The printer’s kitchen: the sausage affair of 1522 and the business of print

The meal of 9 March 1522

The first public breach with church law in Zurich took place in the workshop of a printer. On the evening of 9 March 1522, the first Sunday of Lent, the printer Christoph Froschauer served smoked sausages to a small group gathered in his house. Present were two priests, Zwingli and Leo Jud, and several craftsmen, among them the tailor Hans Oggenfuss, the weaver Laurenz Hochrütiner, the shoemaker Niklaus Hottinger and the baker Heinrich Äberli. Zwingli himself, according to the sources, did not eat, but he did not object.¹ The two sausages, according to a contemporary account, had hung in the chimney for a year and were hard and sharp. They were cut into small pieces so that everyone could have a share. The meal was a deliberate provocation. The Lenten fast was a rule of the universal church, enforced in Zurich both by the bishop of Constance and by the council, so that its public breach challenged both authorities at once.

Froschauer justified the meal with an argument drawn from his trade. His workers, who had been labouring day and night to finish an edition of the Pauline epistles in time for the spring book fair at Frankfurt, could not sustain such work on the thin porridge that the Lenten rules allowed.² The defence is revealing. It presents the breach of the fast as a matter of economic necessity in an export business working to a deadline set by an international market. The biblical text being printed, Paul’s letters, was the very text from which Zwingli and his friends drew the argument that Christians were free in matters of food. Production pressure, commercial calendar and theological conviction met in one room.

The council reacted with caution. It opened an inquiry and took theological advice. Although it did not endorse the breach, it avoided harsh punishment: Froschauer was reprimanded and briefly held. A delegation from the bishop of Constance arrived on 7 April 1522 to demand that the fast be enforced, and negotiations followed.³ In the meantime Zwingli preached on the question and on 16 April published the sermon under the title Von Erkiesen und Freiheit der Speisen (“On the choice and freedom of foods”). He argued that Scripture nowhere commanded the Lenten fast, that a Christian might fast or not fast as conscience dictated, and that the church had no authority to bind consciences in such things.⁴ The sermon was printed by Froschauer. The pattern of the next decade was set: a practical conflict, a sermon grounded in Scripture, a printed pamphlet, a council decision.

Two further points about the affair deserve notice. First, the craftsmen present at the meal carried weight in the city’s reform movement. Hottinger, Hochrütiner and their friends belonged to a radical lay circle that would push for faster and more thoroughgoing change, and several of them later appear among the iconoclasts of 1523 and the early Anabaptists. The coalition that carried the Zurich Reformation in 1522 contained from the start the tension between a council that wished to control the pace of change and lay activists who wanted to act on their own reading of Scripture. Secondly, the affair was followed within months by further steps that touched property and personal status. In 1522 Zwingli secretly married Anna Reinhart, a widow, and made the marriage public in a church ceremony on 2 April 1524.⁵ Clerical marriage was more than a private matter. It raised the question of who would inherit a priest’s property and benefice income while signalling that the clergy were to become householders and citizens like others, subject to the same civil law.

Christoph Froschauer and printing as an industry

Christoph Froschauer, whose kitchen gave the Zurich Reformation its first public moment, was an immigrant. He was born around 1490 in Bavaria, according to the most recent biographical dictionary in Kastl near Altötting, and came to Zurich as a journeyman printer in the mid-1510s. He worked for Hans Rüegger, who had run a small printing business in the old town as a sideline since 1504. After Rüegger’s death Froschauer married the widow and took over the workshop.⁶ On 9 November 1519 the city admitted him to its citizenship, according to the civic register “because of his art”.⁷ The phrase is worth pausing over. Zurich, a guild city that guarded access to its citizenship carefully, granted the right free of the usual conditions to a foreign craftsman because it wished to have a printer. The decision anticipates a pattern that recurs in the city’s economic history: the targeted admission of skilled foreigners who brought a technology the city lacked, as with the Locarno refugees of 1555 discussed in Chapter B.V.

Over the next four and a half decades Froschauer built one of the most productive printing houses in the German-speaking world. The Neue Deutsche Biographie credits him with some 800 publications in his lifetime, other estimates speak of over 700 works, and between 1524 and 1564 he issued twenty-seven complete editions of the Bible in German, Latin and English. His list included the Zurich Bible, the works of Zwingli and Bullinger, Conrad Gessner’s encyclopaedic works on animals, Vadian’s geographical writings and Johannes Stumpf’s great chronicle of the Confederation. The complete Zurich Bible, translated from the Hebrew and the Greek, appeared in 1531 in a luxury folio edition after a first single-volume edition in 1530. The Zentralbibliothek Zürich notes that the translation was complete several years before Luther’s full Bible of 1534.⁸ The folio of 1531 carried woodcuts after designs by Hans Holbein the Younger, and later editions were illustrated by the Strasbourg artist Heinrich Vogtherr the Elder, whom Froschauer brought into his workshop.⁹

A printing house of this size was a capital-intensive enterprise. It needed presses, type, a supply of paper, skilled compositors and pressmen, a distribution network and working capital to carry stock between printing and sale. Froschauer took each of these steps. By 1528 he had expanded into part of a former religious house, where he installed additional presses, a type foundry and a bindery. He acquired the former beguine house of St. Verena, dissolved in the Reformation, which became his residence and business premises under the name “Zur Froschau”.¹⁰ In the autumn of 1535 he set up a paper mill on the Werd island in the Limmat, run by his brother Eustachius, to secure the supply of his most expensive raw material. He travelled regularly to the Frankfurt book fair, which was the clearing house of the European book trade, and timed his publications to its spring and autumn sessions.¹¹ The Reformation, in other words, made a Zurich export industry out of the printed word. Bibles, catechisms, sermons and polemical tracts from the Froschauer press travelled down the Rhine to Frankfurt and from there to the Netherlands, England and eastern Europe.

The relationship between the printer and the state was close and supervised. From the 1520s onward printed works in Zurich were subject to censorship by the ecclesiastical and civic authorities, a system that remained in force until the end of the Ancien Régime in 1798. Froschauer printed what the reformers wrote and the council permitted. In return he enjoyed a position close to a privileged supplier of the new public church. The price of a Zurich Bible, one and a half guilders, put it within reach of prosperous artisans and parish churches.¹² After Froschauer died of the plague on 1 April 1564, his nephew Christoph the Younger carried on the business until 1585. Through later mergers the firm passed into the house that became Orell Füssli, which in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was among the largest printing enterprises in Switzerland and, as a security printer, produced the banknotes of the Swiss National Bank.¹³¹⁴ A line thus runs, with some imaginative licence, from the sausage supper of 1522 to the paper money of the modern Swiss franc.

Notes

1. swissinfo.ch, “Ein frevlerisches Mahl: Wurstessen im reformatorischen Zürich”, https://www.swissinfo.ch/ger/culture/ein-frevlerisches-mahl_wurstessen-im-reformatorischen-zuerich/43017010, which lists the participants and notes that Zwingli watched without eating. The date of 9 March 1522 is also given by the Reformierte Kirche Kanton Zürich, “Reformation von A bis Z”, https://www.zhref.ch/welt/aktuell/500-jahre-reformation/reformation-von-bis-z. ↩
2. swissinfo.ch, “Ein frevlerisches Mahl”, as above, on the pressure of work before the Frankfurt fair and the argument from the workers’ need for nourishment. ↩
3. swissinfo.ch, “Ein frevlerisches Mahl”, as above, on the council’s inquiry and the episcopal delegation of 7 April. The arrest of Froschauer is mentioned in “Affair of the Sausages”, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affair_of_the_Sausages; Barbara Hutzl-Ronge, “Froschauers Wurstessen – der Bayer, der die Zürcher Reformation einläutete”, Sonntagsblatt, 9 March 2022, https://www.sonntagsblatt.de/artikel/kultur/froschauers-wurstessen-bayer-zuercher-reformation, speaks of a reprimand. ↩
4. Reformierte Kirche Kanton Zürich, “Reformation von A bis Z”, as above, on the publication of “Von erkiesen und Fryheit der Spysen” in 1522; swissinfo.ch, as above, on the argument that fasting was a free matter and not a sin. ↩
5. HLS, “Zwingli, Huldrych” (Christian Moser), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/010447/2014-03-04/, giving the marriage in 1522 and the public church procession on 2 April 1524. ↩
6. bref Magazin, “Froschauers Vermächtnis”, https://brefmagazin.ch/artikel/froschauers-vermachtnis/; Hutzl-Ronge, Sonntagsblatt, 9 March 2022, as above, names the widow as Elsa. ↩
7. Paul Leemann-van Elck, “Froschauer, Christoph der Ältere”, Neue Deutsche Biographie 5 (1961), https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz17825.html, for the origin (noting the divergence between Kastl near Altötting and the “Neuburg bei Oetting” of the older Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie) and quoting the register entry “seiner Kunst wegen”; the date of 9 November 1519 is given by bref Magazin, “Froschauers Vermächtnis”, as above. ↩
8. Zentralbibliothek Zürich, “Reformation”, https://www.zb.uzh.ch/en/fokus/beitrag/reformation. ↩
9. bref Magazin, “Froschauers Vermächtnis”, as above, which gives “over 700” works and lists these titles. Leemann-van Elck, NDB 5 (1961), as above, for about 800 publications, the 27 complete Bibles and the illustrators. ↩
10. “Kirchen und Klöster in der Stadt Zürich im Mittelalter”, Wikipedia (German), https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirchen_und_Kl%C3%B6ster_in_der_Stadt_Z%C3%BCrich_im_Mittelalter, entry on St. Verena. ↩
11. Hutzl-Ronge, Sonntagsblatt, 9 March 2022, as above, which speaks of four additional presses, a type foundry and a bindery in premises of a former monastery. bref Magazin, “Froschauers Vermächtnis”, as above; Leemann-van Elck, NDB 5 (1961), as above, for the Frankfurt fairs and for the paper mill of 1535. ↩
12. Swissinfo (Bochsler), “‘Der Preis ist nicht hoch, gross aber der Nutzen’: Die Zürcher Bibel aus der Druckerei Froschauer”, 30 April 2017, https://www.swissinfo.ch/ger/wirtschaft/die-zuercher-bibel-aus-der-druckerei-froschauer_-der-preis-ist-nicht-hoch-gross-aber-der-nutzen/43133616. ↩
13. Leemann-van Elck, NDB 5 (1961), as above; Hutzl-Ronge, Sonntagsblatt, as above, on the plague. bref Magazin, “Froschauers Vermächtnis”, as above, on censorship until 1798, on the descent to Orell Füssli and its position as the largest Swiss printing house in the nineteenth century. ↩
14. “Orell Füssli”, Wikipedia (German), https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orell_F%C3%BCssli, stating that the firm first printed trial banknotes for the SNB in 1909 and that Orell Füssli Sicherheitsdruck has been the sole printer of Swiss banknotes since the sixth series introduced from 1976. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of September 2025.