Melchior Hoffman: The Writings. Critical Edition

• Applicants: Professor Dr.-Ing. Bela Gipp, since 1/2024; Dr. Christine Ruhrberg
• Subject Area: Protestant Theology ; German Medieval Studies (Medieval German Literature)
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 527191597

Melchior Hoffman has been understood as the great apocalyptic misfit of the german reformation despite having started himself a strong and vital anabaptist succession. Born about 1495 in the swabian-franconian imperial town of Schwäbisch Hall, as a furrier Hoffman travelled along Hanseatic League shipping routes and preached at the borders of german speaking regions, in Baltic cities like Riga, Dorpat and Reval, in Sweden, then in Danish Holstein, in Frisia and the upper Rhine valley. In Strasbourg he met with persecution by the city council and the protestant preachers of the town and was imprisoned for ten years in a dungeon until his death problably in 1543. On his way he seems to have tested – while preaching persuasivly with a radical, personal, spiritualistic and apocalyptic faith – contemporary reformation and especially lutheran doctrines, and rejected most of them. He ran his own printing business in Kiel, collaborated with printers in the clandestine milieu of Strasbourg dissident presses and even managed to get tracts he had written in prison printed in Cologne and the Netherlands for his followers there. After 1530 he had begun to baptise in East Frisia (before returning to Strasbourg for the end of the world, as he expected it to come), protagonists of the anapabtist „kingdom“ of Münster as well as dutch anabaptists like Obbe Philips and especially his disciple Menno Simons, the founder of Mennonitism, followed in Hoffman’s tradition. The editorial project will enable full access to the complete works of Melchior Hoffman, an extensive corpus of texts (ca. 1600 p. in early modern print editions). The texts represent a body of important discourses of ‚radical reformation‘ thinking in relation to theological problems (e.g. christology, the free will, the eucharist, apocalypticism, biblical hermeutics, anticlericalism, gouvernance of church, the sword, mysticism), that have been marked since Karl Holl’s influencial work as the core of essentially lutheran hereticism. Historians of literature and language will find in it a wide range of dialects, literary genres and rhetorical forms, of concepts of religious knowledge and authorship. Historians of the printing press and early modern media transformation will be able to discover the voice and the agency of a „literate, but not learned“ (A. Snyder) lay preacher. The website edition contains, alongside with the edited texts (marked up following TEI-XML encoding schemes) high resolution images of the early modern print page, critical apparatus, scholarly annotations and further transcribed material of collated prints. The print version will provide the edited text with annotations and comprehensive introductions.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Professorin Dr. Heike Sahm
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Professor Dr. Wolfram Horstmann, until 1/2024