Pilgram Marpeck, St. Bernard of Clairvaux and the Church as the Bride of Christ

Abstract

St. Bernard’s popularity as a Christian writer reached its peak in the sixteenth-century. He was read by Protestants and Catholics alike. He also had an influence on the Anabaptist movement, a movement that purported to be a break from Catholicism. Pilgram Marpeck, an early South-German Anabaptist elder maintained Bernard’s allegorical interpretation of the Song of Songs in his pastoral letters to Anabaptist congregations throught southern Germany. This demonstrates that Marpeck’s Anabaptism did not spring ex nihilo, but was formed in the religious spirit of the sixteenth-century and the centuries preeceding it.