Primary Contributors:

Sara Joswig, with Cultures of Knowledge, based on ‘Johannes Eck: Briefwechsel’, ed. Vinzenz Pfnür (Universität Münster, 2011)

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Johann Maier von Eck (1486–1543)

Johann Eck, who was born in Eck near Memmingen in 1486 and died in Ingolstadt in 1543, was a Catholic theologian, priest, and scholar. He is best known as a passionate opponent of the Reformation. Eck participated in key disputations with early Protestants, including Luther, and published texts explaining and defending key tenets of the Roman Catholic Church. He was also commissioned to create a German translation of the Bible, which he published in 1537.

Eck was born Johann (or Johannes) Maier, the son of a farmer, but was taken in and educated by his uncle Martin Maier. After his matriculation at the university of Heidelberg in 1498, he went on to study in Tübingen, Cologne, and Freiburg, where he first signed his name as ‘Johann Eck’. He was ordained in Strasbourg in 1508, then became a doctor of theology in Freiburg. In 1510, he moved to the theological faculty at the university of Ingolstadt. He continued to live there for the rest of his life, and later became rector of local churches where he preached regularly.

Eck did not shy away from argument. In 1514–15, his participation in a dispute about loans and interest made him a controversial figure amongst German humanist scholars. His marginalization in this community was cemented through his critique of Erasmus in 1518, which was publicly disseminated along with Erasmus’s response. The allegations of arrogance, drunkenness, and excessive ambition which followed would be intermittently resurrected by critics for the rest of his life.

Despite initially cordial interactions with Luther, their relationship soured after a report Eck had written on the 95 theses became public. Eck faced Luther and his colleague Karlstadt in a disputation in Leipzig in 1519, which was surrounded by the participants’ increasingly abrasive printed missives. In 1520, after raising the alarm about Luther in Rome, Eck was appointed as a papal protonotary and nuncio responsible for disseminating the papal bull Exsurge Domine in Germany. In the following decades, he went on to intervene in the Swiss debates and various diets and disputes in Germany, including Augsburg, Worms, and Regensburg. In his later years, Eck wrote many letters to Rome advocating for financial and social recognition of his role in defending the Catholic Church. At the same time, he emphasized his role as a lifelong scholar dedicated to his students and to the pursuit of knowledge.

Partners and Additional Contributors

This metadata inventory was collated during a practicum completed with Early Modern Letters Online as part of the MSc in Digital Scholarship at the University of Oxford in 2024. It draws on a preliminary online edition of Eck’s letters collated by Vinzenz Pfnür, with Peter Fabisch and Hans Jörg Gerste. Many thanks to Miranda Lewis for providing training and support, to Millie Gall for creating many new metadata records, to Christoph Kudella for identifying key references, and to the Diözesanarchiv Eichstätt for answering research enquiries.

Key Bibliographic Source(s)

This inventory is based on the preliminary online edition Johannes Eck (1486–1543). Briefwechsel, ‘Internet-Edition in vorläufigem Bearbeitungsstand’, ed. Vinzenz Pfnür, with Peter Fabisch and Hans Jörg Gerste, using preparatory work by Joseph Greving and Klaus Rischar (2011).

Although never completed, the edition includes transcriptions, modern German translations and abstracts of the letters and scholarly commentary for letters up to 1521.

Contents

The inventory catalogues 411 letters dated between 1505 and 1543, which are written in Latin or old German. Several letters do not feature Eck as an addressee or recipient, either because he was part of a group of correspondents or because he was a subject mentioned in the letter. This is the case for the last letter, which was written shortly after his death but is closely related to a doctoral student for whom Eck had previously written a recommendation.

Though Eck and his correspondents reference hundreds of people, the catalogue only records mention of Erasmus or Luther. In Luther’s case, this is limited to references to his person rather than ‘Lutherans’, ‘the Lutheran heresy’, ‘Lutheran teachings’, or other variations on this theme. Currently, only two letters include abstracts: a letter to Kunigunde von Bayern and one to Argula von Grumbach. In addition to these two women, Eck corresponded with over 140 individuals and around twenty groups or organizations. The most enduring correspondent is the monk Nikolaus von Ellenbog at the abbey of Ottobeuren, who exchanged letters with Eck from October 1515 to October 1542. His letters often include more personal details, such as news of Eck’s siblings or rhubarb seeds for his garden.

The majority of the letters are about theological and political issues and are concentrated around Eck’s prominent controversies. Several of them, particularly those clustered around his Bible translation efforts in the 1530s, contain anti-semitic references. This becomes more explicit in the letters surrounding his ‘Judenbüchlein’, published in 1541. Another common thread in his letters is commentary on various kinds of violence. This includes religious persecution, the German peasants’ war, the war with the Ottoman Empire, and wars in North Africa.

The inventory represents all the core metadata available in the online edition, but it is not complete. It is likely to be expanded as further Reformation-related correspondences are included in EMLO.

Provenance

Many letters are drawn from Eck’s printed works, in which they function as dedications, epilogues, or evidence for his argument. For 260 letters, manuscript originals or contemporary manuscript copies remain, scattered among over fifty repositories throughout Europe including Germany, France, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Spain, and the Vatican. The catalogue prioritizes a record of manuscript versions where they exist and does not list all of the published sources recorded in the online edition.

Further resources

Iserloh, Erwin, ‘Eck, Johannes‘, in Neue Deutsche Biographie 4 (1959), pp. 273–5 [Online-Version].

Moore, Walter L., ‘Eck, Johann‘, in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

Trüter, Ingo, Gelehrte Lebensläufe Habitus, Identität und Wissen um 1500 (Göttingen: Universitätsverlag Göttingen, 2017).

Eck’s works in the Post-Reformation Digital Library.

Launch Catalogue