Heinrich Heshusius
Heinrich Heshusius (also "Hesshus") (July 1556 in Rostock – 15 October 1597 in Hildesheim) was a prominent third-generation German Lutheran pastor, superintendent, and polemicist. He was the second son of Tilemann Heshusius and Hanna von Bert, two well-educated and influential German Lutherans from Wesel on the lower Rhine. Early life and education. Heinrich was born in 1556, raised in the household of an important Lutheran clergyman, and he was strongly influenced by his father's itinerant movements and polemical struggles with Reformed (Calvinist) churchmen and Roman Catholic opponents. Heinrich eventually followed his father into Lutheran schools and  the ministry, and became well-connected in Gnesio-Lutheran clergy networks in North Germany. In 1594, Heshusius earned a doctoral degree in theology from the University of Rostock, which was paid for by the Hildesheim town council. Heshusius worked for a period of up to ten years with his father as a philosophy (liberal arts) professor at the University of Helmstedt, where he served as an instructor and a private tutor for bachelor of arts students headed into the ministry or government service. Ministry. In 1591, Heshusius took his first permanent pastoral assignment in Tonna, near Erfurt, and served the  community as a pastor and superintendent. In Tonna, Heshusius had a close relationship with the counts of Gleichen and the Ernestine rulers of Electoral Saxony, and he founded a school there at the behest of a local countess. He also began a successful publishing career, printing many sermons and an innovative catechism based on the Psalms that would become influential in Lutheran circles. In 1593, Heshusius was transferred to Hildesheim by Polycarp Leyser, when Nicholas Selnecker vacated the post, and Heshusius became the lead pastor at St. Andreas Church, as well as superintendent of the city's Lutheran churches. Heshusius  became a significant leader in Lutheran circles, corresponding with peers and mentors throughout the region, and working closely with civic leaders in Hildesheim. Along with the town council, Heshusius supported the Formula of Concord. He used his new platform to publish catechetical sermons, devotional books, and a municipal report with conspicuous polemic. Most of these publications sought to protect the Lutheran community from what Heshusius perceived as the inroads of confessional rivals in the region such as Calvinists, Jesuits, Anabaptists, and Jews. His rhetoric has been studied as an aspect of late-Reformation confessionalization in the German lands. In the  mid-1590s, Heshusius attacked the levirate marriage of Jews in his community, and he worked aggressively to expel thirteen Jewish families from Hildesheim. Heshusius also tried to expel Jesuit leaders from the city, who were forming a Latin school and reviving the historic Roman Catholic cathedral, but these efforts were also unsuccessful. Heshusius's masterwork, a two-volume catechetical sermon collection entitled "Psalmocatechesis", was published in 1594. It was based on the content and pedagogy of Luther's Small Catechism and the Psalms, and it became influential in the developing genre of Lutheran catechetical preaching. Death. In 1597, Heinrich Heshusius died  of the plague in Hildesheim with his wife Gesa and the couple's four children. Legacy. Heinrich Heshusius contributed to the consolidation of German Lutheranism in the age of early Lutheran orthodoxy. His catechetical works and preaching influenced a generation of Lutheran churchmen. Church historian Joachim Lauenstein wrote that had Heshusius not died prematurely at 41, the brilliant theologian would have been among the greatest Lutheran reformers in the region. Printed works. "Abbreviations": HAB (Herzog August Bibliothek), HALLE (Universitäts– und Landesbibliothek Halle), HAN (Hannover Niedersächsische Landesbibliothek—Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Bibliothek), JENA (Thüringer Universitäts– und Landesbibliothek Jena), and Sta Hild. (Stadtarchiv  Hildesheim).