Towards Confessional Reconciliation: The “Protestantization” of Charles V in David Chytraeus’s De Carolo Quinto Caesare Augusto Oratio (1583)

Abstract

In 1583, David Chytraeus (1530–1600), one of the key figures of north German Protestant humanism, published his Latin biographical oration De Carolo Quinto Caesare Augusto Oratio on Emperor Charles V (Holy Roman emperor from 1520 to 1556). Despite the numerous confessional conflicts between the German Protestants and the former Catholic monarch, Chytraeus presented the emperor in a strikingly favourable light. To which degree and in which respects Chytraeus was thereby driven both as a theologian and as a historian to promote the overcoming of the confessional split—which renders the oration on Charles an intriguing document of sixteenth-century religious discourse—will be investigated in this article.