Valerius Anshelm



Valerius Anshelm (1475 – 1546/1547), born as Valerius Rüd (or Ryd), was a Swiss chronicler working in Berne.

Anshelm was born in Rottweil, a city in Swabia that was allied with the Old Swiss Confederacy. His grandfather had fought on the side of the Eidgenossen in the Burgundy Wars. After studies in Kraków (1493–95) and Tübingen (until 1499) he spent some time as a travelling scholar (in 1501, he was in Lyon). He then settled in Berne, where he was appointed on August 22, 1505 the headmaster of the Latin school. In 1508, he became the city physician.

As a sympathizer of the Reformation, he corresponded with reformers such as Zwingli and Vadian. A critical remark of his wife on the veneration of Mary earned him a reprimand by the city council and a substantial pay cut in 1523, and as a consequence the family moved to Rottweil two years later. However, there he got involved in the conflicts between Catholics and Protestants, too, and even spent some time in jail. When the Protestants were banned from Rottweil in 1529, he more than gladly followed a call of Berne (which had become Protestant in 1528) to serve as the city's chronicler. From 1535 to 1537 he again served also as the city physician. He died between August 1, 1546 and February 21, 1547; the exact date is unknown.

Anshelm's appointment as chronicler was based on his having written a Latin chronicle of world history already during his first stay in Berne. Written in 1510, it was not printed until 1540, but Anshelm had distributed handwritten copies before. His main opus, however, was the Berner Chronik, a history of the city of Berne on which he worked in his position as city chronicler until his death. After a brief introduction to the early history, it covered especially the time from the Burgundy Wars until 1536, although only fragments of the period of 1526 to 1536 survived. It remained buried in the municipal archives of Berne and was thus not widely known until the 17th century, when Michael Stettler was commissioned to continue Anshelm's work. Stettler's own Schweizerchronik, a history of Switzerland that was based on Anshelm's work, appeared first in 1626.