Colloquy or Cul de Sac at Maulbronn in 1564/ Pamela Biel.

Even before the fall of 1563 trouble was brewing in the Palatinate. At that time, however, Count Wolfgang of Zweibrucken, Duke Christopher of Wurttemburg and Margrave Karl of Baden finally decided that the question of the religious views of the Elector of the Palatinate, officially their territorial representative, were simply too heterodox to be ignored. (1) By April of 1564 a critical mass of theological and political discontent had been attained and representatives of the Lutheran nobility and those of the Elector\u27s court with its Swiss-Reformed tendencies met in Maulbronn at a Colloquy which, according to the commonly received scholarly wisdom on the subject, solved nothing. (2) Some have gone so far as to characterize this meeting as a failure(3), an opinion not shared by at least some of the participants. This paper will argue that the meeting at Maulbronn was important precisely because it solved nothing: indeed the historical record shows that the break between the renegade and eventually Calvinist Elector and his Lutheran subjects was made final not quite two years after this meeting. The Colloquy at Maulbronn provides an opportunity to study the way that Protestants of the second generation of the Reformation established the lines of orthodoxy in that it shows a moment of stasis before the break between Lutherans and Calvinists in the Rhine Palatinate occurred