The Correspondence of Wolfgang Capito, Volume 1 : 1507-1523 (review)

This is the first volume (of three) of an exceptionally valuable project. Wolfgang Capito was a protagonist of many of the most crucial events of the first years of the Reformation. As a member of the circle of Basel humanists, he was an eager admirer of Erasmus, sharing the older man's ambivalent attitude to Luther. While he admired the Wittenberg reformer he had misgivings about his radicalism and the schismatic tendency of his teaching, and he was consequently cautious about committing himself wholeheartedly to the evangelical cause. This cautious, and many would argue equivocating, nature, became an enduring characteristic of Capito's career, earning him Luther's contempt and a measure of distrust among colleagues and collaborators even after he had definitively chosen for the Reformation. This reputation for deviousness was only reinforced when Capito accepted a position with Albrecht of Brandenburg, Luther's adversary in the Indulgences controversy, but a thoughtful patron of scholarship and the arts. In Mainz Capito made much of his role in pointing Albrecht toward restraint in his responses to Luther; yet he also seems not to have decided whether his interests were best served by pursuing patronage opportunities within the old church or throwing in his lot with the reformers. In the event he did both, first securing a benefice in Strassburg through Albrecht's intervention, then defending it against other claimants by converting to the Reformation. Capito was a considerable scholar, and seemed destined for a leadership role in Strassburg. But indecisiveness proved his undoing. It is hard to decide whether this reflected a principled rejection of narrow partisanship, or an innate desire to conform his views to those of interlocutors of very polarized views. In fact, his desire to minimize points of conflict was a consistent thread in his relations with very disparate groups, whether this be his role in the debates between followers of Luther and Zwingli, his reluctance to persecute Anabaptists, or in his tendency toward (even advocacy of) Nicodemism. So this is an interesting career at the center of affairs. The letters published here cover the period up to the decisive move to Strassburg in 1523. Capito's letters were first gathered as a corpus by Olivier Millet, and listed, but not published in extensio, in his monograph of 1982. A number are of course known from their appearance in the published correspondence of Luther, Erasmus, and other contemporaries. For this edition Rummel has therefore followed the sensible principle of publishing the letter in a complete version, where the text is not accessible in a modern edition (broadly, published since 1900). Other letters are noted in their correct chronological sequence, with a summary of the contents. The value of the collection is greatly enhanced by the inclusion of material published as the prefaces of Capito's works; these are especially revealing of Capito's network of friendships, and the relationships to which he aspired. It is interesting, for instance, to range his preface to a collection of Luther's writings (letter 19) alongside his dedicatory letter to Albrecht of Brandenburg (32). The valuable account of the Leipzig Disputation (31) is very different in its treatment of Eck to the dismissive tone of the preface to Karlstadt's attack on Eck in 1518 (15a). In summary, this is a most interesting beginning to an enterprise that will, when complete, shed fascinating light on the dilemmas and opportunities that faced a generation caught up in the turbulence caused by the Reformation controversies.