An anthology of German literature

by Calvin Thomas

Auf, landsknecht gůt

Und reuters můt,

Last Hutten nit verderben!

[26.] Verjagt; Hutten’s revolutionary writings led to a papal order that he be brought to Rome in chains. Banished on that account by his former friend, the Archbishop of Mainz, he took refuge in the castle of Franz von Sickingen at Ebernburg.

[ XLII. THOMAS MURNER]

1475-ca. 1536. An Alsatian friar of the Franciscan order, Murner traveled much and won great prestige as a scholar. His earliest German writings, the Guild of Fools and the Exorcism of Fools, are metrical satires in the vein of Sebastian Brant. Though himself a sharp critic of clerical abuses, he could not brook the thought of a rupture with the Roman church. In the Great Lutheran Fool he assailed Luther scurrilously. His verse is mostly prosaic and often coarse, but there is a certain elegiac warmth in his song of thirty-five stanzas on the Downfall of the Christian Faith, which was published in the early days of the Lutheran revolt. A part of it is given below, the text according to Kürschner’s Nationalliteratur, Vol. 17¹, page 62.

Ain new Lied von dem undergang des Christlichen glaubens.

[1.] The Bruder Veits Ton, verse-form and tune, was a popular favorite. See Erk und Böhme’s Liederhort, II, 59.

Nun hört, ich wil euch singen,

In brůder Veiten ton,[1]