Wolfgang Capito
German religious reformer
Wolfgang Fabricius Capito (also Koepfel) (c. 1478 – November 1541) was an Alsatian Protestant reformer in the Reformed tradition.
His life and revolutionary work
Capito was born circa 1478 to a smith at Hagenau in Alsace. He attended the famous Latin school in Pforzheim, where his friend Philip Melanchthon studied.
He was educated for the medical profession but also studied law. He received a doctorate in theology at Freiburg. Having joined the Benedictines, taught for some time at Freiburg. He acted for three years as pastor in Bruchsal. In 1516 he became cathedral preacher of Basel Minster. Here he made the acquaintance of Zwingli and began to correspond with Luther. He persuaded Johann Froben to publish a collection of Luther's works in 1518.
“Wolfgang Capito” enters the record as german religious reformer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Wolfgang, Capito and German can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1368362. VIAF identifies the subject as 61578502. The Library of Congress control number is n83141814. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1478, 1541, 1516 and 1518.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wolfgang Capito” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.