Franck, SEBASTIAN,

Franck, SEBASTIAN, one of the earliest masters of German prose, was born at Donauwörth in 1499, and became a priest. Converted to Protestantism, he showed the bent of his mind in a Treatise against the Horrible Vice of Drunkenness (1528). But his insistence upon a moral reform in men's lives as being more important and more fundamental than a reform of dogma soon caused him to drift away from the school of Luther. Consequently, he incurred, in 1531, the sentence of banishment from Strasburg, where he had settled two years before, because of the freedom and independence of his views, and especially the advocacy of religious toleration expressed in his Chronica. This book is probably the first attempt at a universal history in the German tongue. Thereupon Franck settled in Esslingen as a soap-boiler in 1531, but during the following year removed to Ulm, where he took up the calling of printer. The publication of his Paradoxa in 1534 was the ultimate cause of his expulsion from that city in 1539. He died in 1542 at Basel. Besides the works mentioned Franck wrote Weltbuch: Spiegel und Bildniss des ganzen Erdbodens (1534), Chronica des ganzen deutschen Lands (1538), Die guldene Arche (1539); and he printed one of the earliest collections of popular proverbs in German in 1541. His historical writings, although distorted by mystic fancies, and from the modern point of view uncritical, are nevertheless distinguished for their justness and love of truth. See works by Bischof (1856), Hase (1869), Weinkauff (1877), and Hagenmacher (1886).