the mystical theology of valentin weigel - DataSpace at Princeton ...

and Jerome (wearing what looks like a cardinal’s hat). All four of these figures hold a
book in their hands, and are church doctors. Taken together, these figures add up to a
selection of figures from Church history that were particularly acceptable to the
Protestant movement. The Evangelists frame and bound the work on all four corners,
suggesting a biblical framework for reading; Jerome was the Bible’s first translator, and
Augustine’s writings were given pride of place even in later Protestant theology, as the
figure from tradition whose role it was to show that Church tradition supported Protestant
theology. 174 All six human figures are from the early Church, and notably absent are
medieval figures—be they monastic or scholastic—including the founder of Tauler’s own
order, St. Dominic, who might be a logical image with which to adorn an edition of one
of the order’s most famous figures. That is, even from the title page, the Tauler edition is
already reinserted into a Bible-centric reading context. Indeed, Frank Hieronymus has
compiled a catalogue of every text printed by the Petri family’s printing operation, and
observes that Adam Petri used this same title page illustration for other works he
considered particularly “evangelical.” 175 In the catalogue, I found four other instances
with this title page in works that Adam Petri printed. The first is a low German
translation of the four gospels, the second a German version of the teachings of the
Dominican preacher Johannes von Freiburg, the third the Tauler edition, and the fourth a
collection of works by Luther in Latin. 176
174 Melanchthon’s curriculum for the theology department at Wittenberg was almost exclusively a study of
the Bible and biblical languages. However, he did allow a short amount of time for reading Augustine,
since Augustine’s supposed agreement with the Wittenberg reformers would give students a sense that the
Christian tradition confirmed and authorized Lutheran theology. Marcel Nieden, Die Erfindung des
Theologen: Wittenberger Anweisungen zum Theologiestudium im Zeitalter von Reformation und
Konfessionalisierung, (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), 48.
175 Hieronymus, 140.
176 Hieronymus also notes that Petri later used a modified version of this title page without the four church
fathers, leaving only the more “evangelical” collection of figures, namely the two apostles Peter and Paul,
67