ALBERUS, ERASMUS (c. 1500-1553), German humanist, reformer
and poet, was a native of the village of Sprendlingen near
Frankfort-on-Main, where he was born about the year 1500.
Although his father was a schoolmaster, his early education
was neglected. Ultimately in 1518 he found his way to the
university of Wittenberg, where he studied theology. He had
here the good fortune to attract the attention of Luther and
Melanchthon, and subsequently became one of Luther's most
active helpers in the Reformation. Not merely did he fight
for the Protestant cause as a preacher and theologian, but
he was almost the only member of Luther's party who was able
to confront the Roman Catholics with the weapon of literary
satire. In 1542 he published a prose satire to which Luther
wrote the preface,
Der Barfusser Monche Eulenspiegel und
Alkoran, an adaptation of the
Liber confermitatum of the
Franciscan Bartolommeo Albizzi of Pisa (Pisanus, d. 1401), in which the Franciscan order is held up to ridicule. Of
higher literary value is the didactic and satirical
Buch von
der Tugend und Weisheit (1550), a collection of forty-nine
fables in which Alberus embodies his views on the relations of
Church and State. His satire is incisive, but in a scholarly
and humanistic way; it does not appeal to popular passions
with the fierce directness which enabled the master of Catholic
satire, Thomas Murner, to inflict such telling blows. Several
of Alberus's hymns, all of which show the influence of his
master Luther, have been retained in the German Protestant
hymnal. After Luther's death, Alberus was for a time Diakonus
in Wittenberg; he became involved, however, in the political
conflicts of the time, and was in Magdeburg in 1550-1551,
while that town was besieged by Maurice of Saxony. In 1552
he was appointed General superintendent at Neubrandenburg
in Mecklenburg, where he died on the 5th of May 1553.
Das Buch von der Tugend und Weisheit has been edited by W.
Braune (1892), the sixteen Geistliche Lieder by C. W. Stromberger
(1857). Alberus' prose writings have not been reprinted in recent
times. See F. Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Erasmus Alberus (1894).
This article is from the 1911 edition of an
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