Records of the Zurich Council on the Reformation, 1519–1533
Decrees, court sentences and witness statements of the city council of Zurich from the years of its Reformation, edited from the city’s archives. They include the mandates on baptism and the sentence on Felix Manz.
Read the text at archive.org ↗English extracts (Kidd, Documents of the Continental Reformation, nos. 171–213) ↗
Egli’s collection prints or summarises, under running numbers, documents from the archives of Zurich: the council’s mandates, the minutes of hearings, and sentences. For the Reformation in the city they are the official record, made at the time by the authority that took the decisions. Where a decree is lost, Egli fills the gap with extracts from Zurich chroniclers such as Heinrich Bullinger and Gerold Edlibach, and says so.
They show what the council ordered and what witnesses told it. They are the record of one side in the conflict with the Anabaptists: the statements of the accused survive only as the court’s clerks wrote them down. Many pieces are given in summary, partly in the editor’s words, and are paraphrased here.
Cited in
- 29 January 1523, firm date
- 21 January 1525, firm date