RASTATT, a town of Germany, in the Land of Baden, on the Murg, 15 m. by rail S.W. of Karlsruhe. Pop. (1933) 208. The old palace of the margraves of Baden, a Renaissance edifice in red sandstone, contains a collection of pictures, an tiquities and trophies from the Turkish wars. The chief manu factures are stoves, beer, paper, sugar, furniture and tobacco. Rastatt has been the scene of two congresses. The first con gress culminated in the treaty of Rastatt between France and Aus tria, signed on March 7, 1714. The second congress, opened in Dec. 1797, was intended to rearrange the map of Germany by providing compensation for those princes whose lands on the left bank of the Rhine had been seized by France but it had no result. RASTELL (or RASTALL), JOHN (c. 1475-1536), an Eng lish printer and author, belonged to a Coventry family, and was educated for the law. He succeeded his father as coroner at Coventry in 1506. He was also M.P. for Dunheved, Cornwall, from 1529 to the time of his death. He began his printing business some time before 1516, for in his preface to the undated Liber Assisarum he announced the forthcoming publication of Sir A. Fitzherbert's Abbreviamentum librorum legum Anglorum, dated 1516. In that year he undertook an expedition to America, but got no further than Ireland when his sailors left him. Among the works issued from the "sygne of the meremayd at Powlys gate," where he lived and worked from 1520 onwards, are The XII. Mery Gestys of the Wydow Edyth (1525), and A Dyaloge of Syr Thomas More (1529). The last of his dated publications was Fabyl's Ghoste (1533), a poem. In 1530 he wrote, in defence of the Roman doctrine of Purgatory, A New Boke of Purgatory (1530), dialogues on the subject between "Comyngs and Almayn a Christen man, and one Gyngemyn a Turke." This was answered by John Frith in A Disputation of Purgatorie. Rastell replied with an Apology against John Fryth, also answered by the latter.
Rastell had married, at some time before 1504, Elizabeth, sister of Sir Thomas More, with whose Catholic theology and political views he was in sympathy. More had begun the controversy with John Frith, and Rastell joined him in attacking the Protestant writer, who, says Foxe (Actes and Monuments, ed. G. Town send, vol. v. p. 9), did so "overthrow and confound" his adver saries that he converted Rastell to his side. Separated from his Catholic friends, Rastell does not seem to have been fully trusted by the opposite party, for in a letter to Cromwell, written prob ably in 1536, he says that he had spent his time in upholding the king's cause and opposing the pope, with the result that he had lost both his printing business and his legal practice, and was reduced to poverty. He was imprisoned in 1536, perhaps because he had written against the payment of tithes. He prob ably died in prison, and his will was proved on July 18, 1536.
Rastell's best-known work is The Pastyme of People, the Chronycles of dyvers Realmys and most specially of the Realme of England (1529), a chronicle dealing with English history from the earliest times to the reign of Richard III., ed. T. F. Dibdin (181 I). His Expositiones terminorum legum Angliae (in French, trans. into English, 1527; reprinted 1629, 1636, 1641, etc., as Les Termes de la Ley), and The Abbreviation of Statutis (1519), of which 15 editions appeared before 1625, are the best known of his legal works.
To Rastell is generally attributed the morality play, A new Interlude and a Mery of the IIII Elements (c. 1519). The fullest details available on John Rastell's life are in A. W. Reed, Early Tudor Drama (1926). For the books issued from his press see a catalogue by R. Proctor, in Hand-Lists of English Printers (Bibliographical Soc., 1896).