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.