ABSTRACT
Faced with the manifold insecurities and uncertainties of life, many pre-modern people resorted to ritual methods for protection against misfortune. The medieval church, hoping to dissuade people from the use of magical spells and tokens, offered a range of consecrated objects known as ‘sacramentals’: holy water, consecrated candles, herbs, salt, and certain religious amulets. The sixteenth-century Protestant reformers rejected any claim that ritual, no matter how orthodox, could constrain God’s action or place the divine under an obligation. Johannes Eberlin von Gunzburg had been an Observant Franciscan friar and served as a teacher and preacher in Freiburg and Tubingen in southern Germany. In 1522, he went to Wittenberg and began to write a sequence of powerful polemical pamphlets, especially against the orders of friars, to which he had formerly belonged. Eberlin wrote this pamphlet to join a dispute that had already broken out between Andreas Bodenstein, known as Karlstadt and some Franciscans from Annaberg, Johannes Fritzhans and Franciscus Seyler.
