Cornelius Henrici Hoen (Honius) and his Epistle on the Eucharist (1525)

Book excerpt: This book is about Cornelius Henrici Hoen and his well-known treatise on the Eucharist, published in 1525, and answers questions like: Who actually was Hoen? What made him dissent from the current belief in transubstantiation? What were the sources of his dissent, and what was his relationship to famous contemporaries like Erasmus, Luther, Zwingli and Bucer? And how influential has his treatise been? After a more detailed portrait of Hoen’s life, the chapters on the origins of his ideas establish that Hoen was not only dependent on Erasmus and Luther, but actually revived age-old heretical arguments, first proposed in the high Middle Ages and later defended by Hus and Wyclif, and popularized by Lollards and Hussites in the late medieval Burgundian Netherlands. The book also describes Hoen’s influence on Reformation thought, and contains an edition of the original Latin text and of a contemporary German translation.