of study he left the University in 1519, being compelled to
forgo his Bachelor's degree because he was too poor to pay the required
fee.[2] The next five years of his life are submerged beyond recovery,
but we hear of him in 1526 as a preacher in the service of Bartholomaeus
von Starhemberg, a prominent nobleman of Upper Austria, and he was at
this time a devout adherent of the Lutheran faith. He was in Augsburg
this same year, 1526, at the time of the great gathering of
Anabaptists, and here he probably met Hans Denck, at any rate he
testified in 1529 before the investigating Judge in Strasbourg that he
received adult baptism in Augsburg three years before. He seems to
have gone from Augsburg to Nikolsburg, where he was present at a public
Discussion in which a definite differentiation appeared between the
moderate and the radical, the right and left, wings of the Anabaptists.
Buenderlin took part in this Discussion on the "moderate" side. He
remained for some time--perhaps two years--in Nikolsburg and faced the
persecution which prevailed in that city during the winter of
1527-1528. The next year he comes to notice in Strasbourg where, for a
long time, a much larger freedom of thought was allowed than in any
other German city of the period. The great tragedy which he had to
experience was the frustration of the work of his life by the growth
and spread of the Ranter influence in the Anabaptist circles, through
the leadership of Melchior Hoffman and others of a similar spirit. He
loved freedom, and here he saw it degenerating into license. He was
devoted to a religion of experience and of inner authority, and now
{34} he saw the wild extremes to which such a religion was exposed. He
was dedicated to a spiritual Christianity, and now he was compelled to
learn the bitter lesson that there are many types and varieties of
"spiritual religion," and that the masses are inclined to go with those
who supply them with a variety which is spectacular and which produces
emotional thrills. Our last definite information concerning Buenderlin
shows him to have been in Constance in 1530, from which city he was
expelled as a result of information against the "soundness" of his
doctrine, furnished in a letter from OEcolampadius. From this time he
drops completely out of notice, and we are left only with conjectures.
One possible reference to him occurs in a letter from Julius Pflug, the
Humanist, to Erasmus in 1533. Pflug says