Scultetus Annales

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VirginiaHuguenot

Puritanboard Librarian
Is anyone acquainted with the Annales of (Vide?) Sculteti (or Sculterus)? I've seen it cited by J.A. Wylie and Philip Schaff among other church historians, but have found little information about it.

[Edited on 8-6-2006 by VirginiaHuguenot]
 
I think this is it: "Abraham Scultetus (1566-1624) wrote a history of the first 20 years of the Reformation, Annals of the Renewal of the Gospel Throughout Europe, published between 1618 and 1620."

Abraham Scultetus was a German Reformed historian, professor at the University of Heidelberg, chaplain to Elector Frederick IV and a Palatine delegate to the Synod of Dordt.

[Edited on 8-6-2006 by VirginiaHuguenot]
 
From Euan Cameron, Interpreting Christian History: The Challenge of the Churches' Past, p. 140:

It is only fair to point out that, of the various kinds of Protestants, Lutherans were much the most aggressively exclusive. Those who followed the "reformed" tradition of south Germany and Switzerland (whom Lutherans and many historians have described as "Calvinists") took a slightly different approach. A case in point is the Annals of the Renewal of the Gospel Throughout Europe published by the Heidelberg court preacher and theologian Abraham Scultetus (1566 -- 1624) in 1618-1620. This two-volume work, more modest than Osiander's account, contained a year-by-year survey of the Reformation over its first 20 years between 1516 and 1535. Scultetus adopted the somewhat archaic "annalistic" mode: that is, he listed the events of each year in a series of relatively disjointed paragraphs, with little attempt to construct a continuous narrative. However, he had a number of ideological reasons for this apparently retrospective approach. First, Scultetus saw his work as a continuation of the Old Testament histories, and of the early Church histories of Eusebius and his continuators. Just as the Israelites were told not to forget their servitude in Egypt, so the Protestants should not forget this "spritual servitude" under the "Roman Pharaoh." Secondly, Scultetus regarded the Reformation not as a single thread of development, but as a bundle of parallel strands, where different leaders in different communities and churches pressed for essentially the same program. In each of his chapters, once the Reformation was established, he provided blow-by-blow accounts of developments in each country, city, and town in turn. He was particularly well informed about events in East-Central Europe. He occasionally mocked Luther's failings; he quoted Melanchthon's disappointed and angry letter written when Luther had celebrated his wedding suddenly, in the midst of the massacres of peasants after the revolt of early 1525. However, in the main Scultetus appeared more inclusive, where the Lutherans were exclusive. In this he, no less than Osiander, represented the theological stance of his confession. The rhetoric of German "Calvinists" habitually encouraged all Protestants to make common cause. They denied Luther the status of sole hero of the Reformation that his worshippers sought to give him. That was how they asserted their claim to unite and lead the diverse Protestant confessions of the early seventeenth century.
 
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