<i>The newe Testament</i>, Worms 1526: William Tyndale and his Printer Peter Schöffer the Younger Revisited

In his Historia Lutheri (1549) the Anti-Lutheran Johannes Cochläus mentions Tyndale's flight to Worms after the failure of his printing project in Cologne (1525). Like Cochläus, Tyndale's later biographers come to the conclusion that Tyndale finished his printing project at Schöffer's workshop in Worms, because the Free Imperial City, place of the Diet of 1521, was an early “stronghold” of the Reformation. More probably, Tyndale's choice of Worms was based on commercial and personal connections between Peter Quentel and Anton Woensam (born in Worms), the printer and the woodcut illustrator of Tyndale's unfinished New Testament in Cologne, and Peter Schöffer. The colophon in one of the early “Protestant” publications of Schöffer's workshop (1524) mentions the location of his workshop in Worms: the Meielburg—residence of Dr. Balthasar Meiel, Schultheiß (judge) and notable member of the municipal council. Obviously, the Meielburg is the location where the first complete edition of Tyndale's New Testament was printed.