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Jerome Zanchi was born February 2, 1516 in the city of Alazano near Bergamo in the north of Italy. ¹ The death of his parents when he was fourteen precipitated his entrance into the local monastery of the Augustinian Order of Regular Canons. During his early days in the order he formed a close friendship with Massililiano Celso Martinengo² and in the Spring of 1541 they both transferred to the priory of San Frediano in Lucca where they fell under the influence of the newly elected prior Peter Martyr Vermigli on his way to becoming the most well known of the Italian reformers. ³

Under Martyr's tutelage Zanchi partook not only in daily exposition of the Scriptures from an evangelical perspective but was also introduced to several of the leading Reformation thinkers of Germany and Switzerland. ⁴ During his time at San Frediano he also prepared a synopsis of Protestant theology that was particularly indebted to John Calvin's Institutes to which Zanchi gave the title Compendium praecipuorum capitum Docrinae Christianae .⁵

Peter Martyr's direct influence upon his charge proved to be short lived. In 1542, only fifteen months after his arrival, he fled Lucca in the wake of his rising fame fearing the Inquisition. Despite Martyr's absence both Zanchi and Martenengo demonstrated the lasting impression that his teaching must have made upon them. They stayed on at the priory after his departure teaching theology and Greek respectively. By 1551 the reputation of Martenengo had become such that, like Martyr, he fled north. He intended to make his way to England, but while in Basel was prevailed upon by Calvin and the marquis Galeazzo Caracciolo to answer a call to minister to the Italian congregation of Geneva.

In October of the same year Zanchi felt the pressure to be too great and he followed his friends northward leaving the "Babylonian captivity" of his native land. ⁶ After leaving Italy his travels brought him into contact with many of the key personalities of the Reformation. He visited with Wolfgang Musculus in Basel, Pierre Viret in Lausanne, and John Calvin and Theodore Beza (not to mention his good friend Martenengo) in Geneva. He intended to work his way northward across the English Channel in hopes of joining Peter Martyr in Edwardsian England, but before he was able to do so Zanchi received a request from Jakob Sturm, the chief magistrate of Strasbourg, to become professor of Old Testament at the College of St. Thomas, which was under the rectorship of Johann Sturm.⁷

Zanchi's experience at Strasbourg was rarely peaceful. ⁸ Almost from the first night of his arrival there he became embroiled in disagreements with Johann Marbach, the leading Lutheran preacher of the city. After the death of Jakob Sturm in 1553 the spirit of religious freedom that he had fostered disappeared. Marbach made it his goal to undermine the influence of the Reformed theology and instal confessional Lutheranism. As head of the collegiate Chapter of St. Thomas, Marbach required all professors to subscribe to the invariata form of the Augsburg Confession. Zanchi refused to sign.

On October 30, 1553 Peter Martyr, fleeing the accession of Mary in England, returned to Strasbourg and was offered a position at the College on the condition that he sign the Augsburg Confession. On December 22 of that year he decided that he could do so in good conscience but with the proviso that the document needed to be "rightly and profitably understood." ⁹ Zanchi followed suit and signed reluctantly noting that he only agreed with the document modo orthodoxe intelligatur, "as understood in an orthodox manner." ¹⁰ Marbach believed, not without cause, that they had signed the document with their fingers crossed. He continued to press forward with the Lutheranizing of Strasbourg thereby alienating Zanchi and his mentor. Within three years Martyr, finding it impossible to continue there, accepted an offer from the city of Zurich to succeed Conrad Pellican as professor of Hebrew.

Zanchi too felt the pressure keenly. In October 1556, just months after the departure of his friend, and in the midst of his own troubles with Marbach, his wife of three years, Violante, died after an extended illness. In 1557 Celso Marenengo likewise passed away. Finally in 1561 the troubles in Strasbourg came to a head: Marbach brought charges against Zanchi to Johann Sturm over his doctrines of the Lord's Supper, predestination and free will. Sturm reluctantly brought the matter before the Collegiate Chapter of the college which passed it on to the Church Convention and finally to the magistrates of the city.

Zanchi was eventually exonerated of heterodoxy in the matter, but this controversy seemed only to spawn others. By the summer of 1563 the rift between himself and his Lutheran colleagues had become so great that he chose to accept an invitation to become the pastor of a northern Italian congregation in in the city of Chiavenna.¹¹ But even Chiavenna was not without conflict for him. After ministering only a few years, plague, anti- Trinitarians, and factionalism led him to take up Prince Frederick III's invitation to succeed Zacharias Ursinus as professor of dogrmaic theology at the University of Heidelberg.

He assumed his duties at Heidelberg in the winter of 1568 and began work on what might ultimately have turned into a massive Reformed theological system. In 1572, resonding to a request from Frederick III, he published a volume on the Trinity. ¹² In fairly short order Zanchi completed De natura Dei, but it was not published until 1577. A third major work on creation was completed but did not go to press in Zanchi's lifetime. ¹³ He began another work, which was to cover the Fall, sin, the law, and perhaps sotereology as well, but he had only completed half of it when, on October 26, 1576, Frederick III died.¹⁴ He was succeeded as Prince Elector of the Palatinate by his son Ludwig VI, whose accession precipitated the rise of Lutheran dominance in Heidelberg. Zanchi abandoned his theological systematizing and seems never to have resumed work on it.

Once again Zanchi was forced to leave his home. During Ludwig's electorate Johann Casimir, Count Palatine and the second son of Frederick III, organized the Casimirianum at Nesustadt-an-der-Hardt as a home for the Reformed professors. There Zanchi, "a withered old man, but still, by God's good favor, in good health," taught as professor of New Testament.¹⁵ When Ludwig died in 1583 he was succeeded by the Reformed Frederick IV. Zanchi was invited to take up his post once again on the other side of the Rhine in Heidelberg, but he declined. Instead, weary and in declining health, he elected to retire and remain in Neustadt. For his years of service Johann Casimir granted him an annual pension.

The last years of his life were marked by failing eyesight which slowed his writing and editing. In 1585, at the age of sixty-nine, he saw to the publication of De religione christiana fides, a confession of faith written for his children. ¹⁶ Five years later, on November 19, 1590, Jerome Zanchi died peacefully on a visit to Heidelberg, and his body was interred there at the University Church.

Patrick J. O'Banion - Dana Point, CA

¹ For further information on Zanchi's life see Charles Schmidt, "Girolamo Zanchi," Studium und Kritiken, XXXII (1859): 625-708; Luigi Santini, La comunitá evangelica di Bergamo: Vicende storiche, (Torre Pelice: Claudians, 1960), 228-251; Joseph H. Tylenda, "Girolamo Zanchi and John Calvin: A Study in Discipleship as Seen Through Their Correspondence," Calvin Theological Journal vol. 10 no. 2 (1975): 101-141; and on his later life, controversies and works see Christopher J. Burchill, "Girolamo Zanchi: Portrait of a Reformed Theologian and His Work," in Sixteenth Century Journal XV, No. 2 (1984): 185-207. There is also a very brief summary in Zanchi's own words of his life since leaving Italy in the epistolary dedication of De religione to Ulysses Martinengo, [pp. 35-6 of the Englished version.].

² Martinengo (1515-1557) would later flee Italy and become the minister of the Italian exile congregation in Geneva and an important personality of the Reformed church in his own right.

³On the life and thought of PMV see Joseph C. McClelland, The Visible Words of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Eermans; Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1957); Phillip McNair, Peter Marty in Italy: An Anatomy of Apostasy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967); M. Anderson, Peter Maryr, a reformer in exile (1542-1562): a chronology of biblical writings in England and Europe (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1975); John Patrick Donnelley, Calvinism and Scholasticism in Vermigli's Doctrine of Man and Grace (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1975) and Joseph C. McLelland ed., Peter Martyr Vermigli and Italian Reform (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1980).

⁴Tylenda suggests that he had access to Martin Bucer's Treatises, Philip Melancthon's Loci communes, Heinrich Bullinger's On the Origin of Error and John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion.

⁵Op. Theol. vol. VIII, col. 621.828.

⁶From the introduction ("ad Martenegum") of De religione Christiana fides (Neustadt: 1585), [35].

⁷See W. Sohm, Die Schule Johann Sturms und die Kirche Strassburgs (Munich, 1912).

⁸With regard to Zanchi's controversies in Strasbourg see James M. Kittelson, "Marbach vs. Zanchi: The Resolution of Controversy in Late Reformation Strasbourg," Sixteenth Century Journal VIII, 3 (1977), 31-44 as well as the discussion of it in Tylenda, "Girolamo Zanchi and John Calvin." Zanchi's own account of the events is contained in his Miscellanea (Op. Theol., VII).

⁹McClelland, The Visible Words of God, 285-7.

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