Philip Melanchthon
He was born Philipp Schwartzerdt on 16 February 1497, at Bretten where his father Georg Schwarzerdt was armorer to Philip, Count Palatine of the Rhine. His birthplace, along with almost the whole city of Bretten, was burned in 1689 by French troops during the War of the Palatinate Succession. The town's Melanchthonhaus was built on its site in 1897.
Philip Melanchthon
Melanchthon exerted a wide influence in the department of homiletics, and has been regarded as the author, in the Protestant church, of the methodical style of preaching. He himself keeps entirely aloof from all mere dogmatizing or rhetoric in the "Annotationes in Evangelia" (1544), the "Conciones in Evangelium Matthaei" (1558), and in his German sermons prepared for George of Anhalt. He never preached from the pulpit; and his Latin sermons "(Postilla)" were prepared for the Hungarian students at Wittenberg who did not understand German. In this connection may be mentioned also his "Catechesis puerilis" (1532), a religious manual for younger students, and a German catechism (1549), following closely Luther's arrangement.