negotiations after the
first Kappel War (1529), the Swiss Protestant party demanded that he be
handed over as prisoner, whereupon he left Lucerne and spent his remaining
years until 1537 in pastoral work in Oberehnheim.
The main instances of Murner’s reception of Augustine date from 1503 and
- In fact, the most perceptible influence of Augustine on him amounts to
twoflorilegiaof citations, one from theCity of Godpublished in theLaudatio
and another, longer one fromDe doctrina christianapublished in 1509 in the
Reformatio poetarum, mentioned above, where it occupies roughly twenty
pages of the small, in-quarto volume offifty-eight pages. To Murner, similarly
(^17) Thomas Murner,Reformatio(1509), fol. 25r.
The Church Fathers and the Humanities 39