The Life of David Chytraeus: Consecrated to the Memory of Posterity

A life assembled by those who knew him.

David Chytraeus—hearer of Martin Luther, pupil and household member of Philip Melanchthon, historian, theologian, university reformer, and participant in the work that produced the Formula of Concord—was one of the most learned and widely respected Lutheran scholars of the sixteenth century.

This book is not a biography in the modern sense. It is something rarer: a memorial archive assembled immediately after Chytraeus’s death by his son, colleagues, students, relatives, pastors, fellow theologians, jurists, physicians, schoolmasters, and poets. Official notices from the University of Rostock stand beside funeral orations, Lucas Bacmeister’s German funeral sermon, private letters, eyewitness recollections, Greek epicedes, Latin elegies, epitaphs, anagrams, and other memorial poems.

Together these witnesses trace Chytraeus’s remarkable course from Swabia to Tübingen and Wittenberg, where he heard Luther’s final lectures on Genesis and entered Melanchthon’s household, and then to nearly half a century of teaching at Rostock. They remember his work as a biblical interpreter, historian, chronologist, designer of church and school orders, counselor to princes, reformer in Austria and Styria, and defender of Lutheran doctrine.

The portrait is affectionate but not bland. Chytraeus appears as a man of immense learning and disciplined method, yet also as one naturally inclined to anger, melancholic in temperament, cautious in judgment, worn by controversy, repeatedly bereaved, and afflicted by years of severe illness. The accounts of his final days preserve his confession of faith, reception of absolution and the Lord’s Supper, meditation upon Scripture, and peaceful death among pastors, family, and friends.

This complete English translation preserves the order and distinct voices of the original Latin, German, and Greek materials. It includes an editor’s introduction, a note on the text and translation, a chronology of Chytraeus’s life, historical and textual annotations, a guide to the witnesses and contributors, and a selected bibliography.

For readers of Lutheran history, Reformation theology, early modern universities, Christian humanism, and Neo-Latin literature, The Life of David Chytraeus opens an extraordinary window onto how a learned Christian community remembered its teacher—and what it believed a learned Christian life ought to be.