The Castle, the Church and a University Without a Charter

The religious weight of Marburg is older than the colloquy. Elizabeth of Hungary, landgravine of Thuringia, was widowed young, gave her wealth to a hospital she founded at Marburg and died there in 1231 at the age of twenty four. She was canonised in 1235, and the Teutonic Order began in the same year to build over her grave the church that carries her name. It was finished in 1283 and is among the earliest churches in Germany built wholly in the Gothic manner, with no Romanesque compromise anywhere in it. Her shrine drew pilgrims from across the empire for three centuries, until 1539, when Philip of Hesse, by then Lutheran, had her relics removed to end the cult. The building stayed; the pilgrimage did not.

In 1527 the same landgrave founded a university at Marburg. It was established with neither a papal bull nor an imperial charter behind it, which made it Protestant by constitution rather than by conversion, and it turned the town into a place where the Reformation argued with itself in public.

The habit held. Hermann Cohen taught philosophy at Marburg from 1876 and built there the neo-Kantian reading of Judaism that shaped a generation of Jewish thought. Rudolf Bultmann held the chair of New Testament from 1921 to 1951 and wrote his programme of demythologising from it. For a town of this size, an unusual quantity of argument about what a text means has come out of it.