On March 24 and 25, Elizabethtown College will hold the annual Durnbaugh Lecture and Seminar at the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies. The Ausbund, the oldest and only-known copy of the Protestant hymnal, also will be on display.
“The Ausbund, first published in 1564, is still used by Amish churches as their Sunday hymnal,” Interim Director of the Young Center Steve Nolt said. “It was discovered by a historian in a Harrisburg, Pa antique book dealer shop in 1928. Instantly recognizing the rarity of the book (historians at the time believed that all copies of the 1564 edition had been lost), the book has subsequently been kept in a rare book collection in a Mennonite archive in Indiana almost never leaves the vault.”
The rare piece of Anabaptist and 16th-century music history will be at Elizabethtown College in conjunction with the annual Durnbaugh Lecture and Seminar. Joe A. Springer, the curator of the Mennonite Historical Library, be lecturing on early Anabaptist hymnody is bringing the 1564 Ausbund.
“The Ausbund is the oldest Protestant hymnal in regular use anywhere,” Nolt said. The first edition was printed in 1564. And only one copy of that 1564 edition has survived to the present – and that’s the one that will be here on view. Although printed in Europe, no copies of the 1564 edition survived in Europe. This one was presumably brought to Pennsylvania by Mennonite or Amish immigrants in the 1700s.”
In addition to the Durnbaugh Lecture on Thursday, March 24 at 7 p.m., and the Durnbaugh Seminar schedule for Friday, March 25 at 10 a.m., visitors may view the rare Ausbund in the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on March 24 and 25.
Visit etown.edu for more information about how to view The Ausbund and the Durnbaugh Lecture and Seminar.
About The Ausbund
The Ausbund is a hymnal of the Anabaptists—the Reformation-era religious group that is the precursor to today’s Brethren, Mennonites, and Amish. In the early 1500s, the Anabaptists, as religious dissenters, were regarded as heretics, and in a time before religious toleration of the sort pioneered by William Penn in colonial Pennsylvania, they were liable to be arrested, imprisoned, and in some cases executed. In 1535 a group of 52 Anabaptists (including several teenagers) was arrested in Passau (now a city on the modern-day border of Germany and Austria) and imprisoned. One of the things this group of prisoners did while they languished for years in the Passau jail was to write hymns. They wrote at least 53 hymns, which were to be sung to pre-existent, often popular, secular tunes. A few of the Anabaptist prisoners died in custody and others were released, many years later – some not until 1544 after 9 in prison. Eventually, 53 of the hymns the prison group wrote were published as the Ausbund hymnal in 1564, along with some other Anabaptist hymns. Again, the book that will be here is the lone surviving copy of this 1564 printing of the prisoner-authored hymnal. In 1583 a second edition of the Ausbund was issued, which included some additional hymn texts. The book has been reissued many times since then and has never been out of print. It is the hymnal still used on Sunday mornings by the Amish today. Yesterday morning, Amish people were singing from modern printings of the Ausbund in their church services.