Christian Hild’s book examines Leo Jud’s translations from German into Latin of two theological tracts by his fellow Zurich Reformers Ulrich Zwingli and Heinrich Bullinger. One of the leading figures of the Zurich Reformation, Jud has often been overshadowed by his more famous colleagues. Hild’s analysis reveals Jud as an innovative thinker in his own right while showing how personal and political relations shaped the parameters of scholarly translations during the sixteenth century.

While several scholars have studied Jud’s many German translations, few have examined the four major Latin translations that he undertook. Hild’s monograph addresses this deficit through detailed analysis of two Jud translations published in 1535: Zwingli’s Opus Articulorum sive Conclusionum and Bullinger’s Adversus Omnia Catabaptistarum. Zwingli’s tract, originally published in German in 1523, offered a defense of the sixty-seven articles that served as the basis for Zurich’s religious disputation in January 1523. While the original German version sought to make Zwingli’s ideas accessible to a wide lay audience, Jud’s Latin translation sought to persuade an academic audience of Zwingli’s correctness. Hild argues that the timing of the translation had everything to do with Zurich’s political situation. In the wake of Zwingli’s 1531 death and amid attempts to forge some kind of concord with German Evangelicals over the nature of the Eucharist, it became critical for Zurich’s religious leaders to show how Zwingli’s views on the Eucharist supported attempts at theological compromise. This goal motivated Jud’s translation of the Zwingli text, Hild claims. Most of the changes that Jud introduced involved clarifying the contours of Zwingli’s thought or adding new examples that made Zwingli’s ideas more applicable to the concord discussions of the mid-1530s. Ultimately, Jud’s translation emphasized aspects of Zwingli’s theology that could be reconciled with Martin Luther’s thought, especially concerning the Lord’s Supper. The ultimate goal was to forge a coalition of Swiss communities willing to sign onto a concord with Wittenberg. Jud was not entirely successful in this goal, but Hild’s analysis of how this intention shaped the translation of Zwingli’s tract is insightful and persuasive.

Similar tendencies drove Jud’s translation of Heinrich Bullinger’s 1531 tract against the Anabaptists. Hild argues that internal politics within Zurich dominated much of Jud’s approach to this text, especially that a sizable Anabaptist community existed in the city. The translation appeared at a time of debate among Swiss Reformed leaders over how harshly they should treat the Anabaptists. Bullinger took a hardline position based on the persecution and execution of recalcitrant heretics. Jud’s 1535 translation furthered this agenda by making the dangers of Anabaptist practice clear to a wider educated audience. The translation placed greater emphasis than the original on marshaling biblical support for harsh persecution as a way to bolster Bullinger’s position. These efforts proved more successful than the attempts at concord pursued through his translation of Zwingli.

Hild offers an exhaustive, line-by-line analysis of each tract that highlights every place where the translation differed from or expanded upon the original. He organizes these sections thematically, examining the logic of Jud’s translation efforts on numerous theological issues for each tract. This structure enables Hild to identify patterns within the translations that speak to Jud’s larger political goals. The volume also contains several appendixes that chart the differences between the German originals and Jud’s Latin translations by displaying the texts side by side. Hild’s linguistic analysis is impressive and offers the type of close reading necessary to understand the logic of any translation. His claim that Zurich’s political context motivated these two translations is very persuasive. More broadly, it offers a way for scholars to think about what translation meant during the Reformation. Hild shows how Jud’s literal acts of translation entailed figurative translations of each tract into a new context in order to achieve a specific purpose. The translation of any theological text in the sixteenth century was an inherently political act. Only by placing the work back in the political context that spawned it can we understand its underlying logic and importance.