John McNeill's "History and Character of Calvinism," 8ff.

1.     The Background of the Swiss Reformation, 3-17. Prof. McNeill gives a tour de force, as it were, on Swiss history down to Zwingli and the German, Swiss Reformation. It’s a digest of speedy historical developments over centuries until definitive changes between 1530-1564, one generation. Historically, a rather independent confederacy had developed in the Alpine Valleys, not quite attached to the Reich yet with a “slender attachment to the Empire” (6). An occasional Hapsburg intrusion unified them. Efforts to collect taxes were rebuffed and unsuccessful. They had no representatives at the Reich’s Imperial Diet. Luzern, Zurich, Glarus, Zug and Bern rapidly expanded as cantons. Prof. McNeill states that the Swiss were “culturally retarded” in the 15^th century (9), but Basel later became an high-end academic center and had been a trading center since the 10^th century. The Council of Basel and the fall of Constantinople (1453) brought academic celebrities to Basel as did the development of famed printers in the city with book-distribution centers throughout Europe. Venice and Basel vied with each other as printing centers. Amerbach, John Reuchlin, Sebastian Brant, Conrad Pellican, Beatus Rhenanus, John Froben and, ultimately, Erasmus were associated with Basel. Prof. McNeill notes that the pre-Reformation Swiss Church paralleled that elsewhere in Europe—“abuses, disorders and secularity” of the clergy (13). The leaders of the Swiss Reformation “had undergone the intellectual emancipating of humanistic learning” (15), but we’d add a recovery of the commitment to Sacred Scriptures as the Word of God. Some became flippant, other sought Neo-Platonic aid to rebut Aristotle, and others recovered God’s Word—our view. Historically, Zwingli was God’s agent in Switzerland.