Commentaries on the Acts and Writings of Martin Luther
A hostile history of Luther and his movement by the Catholic controversialist Johannes Cochlaeus, printed in 1549. It tells how its author discovered and stopped the printing of an English New Testament at Cologne.
Cochlaeus spent his life writing against Martin Luther. In his history, printed near Mainz in 1549, he relates that while he was living at Cologne he learned from printers over wine that two Englishmen were having three thousand copies of an English New Testament printed there, that he told Hermann Rinck, a patrician of the city, who had the senate forbid the printers to continue, and that the two fled up the Rhine to Worms with the printed sheets.
The Cologne episode is told here by the man who caused the interruption. He wrote more than twenty years later, calls the translators apostates and their book Luther’s Testament, and never saw them. Arber, who reprints the passage, notes these limits.
Cited in
- 1526, firm date