The Ups and Downs of Faculty Recruitment: Zurich's Theology Professors in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century

This paper will examine the professors hired in Zurich from around 1560 to 1600 in an attempt to discern how much geographical, political, and confessional factors affected Zurich's ability to recruit a high-quality theological faculty. Zurich's theological academy-Europe's first Reformed academy-was founded in Zurich in the 1520s, as part of Huldrych Zwingli's reorganization of the Grossmünster Latin school. The academy became famous for its daily biblical lectures, delivered by leading Reformed theologians and attended by Zurich's most talented students, as well as by visiting foreign students and guests. In the second half of the sixteenth century, however, the international status of Zurich's academy declined for a number of reasons. For example, in 1562, the city council passed an ordinance requiring that all professors be citizens of Zurich; this severely restricted the pool of qualified applicants. There was also the problem of competition with Geneva, where Jean Calvin founded another Reformed academy in 1559. Throughout this period, the Zurich government kept meticulous and voluminous records on the academy, including much information about the coming and going of faculty. These records are now housed in the cantonal archives and are ripe for investigation. They have not been completely ignored by previous historians, but no one has ever conducted a study of Zurich's faculty in the context of the impact of confessionalization on higher education. Indeed, recruiting and retaining faculty was a crucial aspect of Zurich's ability to train Reformed ministers for its many urban and rural churches. Thus, a study of Zurich's faculty recruitment is important because helps to illuminate the processes by which Reformed communities strove in the second half of the sixteenth century to implement and consolidate the changes made during the early Reformation.