PELLICANUS, Conrad (1478-1556), one of the most interesting minor figures in German theology and scholarship in the great age of the Reformation, was born at Ruffach in Alsace in the winter of 1478. His paternal name was Kürsner, his father’s father having been a currier of Wyl in the Black Forest. The Latin name of Pellicanus was chosen for him by his mother’s brother Jodocus Gallus, an ecclesiastic connected with the university of Heidelberg, who gave his nephew sixteen months at the university at the cost of some fourteen florins in 1491-92. Pellican’s parents were worthy people, but very poor; the boy was eager for learning, but had no books; at school at Ruffach, where he had learned well, “with much fear and many a scourging,” it was only the richer boys who had a copy of the Ulm Donatus of 1485. So when his uncle tired of him and he came back to Ruffach, with some knowledge of the great Latin classics as well as of the usual bachelor’s course, he was glad to teach gratis in the Minorite convent school that he might borrow books from the library, and in his sixteenth year he resolved to become a friar. This step helped his studies, for he was sent to Tübingen in 1496 and became a favourite pupil of the guardian of the Minorite convent there, Paulus Scriptoris, a man of considerable general learning and of much boldness and honesty, who anticipated Luther in his open preaching on such topics as vows, indulgences, and the sacraments. There seems to have been at that time in south-west Germany a considerable amount of sturdy independent thought among the Franciscans, and more genuine conformity to the original ideas of the order than is often supposed; Pellicanus himself became a Protestant very gradually, and without any such revulsion of feeling as ...