ABSTRACT
Eberlin’s anticlerical asides in the works written in Wittenberg in 1522 and early 1523 suggest that, like his mentor, he withdrew from direct anticlerical agitation, but not from an anticlerical stance. This suspicion is confirmed by the appearance of ‘Against the Profaners’ with its scathing denunciations of the clergy and identification of ordination as a mark of the apocalyptic beast. That Eberlin would adopt such a radically anticlerical stance after his campaign to define and enlist support for an evangelical clergy, especially in the wake of the culmination of that campaign as embodied in the persons of the seven pious priests, indicates that anticlerical diatribes remained an important polemical weapon for the Reformers. The value of this weapon, and the importance which the Reformers attached to it, is indicated more clearly by the 1523 campaign against the Franciscans.
