Worship, schooling and discipline after 1525

The year 1525

The year 1525 was the year in which the civic Reformation took institutional form. The council adopted the new ordinance on poor relief in January, abolished the Mass in April and created the marriage court in May. The Prophezei opened in June, and throughout the year the council dealt with the Anabaptists and with peasant demands that are discussed in the next section. The Reformierte Kirche des Kantons Zürich lists the poor-relief ordinance of January 1525 as the foundation of a state-organised welfare system, financed from the dissolved monasteries.¹ Its detailed rules, which prohibited begging, organised the distribution of bread and other support from the former Dominican and Augustinian houses and created a class of overseers, are examined in Chapter B.II. For present purposes it suffices to say that the ordinance transformed private and ecclesiastical charity into a public service financed from secularised endowments and administered by civic officials.

The Lord’s Supper replaced the Mass, with communion celebrated four times a year in place of the daily Mass.² The economic effect of this change is easy to overlook. The late medieval church in Zurich, as elsewhere, had been sustained in large part by endowments for masses for the dead: families gave land or rents to a church or chapel so that a priest would say mass for the souls of their deceased members, often in perpetuity. The Reformation declared such masses useless and abolished the altar benefices that paid for them. The endowments passed into the public funds for church, school and poor relief, without any return to the heirs of the donors. The Reformation thus terminated, in one stroke, a whole class of perpetual trusts and redirected their capital, an operation that a modern trust lawyer would describe as a cy-près application on a grand scale, carried out by the sovereign without judicial process.

The Prophezei and public education

On 19 June 1525 the Prophezei held its first session in the choir of the Grossmünster. Every weekday except Friday, at seven in the morning in summer and eight in winter, the clergy and the older students of the city gathered to study a passage of the Old Testament. The text was read in Hebrew, translated into Latin, compared with the Greek of the Septuagint and then expounded, after which Leo Jud translated the results of the exegesis into German for the wider congregation. The first teacher of Hebrew and Greek, Jakob Ceporin, died in December 1525 at the age of twenty-five and was succeeded in March 1526 by the Hebraist Konrad Pellikan. The Prophezei, the workshop in which the Zurich Bible was prepared, served as a model for the Bernese school of theology founded after 1528 and for the academy of Lausanne.³

The HLS describes the Prophezei, later called the Carolinum, as the city’s institution for the training of pastors from 1525.⁴ It was financed from the income of the Grossmünster chapter and, in effect, from the prebends that the agreement of 1523 had converted into salaries. The Carolinum remained Zurich’s higher school until the foundation of the University of Zurich in 1833, an institution that regards the Prophezei as its predecessor.⁵ From a financial point of view, the arrangement was an endowment-funded educational institution under public control, a structure that anticipated the later foundations of Zurich’s cultural and educational life. The link between endowed wealth and public education also shaped the city’s later banking and commercial elite, which was educated in the Carolinum and the Latin schools and which saw support for education as a civic duty.

The parish schools in the countryside developed more slowly, but the principle that the pastor should instruct the young in reading, the catechism and the psalms was established with the Reformation and financed from the parish endowments. The former abbey of Rüti, according to one account, became the site of one of the first public schools in the canton, established by reformers and former monks.⁶ A population that could read the Bible could also read a contract, a bill of exchange and a printed ordinance. The link between Protestant literacy and commercial development is a familiar theme in economic history. In Zurich it had a concrete institutional basis in the use of church property for schools.

Discipline and the moral mandates

The marriage court of 1525 was the core of a system of moral discipline that the council extended in the following years. Mandates against swearing, gambling, excessive drinking, luxury in dress and feasting, and neglect of church attendance were issued and read from the pulpits, while the Ehegaumer in the villages reported offences. The HLS dates the institution of the Ehegaumer to 1526.⁷ A comprehensive morals mandate followed in 1530. The discipline was civic in character. Unlike Geneva, where the consistory under Calvin would later claim a certain independence for the church in matters of excommunication, Zurich kept the power of discipline firmly in the hands of the council and its courts. Bullinger opposed a church discipline exercised separately from the secular power, at least as long as the government was Christian.⁸ The comparison is developed in Chapter B.IV. For the economic history of the city, the result was a culture in which public authority regulated private conduct, including the conduct of business: sumptuary laws limited display, while the council’s courts treated fraud, debt and breach of trust as offences against the Christian commonwealth.

Notes

1. Reformierte Kirche Kanton Zürich, “Reformation von A bis Z”, https://www.zhref.ch/welt/aktuell/500-jahre-reformation/reformation-von-bis-z. ↩
2. Reformierte Kirche Kanton Zürich, “Reformation von A bis Z”, as above. ↩
3. “Prophezei”, Wikipedia (German), https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prophezei, for the date, the schedule, the method, the teachers and the later influence. ↩
4. HLS, “Zurich (canton)”, “La Réforme et l’Eglise d’Etat” (Meinrad Suter), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/fr/articles/007381/2017-08-24/. ↩
5. “Universität Zürich”, Wikipedia (German), https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universit%C3%A4t_Z%C3%BCrich, on the foundation of 1833, the incorporation of the existing higher school of theology (“seit 1525”) into the new university and the university seal, which refers to the Collegium Carolinum as the oldest higher school in Zurich. ↩
6. “Rüti Monastery”, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%BCti_Monastery. ↩
7. HLS, “Zurich (canton)”, “La Réforme et l’Eglise d’Etat” (Meinrad Suter), as above. ↩
8. For the mandate of 1530: wissen.de, “Aus dem Züricher Sittenmandat”, https://www.wissen.de/lexikon/aus-dem-zuericher-sittenmandat (“Zur Durchsetzung einer religiös-sittlichen öffentlichen Ordnung erließ der schweizer Reformator Ulrich Zwingli 1530 u. a. folgende Gebote”, followed by rules on church attendance, taverns and games). For Bullinger: Wikipedia (English), “Heinrich Bullinger”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Bullinger, on the controversy of 1532 with Leo Jud: “Jud proposed exercising church discipline separately from the secular power, while Bullinger argued that separating church and state courts was necessary only if the government were not Christian.” Bullinger’s defence of magisterial discipline is treated further in Chapter B.IV. ↩

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.