ALTHAMER, ANDREAS. — Lutheran theologian and humanist, b. ca. 1500 at Brenz, near Gundelfingen (Württemberg)—hence also the appellations «Brentius, Gundelfingius»—d. in 1539. He studied at the Universities of Leipzig and Tübingen (1516–20), already beginning at that time his commentary on Tacitus’s Germania. 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, went to Wittenberg, where he devoted himself to the study and dissemination of the new doctrine. The following year he was in Nuremberg and in 1527 became pastor at Eltersdorf, where he carried out extensive literary and propagandistic activity. At the Bern Disputation, 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 years that followed, became the driving force and organizer of the Lutheran movement throughout that territory.
Meanwhile, he did not abandon his humanistic studies. His Commentaria Germaniae P. Cornelii Taciti, first published in 1529 and, in a more elaborate form, in 1536, enjoyed great success and went through several reprints. From 1537 he devoted himself to introducing Lutheranism into the Neumark. Among his writings (the list is given in Kolde, pp. 129–38) are remembered: Adnotationes in Epistolam beati Jacobi (Strasbourg 1527), in which he goes beyond Luther’s own contempt for that epistle, a judgment subsequently moderated in a further commentary of 1533; Dialloge, hoc est conciliatio locorum Scripturae qui prima facie inter se pugnare sidentur (Nuremberg 1527), a work widely read and circulated in its day;
Catechismus. Das ist Unterricht zunchristlichen Glauben, wie man die Jugend lehren und ziehen soll, in Frageweis und Antwort gestellt (Nuremberg 1528), the first Lutheran catechism in questions and answers to make an epoch in Protestant literature; Silva bibliorum nominum (Nuremberg 1530), a kind of biblical dictionary.