Bruce Gordon, Zwingli: God's Armed Prophet (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021), pp. xxi + 349. $32.50.

Abstract

Of the three major Reformers, Zwingli remains the least studied and the least understood. That, as Bruce Gordon points out in his excellent new biography, has a lot to do with the uncomfortable legacy left by Zwingli’s manner of death: the preacher died in battle. Gordon does not shy away from this fact, as many others have, and instead embraces it. The book’s title is not accidental. It is well-chosen and it signals a set of themes that will run throughout the author’s highly engaging account of this oft neglected but profoundly formative leader of the Reformation. The first two chapters, titled ‘Mountain Valley’ and ‘Humanist Priest’, set the tone. The basic contours of Zwingli’s early life are fairly well-known to scholars – in part because there is so little to know; documentary evidence is scarce. Zwingli left few autobiographical insights or written works from his time before Zurich. Gordon makes the most of what there is. As he deftly illustrates, what we do know about Zwingli’s early years is vitally important for understanding his later trajectory. Born in a wealthy peasant family in an alpine village, Zwingli’s ‘formation...was dictated by a deep-rooted attachment to land and people, by the faith of his parents, by an acute sense of the depredations in God’s world, and by ever-present violence’ (p. 11). Landscape motifs, drawing from those mountainous vistas, played a prominent role in Zwingli’s language throughout his life. So, too, did his sympathy for the simple lives and values of his peasant neighbours. Although he would attain international acclaim and participate in a Europe-wide network of correspondence, he remained self-consciously Swiss. At least at first, he saw his main opponents not in the pope but in the traditional Swiss nemesis, the Habsburgs. His patriotism, as Gordon’s subsequent chapters show, ran deep, seemed at times all-consuming, but was also multi-layered and complicated. Zwingli, more than Luther and arguably even Calvin, aimed his Reformation at both faith and society; the two remained inextricably linked. Gordon compellingly argues that only by understanding this link can one begin to make sense of the Reformer’s taking up arms and riding into battle. The enemy was not just internal, but embodied by all those who opposed the preaching of the word and the creation of a unified Reformed Confederation. Zwingli’s early years contain another key to understanding his later career: his passion for learning and his humanist education. Inspired by Erasmus, Zwingli crafted an ethos of spiritual renewal that was based in humanist ideals of the Renaissance. As Gordon observes, Zwingli – perhaps alone among the Reformers – is prepared to count classical figures such as Hercules and Socrates among the blessed. The Zurich Prophezei, which after 1525 gathered scholars to study and ultimately translate into German the entire