Antoine Marcourt

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Antoine Marcourt (* around 1490 in Lyon , † 1561 in Saint-Julien-en-Genevois ) was a theologian and reformer of French-speaking Switzerland . The doctor of the Sorbonne was a good speaker and tried and tested in religious polemics against Catholics. First arguments with the Syndic of the Sorbonne Natalis Beda (Noël Bedier) forced him to leave Paris in 1531. He was installed as a preacher in Neuchâtel on the recommendation of Guillaume Farel .

Life

In 1533 he published Le livre des marchands ... composé par le sire Pantapole, ..., proche voisin du Seigneur Pantagruel , printed by his Lyonesian compatriot Pierre de Vingle . This book was reprinted in London as early as 1534. With the choice of the name Gargantua, Marcourt leaned closely to the humanist François Rabelais , and when he made his Pantapole the neighbor of Pantagruel, he put himself close to Rabelais and his criticism of church conditions.

Marcourt's next writing was directed against Natalis Beda. Under his leadership, the opposition between the humanistic, Reformation-inclined artistic faculty and the conservative theologians, who had spoken out against Lefèvre d'Étaples and Bishop Briçonnet in 1524 and against Erasmus of Rotterdam in 1526, intensified . At the suggestion of Johannes Calvin , the Rector of the Sorbonne, Nicolas Cop, had revealed the contrast between the two schools in a speech in 1533. The reformers had to flee Paris in early 1534. For the moment the keeper of the old man had won, but he soon fell out of favor with the king and - unintentionally - gave rise to another writing ascribed to Antoine Marcourt: La Confession et raison de la foy de maistre Noël Beda. Marcourt claimed that after King François I had chased Beda away, a change of heart had taken place in exile in favor of the Evangelicals, and wanted to let his bogus denomination take effect in favor of the Evangelicals.

Marcourt attracted general attention through the so-called Affaire des Placards . On the night of October 17-18, 1534, copies of an anti-Catholic treatise were hung in Paris, in front of and in Amboise Castle , where King François I was staying, and in several cities in France ; it strongly criticized the abuse of the mass, which it called it so, and tried to present the Evangelicals to the king as the true, loyal subjects. It was entitled: Articles veritables sur les horribles / grandz & importables abuz de la messe papalle inventee directement contre la saincte Cene de Nostre Seigneur, seul Médiateur et seul Sauveur Jesus Christ . The author and printer were initially unknown. This was an outrageous provocation for the king, as he attached great importance to an agreement with Rome and felt obliged to nip any heresy in the bud. He acted quickly and harshly: on November 13, 1534, a Protestant was sentenced to death at the stake, followed by six more in January 1535, after an edict had previously been issued against the printers. The placard affair can be seen as the prelude to the religious wars that rocked France for almost six decades.

In 1532 representatives of the Waldensians met in Chanforan (in Piedmont) with Guillaume Farel and Pierre-Robert Olivétan , who had been a Preceptor in Neuchâtel since 1531 , and asked for a translation of the Bible into their native French. Olivétan did the job; he revised the translation of the New Testament by Lefèvre d'Étaples and independently translated the Old Testament from Hebrew and Aramaic. 1535 appeared: " La bible qui est toute la saincte escripture ". Co-editors were Antoine Marcourt and the printer Pierre de Vingle in Neuchâtel. This Bible is the original form of all French Evangelical Bibles ; as early as 1540 it was reprinted by Jean Girard in Geneva, where Antoine Marcourt had moved in 1538.

In Geneva, Antoine Marcourt was entrusted with the task of reorganizing the church there - more liberally - after Jean Calvin and Guillaume Farel had been expelled . Farel took Marcourt's place in Neuchâtel - Calvin reached Strasbourg via Basel. Marcourt did not look happy in Geneva; he was probably overwhelmed with the dispute between the supporters of a radical church order, an open regional church and an episcopal church. Eventually Roman Catholicism threatened to regain the city. In 1541 the city council sent a call for help to Calvin and Farel, and in the autumn they entered the city and their old offices triumphantly. Calvin had set conditions for his new beginning in Geneva - one of which was the elimination of all forces that did not support his consistent line of church discipline - and Antoine Marcourt was one of them. It now became clear to him that he was born to be a polemical warrior and writer, but not a church leader. He soon took up the subject of mass again in literary form in the book Declaration de la Messe - Pierre Viret published it under the pseudonym Cephas Geranius and had it printed in Geneva in 1544. In it he took up an old and still current topic; the work referred to in the title is none other than the Articles veritables of 1534.

With the death of the English King Henry VIII on January 28, 1547, the guardian of the ten-year-old Edward, his uncle Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset , a staunch Protestant, saw his hour for a reform of the English Church based on the German or Swiss model. In the same year an English edition of the Declaration de la Messe : A declaration of the masse appeared under the dummy address Wyttenberge: prynted by Hans Luft . The 1548 edition no longer appeared anonymously.

In 1561, Antoine Marcourt died in St. Julien-en-Genevois. Posterity soon forgot the hot spurs of Paris and Neuchâtel and the moderate reformer of Geneva - and his writings with him. His placards had once set a beacon that plunged France into civil war; His other writings have rather contributed to the fact that the Reformation in England progressed peacefully and that it ran along channels that were more influenced by the Swiss and Upper Germans.

Works

  • Le livre des marchands, fort utile à toutes gens, nouvellement composé par le sire Pantapole, bien expert en telle affaire, proche voisin du Seigneur Pantagruel . Imprimé à Corinthe, le 22 d'août l'an 1533, [Neuchâtel, Pierre de Vingle] - reprinted as: The boke of marchauntes, right necessarye vnto all folkes. Newly made by the lorde Pantapole, right expert in search busynesse, nere neyghbour vnto the lorde Pantagrule . [London, 1534]
  • La Confession et raison de la foy de maistre Noël Beda, docteur en théologie et sindique de la sacrée Université à Paris, envoyée au très chrestien roy de France, Françoys . [Neuchâtel, Pierre de Vingle, 1534]
  • Articles veritables sur les horribles / grandz & importables abuz de la messe papalle inventee directement contre la saincte Cene de Nostre Seigneur, seul Médiateur et seul Sauveur Jesus Christ . [Neuchâtel, Pierre de Vingle, 1534]

Co-editor of

  • La bible qui est toute la saincte escripture, en laquelle sont contenues la vieil testament et le nouveau, translatez en Francoys . [Serrières, Pierre de Vingle, 1535]
  • Declaration de la Messe, Le fruict dicelle, La cause, & le moyen, pour quoy & comment on la doibt maintenir. Nouuellement reueue & augmetee, par son premier Autheur . [Pierre Viret - pseudonym: Cephas Geranius - Geneva, Jean Michel 1544] - reprinted as: A declaration of the masse, the fruyte therof the cause & the meane … Newly perused and augmented by the fyrst author therof… Translated newly out of Frenche into Englyshe. Wyttenberge: prynted by Hans Luft - A declaration of the masse… Newely perused and augmented by the first author therof. M. Anthony Marcort… Translated… into Englysh [London, John Day, 1548].

literature

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