ABSTRACT
According to Wilhelm Lucke’s reassessment of the chronological sequence of the constituent elements of ‘The Fifteen Confederates,’ the first to be written, numbers seven, two, three and four in the collected work, date from the period before Eberlin was in open conflict with the Franciscan order. The remainder of the confederates chronicle a crucial phase in his development as a Reformer, beginning with his break with the order and ending with his decision to go to Wittenberg. From the perspective of the present investigation, they may be divided into two groups. Numbers one, five and six, eight and nine, and thirteen and fourteen were written amid the conflict which led to his expulsion from the order, or shortly thereafter. In them, Eberlin develops his distinctive vision of the evils perpetrated on Christendom by the clergy and the special role of the mendicants in this process. Eberlin’s conciliatory attitude to the papacy and those he perceives as its allies in the earliest confederates here gives way to a vehement denunciation of them. As his bitterness increases, he moves ever closer to a break with Rome and rejection of the medieval ecclesiastical structure. However, in this he continues to draw on medieval visions of reform as well as those emanating from Wittenberg and the humanists. Of note is his new adherence to the cause of Ulrich von Hutten. Numbers ten to twelve and fifteen are much more reflective works, written while Eberlin spent the summer with a cousin in Lauingen. Here he does not so much expand his anticlerical polemics as give them greater depth and incorporate them into his vision of reform. This deepening of his polemics betrays the unmistakable influence of a more careful study of Luther’s reform proposals. Increasingly in these writings, Eberlin adopts the suggestions of Luther, and in the last begins to deal with the central theological issues of the Wittenberg movement. Nonetheless, it would be inaccurate to describe Eberlin as a Lutheran at this point in his career. He himself continued to regard reforming suggestions from Reuchlin to Luther as part of a unified process, although his attack on his former brethren indicates that he no longer saw the Franciscan Observance as part of that process. Luther had become for him a prominent symbol of the reforming movement, but was not yet the symbol of it.
