Niklaus Manuel was one of the most colorful figures of the Swiss Reformation. Though by trade a painter, he was multitalented and succeeded as a playwright, poet, magistrate, and mercenary, leading his nineteenth-century editor, Jakob Baechtold, to compare him to the quintessential uomo universale of the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci. Following the redating of Manuel's first plays and the discovery of new sources, later scholars have been quick to temper Baechtold's praise of his subject's originality. Nevertheless, even for the modern reader Manuel's plays, songs, and dialogues have lost little of the vitality that made them some of the most widely circulated Protestant pamphlets. Above all, the success of his carnival plays Vom Papst und seiner Priesterschaft (The Pope and His Priests) and Von Papsts und Christi Gegensatz (The Difference between the Pope and Christ), performed in 1523 and published together in 1524, makes Manuel, along with Thomas Murner and...