ALTHAMER, ANDREAS.— Lutheran theologian and humanist, b. ca. 1500 at Brenz, near Gundelfingen (Württemberg) — from which also the appellatives “Brentius, Gundelfingius” — d. in 1539. He studied at the Universities of Leipzig and Tübingen (1516–20), already at that time beginning his commentary on the *Germania* of Tacitus. In 1521 he was assistant at the school of Schwäbisch-Hall, in 1522 at that of Reutlingen, and in 1524 assistant priest at Schwäbisch-Gmünd. He was removed from this office because of his Lutheran propaganda, and then, having married, he went to Wittenberg, where he devoted himself to the study and dissemination of the new doctrine. The following year he was at Nuremberg and in 1527 as pastor at Eltersdorf, where he carried out great literary and propagandistic activity. At the Disputation of Bern in January 1528, he defended Lutheran theories against the Zwinglians; in May of the same year, at the invitation of the margraves of Ansbach-Brandenburg, he settled in Ansbach and in the following years became the animator and organizer of the Lutheran movement throughout that territory.
Meanwhile he did not abandon his humanistic studies. His *Commentaria in Germaniam P. Cornelii Taciti*, first published in 1529 and more elaborate in 1536, enjoyed great success and numerous reprints. From 1537 he devoted himself to the introduction of Lutheranism into the Neumark. Among his writings (of which the list is in Kolde, pp. 129–38) may be recalled: *Adnotationes in Epistolam beati Jacobi* (Strasbourg 1527), in which he goes beyond the contempt even of Luther himself for that epistle, a judgment later mitigated in a further commentary of 1533; *Dialoge, hoc est conciliatio locorum Scripturae qui prima facie inter se pugnare videntur* (Nuremberg 1527), a work much read and circulated in his time; *Catechismus. Das ist Unterricht zum christlichen Glauben, wie man die Jugend lehren und ziehen soll, in Frageweis und Antwort gestellt* (Nuremberg 1528), the first Lutheran catechism in question-and-answer form that made an epoch in Protestant literature; *Silva bibliorum nominum* (Nuremberg 1530), which is a kind of biblical dictionary.