1527: Hans Hergot, immovable type
May 20th, 2020 Headsman
Nuremberg printer Hans Hergot was beheaded in Leipzig on this date in 1527.*
He’d previously published work of revolutionary Thomas Müntzer and he proved his simpatico with that fellow’s millenarian vision by publishing his own tract, Von der newen Wandlung Eynes Christlichen (The New Transformation of Christian Living). It was for this utopian sedition that Hergot lost his life, and no wonder.
The vision is of an egalitarian, agrarian society organized on a parochial basis in which goods are held in common for the use of all, habitation is after the Carthusian pattern, farming and crafts operate harmoniously, and every invidious ground and sign of social distinction has disappeared …
The enemies of Hergot’s revelation on whom he pronounces God’s imminent wrath are the ruling nobility and the Lutheran “scripture wizards” who theologically collude with them, the unjust acquitting the unjust …
It is precisely the eclecticism of Hergot’s prophetic voice that underlies its importance. For it suggests how a far-flung outburst of enthusiasm for divine or evangelical law, as opposed to corrupt and compromised human ordinances, was a connecting thread among myriad reforming orientations int he early sixteenth century — humanist, Lutheran, mystical, and apocalyptic — all of which intersected with the German Peasants’ War and the development of Anabaptism and other strands of Christian social radicalism.
–From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought
There’s a “Hans Hergot Tower” in the Saxon town of Uelzen.
* Overshadowed, on the Reformation martyrology, by Anabaptist Michael Sattler, who burned at Rottenburg on the same date.
On this day..
- 1952: Jan Bula, Czechoslovakian priest - 2019
- Feast Day of St. Baudilus - 2018
- 1622: Sultan Osman II - 2017
- 1691: Mark Baggot, Jacobite spy - 2016
- 1799: Simon Taylor, for indulging in drunkenness - 2015
- 1795: Ignac Martinovics and the Magyar Jacobins - 2014
- 2001: An adult actress stoned to death in Evin prison - 2013
- 1881: Po'olua, "darkened in my mind" - 2012
- 1943: Wilhelm H., pensioner and vandal - 2011
- 1987: Edward Earl Johnson, "I guess nobody is going to call" - 2010
- 2001: Zhang Jun and his gang - 2009
- 1820: Karl Ludwig Sand, a curious strand of German history - 2008
Entry Filed under: 16th Century,Arts and Literature,Beheaded,Businessmen,Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,Execution,Germany,God,History,Martyrs,Power,Public Executions,Religious Figures,Revolutionaries
Tags: 1520s, 1527, christianity, hans hergot, leipzig, may 20, michael sattler, thomas muntzer, utopia
