(Zurich: Christopher Froschauer, 1524)
Wing ZP 539 .F9286
Gift of the McCormick Theological Seminary. Catalogued and Conserved by a grant from the B. H. Breslauer Foundation.
Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531), briefly a Dominican friar, trained as a university theologian and a Roman Catholic priest, became in the second and third decades of the sixteenth century the principal leader of the Reformation in German-speaking Switzerland. Like Luther, he availed himself of the printing press and the vernacular to reach a broad lay audience. Der Hirt or The Shepherd exemplifies the new popular spirituality of the Reformation, which was dependent on the technology of printing. Christopher Froschauer (d. 1569), the printer of this edition, and the leading Protestant printer of Zurich, produced volumes of exceptional beauty. The metal-cut borders here illustrated have been attributed to Hans Holbein (1497-1543).