Melanchthons Briefwechsel. Personen ed. by Heinz Scheible (review)

Reviewed by: Melanchthons Briefwechsel. Personen ed. by Heinz Scheible Timothy J. Wengert Melanchthons Briefwechsel. Personen. Edited by Heinz Scheible. Stuttgart/Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2003–2022. 4,926 pp. in 6 volumes. When Heinz Scheible was named head of the Melanchthon-Forschungsstelle [-Research Center] in Heidelberg in the 1960s, one could hardly have anticipated the remarkable production over the next sixty years, as a changing team of scholars worked and are still working on the critical edition of Philip Melanchthon’s correspondence (Melanchthons Briefwechsel [MBW]). To get some sense of the enormity of the task: the number of letters, memoranda, opinions, prefaces, and other items in Melanchthon’s correspondence is more than the combined total for Martin Luther and Erasmus of Rotterdam—nearly 10,000! Despite several attempts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to publish Melanchthon’s correspondence, the number of new letters, redated letters, and reworked letters (often based upon recently discovered autographs) now available in MBW is staggering. Melanchthon was in epistolary contact with other scholars, government officials, and rulers all over Europe. The first and foremost project for MBW involved the proper dating, identification, and summary of these letters. The result was the publication of digests [German: Regesten], beginning in 1977 and completed with volume nine in 1998. The letters themselves are appearing in separately numbered volumes (Texte), which began to [End Page 466] be published in 1991 and, as of 2022, had reached vol. 23 (1553–54), now under the able editorial leadership of Christine Mundhenk and overseen by the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences. From the beginning of the project, Scheible had insisted upon using what was then the very latest in computer programs. As a result, the digests are now available online (https://melanchthon.hadw-bw.de/regesten.html), and the Texts are being produced using the very latest and best tools. Also, from the onset of this project, Scheible began the task of assembling as much information as possible about the people named in the correspondence and appearing in the Regesten. Beginning in 2003, as a project for his retirement, Scheible began to publish this information (under the rubric: Personen), which included a brief description of each person’s family of origin, career, birth and death dates, places in Melanchthon’s correspondence where they either sent or received letters or were mentioned by Master Philip or by others, and the most up-to-date bibliographic information. Now, two decades later in 2022, the final volume (T-Z) has appeared. When compared to the still useful three-volume Contemporaries of Erasmus: A Biographical Register of the Renaissance and Reformation, edited by Peter G. Bietenholz and Thomas Brian Deutscher (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985–87), the Personen registry of MBW provides more detail, contains more up-to-date information, and covers a far wider swath of sixteenth-century figures. In fact, it is probably the most complete register of such figures in existence. Even libraries that cannot afford to own the correspondence itself should consider purchasing these six volumes. They contain an astounding wealth of information about members of the German nobility, leaders in imperial and territorial cities, scholars, pastors, theologians, and other important figures from central Europe and beyond. Anyone interested in historical research from this period must always be ready to mine this treasure trove of biographical and bibliographical information. Heinz Scheible turned ninety-two in August of 2023. His work—like that of the editor of Erasmus’s correspondence, Percy Stafford Allen—is destined to assist scholars well into the next century and should be remembered and celebrated for this remarkable literary achievement. [End Page 467] Timothy J. Wengert Hackettstown, New Jersey Copyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press and Lutheran Quarterly, Inc

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