De Templis hoc est de Origine, Progressu, Usu et Abusu Templorum, Ac Rerum Omnium ad Templa Pertinentium Libri V

Rodolphus Hospinianus; Rudolf Hospinian; Rudolf Wirth

[Zurich] Tigurus: In Officina Froschoviana, 1587

[The Reformation & Anti-Catholicism: An Early Swiss Imprint] Small folio, 11 1/2 x 7 1/2 in. (29.2 x 19 cm).  Bound in later marbled boards. [7], 136 [=130] leaves (16, 260 pp.)  A defective copy, lacks title page (provided in photocopy).  Later title page in manuscript, which I did not include in the collation. Last leaf mounted and the margins trimmed.  (Final page number is 136, due to a printer's error in numbering.  There is actually no a gap in the text between 129-136, despite appearing to be numerically.)  Some water staining to text.  Visch. Bibl. C 1096.  The author, Rudolf Wirth, was a Swiss Reformed theologian and controversialist. As a child Hospinian watched his father imprisoned and tortured by the Church, and his uncle martyred, for heresy. In this work, Wirth attacked Catholic ceremonies as being out of harmony with the practices of the early Christian church. He writes of errors in Catholic baptism, the Eucharist, church festivals, fasting, religious orders, the rule of the papacy, and funerals. His biographer J. Heidegger writes: "Our Hospinian believed that the false dye of antiquity could be shaken off if the first origins of their errors, the incunabula themselves, as if tiny fibers placed beneath the sun and so shining through more clearly, could be distinguished from all the rest."