Wesel, formerly known as Lippemünde, was one of the points from which Charlemagne directed his operations against the heathen Saxons. The present name is said to be derived from the numerous weasels (Germ., Wiesel) at one time found in the neighbourhood. In the Middle Ages it was a flourishing commercial town, and a member of the Hanseatic League, and as late as 1495 a free imperial city. A monument outside the town commemorates eleven of Schill’s officers who were shot here in 1809 after their unsuccessful attempt at Stralsund. Wesel is occasionally spoken of as Unterwesel, to distinguish it from Oberwesel, a small town also on the Rhine (18 miles south-south-east of Coblentz), and also at one time a free imperial town.

WESEL, John Kuchrath, of Oberwesel (see above), was born in the early years of the 15th century, and died under sentence of imprisonment for life on a charge of heresy in the Augustinian convent in Mainz in 1481. He appears to have been one of the leaders of the humanist movement in Germany, and to have had some intercourse and sympathy with the leaders of the Hussites in Bohemia. Erfurt was then the headquarters of a humanism which was at the same time devout and opposed to the realist metaphysic and the Thomist theology which prevailed in the Rhenish universities at Cologne and at Heidelberg. Wesel was one of the professors at Erfurt between 1445 and 1456, and was vice-rector in 1458. In 1460 he was called to be a preacher either at Worms or at Mainz, and in 1479, when an old and worn-out man (he was led into the room by two Franciscans, and was obliged to support himself on a staff), he was brought before the Dominican inquisitor Gerhard Elten of Cologne. The charges brought against him were chiefly based on a treatise, De Indulgentiis, which he had composed while at Erfurt twenty-five years before.

It is somewhat difficult to determine the exact theological position of Wesel. Ullmann claims him as a “reformer before the Reformation,” but it is more than doubtful that he had that experimental view of the doctrines of grace which lay at the basis of Reformation theology. He held that Christ is our righteousness in so far as we are guided by the Holy Ghost and the love towards God is shed abroad in our hearts, which clearly shows that he held the mediaeval idea that justification is an habitual grace implanted in men by the gracious act of God. He seems, however, to have protested against certain mediaeval ecclesiastical ideas which he held to be excrescences erroneously grafted on Christian faith and practice. He objected to the whole system of indulgences; he denied the infallibility of the church, on the ground that the church contains within it sinners as well as saints; he insisted that papal authority could be upheld only when the pope remained true to the evangel; and he held that a sharp distinction ought to be drawn between ecclesiastical sentences and punishments and the judgments of God.

The best account of Wesel is to be found in Ullmann's Reformers before the Reformation. His tract on Indulgences has been published in Walch's Monumenta Medii Aevi, vol. i., while a report of his trial is given in Ortuin Gratius’s Fasciculus Rerum Expetendarum et Fugiendarum (ed. by Browne, London, 1690).