The Inner Word and the Outer World

The Inner Word and the Outer World Synopsis

This study focuses on one of the most idiosyncratic and interesting figures of the German Reformation, Sebastian Franck (1499-1542). Franck's life traces the margins of sixteenth-century religious dissent and the tolerance of heterodoxy. The book details Franck's appropriation of late medieval mysticism and humanism, which he shaped into a critique of all religious institutions and ideologies of his day, Catholic, Protestant, and Anabaptist. The work also examines the responses of religious and political authorities to Franck's critique; responses which revealed the fissures in the hierarchies of rule of the early Reformation, and the possibility for dissent in the age of religious reform.