the merit of brevity, and are not much worse than the specimens that Eck's biographer gives us from the most famous scholars of that age.
From another source we learn more about the Schaffhausen episode of which Eck speaks: the official records of the city inform us that Baltisar Hubmer of Augsburg was a temporary resident of the town in 1507, and had taken the prescribed oath of obedience to the laws.[1] Beyond this, little or nothing can be added to the words of Eck, Of Hübmaier's university career only one other detail can be supplied, and that is told us by himself, in one of his rare autobiographic passages. In his last known writing, he says that twenty years before, he held a disputation at Freiburg on the question whether it is allowable to increase the number of feast days, himself taking the negative. His enemies accused him in Zurich, in 1526, of stealing gowns while he was at Freiburg; it is possible there
- ↑ Loserth, p. 15, note 4.
scholar. My Eck, sprung from the stars, is surely the bright ornament of this German land. A rare theologian, skilled in law and wisdom, he often sows the good seed among the people. A knotty logician, a master of sentences, whatever mathematician or astronomer teaches, all that orator, historian, or poet knows—I'll be hanged if this single man does not know it all!"
