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Martin luther, fallible reformer.

Colleen Walsh

Harvard Staff Writer

Divinity School professor considers the man and his 95 Theses 500 years later

On Oct. 31, 1517, the German priest and professor of theology Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of a Wittenberg church, protesting all that he saw wrong with the late-Renaissance Roman Catholic power structure. Outraged by the church’s practice of selling indulgences to fund the reconstruction of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, he challenged papal authority and church doctrine, eventually asserting the primacy of scripture and faith over priests and good works. Aided by the era’s most revolutionary innovation — the printing press — and protected by a sympathetic local prince, Luther sparked the massive religious upheaval that came to be known as the Protestant Reformation. We asked Harvard Divinity School Assistant Professor Michelle C. Sanchez about his life and legacy.

GAZETTE: What about Luther might surprise people?

SANCHEZ: One of my favorite aspects of Luther’s thinking is how he understands the devil. But it’s also underappreciated — no doubt because modern people don’t talk a lot about the devil. I find Luther’s interpretation of the devil to be insightful. For Luther, the devil doesn’t do his mischief by tempting human beings to bodily excess. It’s not sex or gluttony that we most need to fear. The devil works by tempting us to use our minds in ways that flatter us into thinking that we can find satisfaction, certainty, and happiness by mental domination, or by trying to think our way to mastery. But this only leads to more uncertainty, more fear, and most of all to melancholy. The devil operates this way because the devil is jealous of Jesus. Unlike the devil, Christ actually became human. So Christ can relate to human beings in a way that the devil can’t. The devil has to do his work by luring our minds away from the places where love and joy are found, and Christ is our most powerful helper precisely because Christ lived, ate, drank, and suffered right along with us.

GAZETTE: Did Luther cause the Protestant Reformation, or was the Reformation inevitable? In other words, had Luther not nailed his 95 Theses to the church door, would someone else have initiated a major split in the church?

SANCHEZ: It’s always tough to talk about historical developments in terms of inevitability, because social systems are vastly complicated and human actors are notoriously unpredictable. But it’s a fact that “reform” had been a common watchword in the church for at least two centuries before Luther, and many strategies of reform had been tried and tested before Luther’s 95 Theses appeared at All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg on Oct. 31, 1517.

Jan Hus was active in Prague in the early 1400s, drawing on ideas about an invisible church of the predestined in order to reimagine what the true church consisted of. He wanted to reimagine the church as a spiritual body in which true teaching and moral purity lined up, and to use this as a kind of Archimedean point from which to oppose what he saw as the obvious moral failings and greed of the church establishment at the time. Hus’ thinking was directly informed by his readings of Oxford scholar and dissident John Wycliffe , who had died in 1384 and shared many of the same concerns. Hus was ultimately burned at the stake at the Council of Constance in 1415, which is interesting in retrospect because the third stated purpose of the council was to “reform the corrupt morals of the church.”

So, in the two centuries prior to Luther, there was a general consensus that corruption was a problem and that reform needed to happen, yet there were radically different views on how to reform. The radicals began to appeal more strongly to biblical authority, but this was only one strategy alongside others. And when Luther came along a century later, he reinhabited many of these strategies.

GAZETTE: What were his key differences with the Roman Catholic Church?

SANCHEZ: Luther seems to have been driven, fundamentally, by his anxiety over whether and how you could know that you were, in fact, pleasing to God. Biographical accounts suggest that Luther never felt good enough, but he also never felt like he could make himself good enough by following the practices the church prescribed, such as confession and penance. So when he latched onto St. Paul’s claim that we are justified before God “by faith, not works,” this was deeply personal. It meant that God loves us not because we’ve achieved anything, but merely because God decided to love us. God decided to be “for us,” and proved it through the incarnation, when Jesus Christ was born as a human being to proclaim divine love, and to live and die on our behalf. So we’re assured that God loves us simply by believing God’s promise to love us, and this frees us up to follow Christ in acts of love to our neighbors and enemies.

Of course, this whole vision has another side — one that entails a passionate rebuttal of church practices designed to give one confidence before God. For Luther, the pursuit of righteousness is an asymptote: You can approach it, but you’ll never get there on your own. So when priests would preach, on the pope’s authority, that the purchase of an indulgence could remit a sin, Luther saw this as a fundamental deception misleading ordinary people away from the true source of salvation by faith.

GAZETTE: Others had protested church practices before, without making much of an impact. Why did Luther succeed where others had not?

SANCHEZ: This is where the question of historical inevitability gets complicated, because there are a lot of complicated reasons tying the Reformation to Luther rather than someone else. Some of these reasons are fundamentally political. Luther enjoyed the protection of his prince, Frederick the Wise, who was the elector of Saxony and a major political player in the Holy Roman Empire. So, unlike Wycliffe, Luther was operating closer to the center of ecclesial and political power; and unlike Hus, Luther did not meet an untimely death. These factors surely contributed to his success. Add to this the fact that Luther’s teachings proved friendly to German princes and the rising middle class, and you can begin to see why his reforms gained traction.

And there’s no doubt that Luther’s fame was aided by the economics of printing. Printers were cropping up all over German-speaking areas at the time, and Luther was really good at expressing himself in simple, everyday terms. So even though many ordinary people couldn’t read, Luther’s tracts — and the controversy they stirred up — proved to be really good for the bottom lines of printing entrepreneurs.

There’s also the fact that Luther’s way of understanding salvation — the emphasis he gave to faith in the promises of God — was really compelling, and downright inspiring to many, then and now.

GAZETTE: Can you summarize Luther’s legacy?

SANCHEZ: I find that Luther’s ongoing impact is most felt in the challenge his life poses to us; the way in which it’s both frustrating and inspiring, both embarrassing and revealing. Luther is a helpful conversation partner not because he’s some kind of reforming hero, but because he’s a mirror for our contradictions and struggles, for all the ways our society and our religious establishments continue to try and fail.

And yet, in some strange way, Luther remains important because he was wise to this very dynamic. He deeply got both the joy and the tragedy of the human condition. He didn’t try to explain away human flaws. He knew he was full of them. Instead, he called for us to learn to think of life in this world as a constant practice of critique, a constant practice of meeting the limitations of our own thinking. And he called on us to look for insight outside of ourselves, and especially in those places that seem most unlikely, most humble, because that’s where Jesus went. For Luther, we cannot forget that the highest form of divinity is revealed in the body of a criminal who was condemned by the state to death on a cross.

Interview was edited and condensed.

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How Martin Luther Changed the World

By Joan Acocella

Clang! Clang! Down the corridors of religious history we hear this sound: Martin Luther, an energetic thirty-three-year-old Augustinian friar, hammering his Ninety-five Theses to the doors of the Castle Church of Wittenberg, in Saxony, and thus, eventually, splitting the thousand-year-old Roman Catholic Church into two churches—one loyal to the Pope in Rome, the other protesting against the Pope’s rule and soon, in fact, calling itself Protestant. This month marks the five-hundredth anniversary of Luther’s famous action. Accordingly, a number of books have come out, reconsidering the man and his influence. They differ on many points, but something that most of them agree on is that the hammering episode, so satisfying symbolically—loud, metallic, violent—never occurred. Not only were there no eyewitnesses; Luther himself, ordinarily an enthusiastic self-dramatizer, was vague on what had happened. He remembered drawing up a list of ninety-five theses around the date in question, but, as for what he did with it, all he was sure of was that he sent it to the local archbishop. Furthermore, the theses were not, as is often imagined, a set of non-negotiable demands about how the Church should reform itself in accordance with Brother Martin’s standards. Rather, like all “theses” in those days, they were points to be thrashed out in public disputations, in the manner of the ecclesiastical scholars of the twelfth century or, for that matter, the debate clubs of tradition-minded universities in our own time.

If the Ninety-five Theses sprouted a myth, that is no surprise. Luther was one of those figures who touched off something much larger than himself; namely, the Reformation—the sundering of the Church and a fundamental revision of its theology. Once he had divided the Church, it could not be healed. His reforms survived to breed other reforms, many of which he disapproved of. His church splintered and splintered. To tote up the Protestant denominations discussed in Alec Ryrie’s new book, “ Protestants ” (Viking), is almost comical, there are so many of them. That means a lot of people, though. An eighth of the human race is now Protestant.

The Reformation, in turn, reshaped Europe. As German-speaking lands asserted their independence from Rome, other forces were unleashed. In the Knights’ Revolt of 1522, and the Peasants’ War, a couple of years later, minor gentry and impoverished agricultural workers saw Protestantism as a way of redressing social grievances. (More than eighty thousand poorly armed peasants were slaughtered when the latter rebellion failed.) Indeed, the horrific Thirty Years’ War, in which, basically, Europe’s Roman Catholics killed all the Protestants they could, and vice versa, can in some measure be laid at Luther’s door. Although it did not begin until decades after his death, it arose in part because he had created no institutional structure to replace the one he walked away from.

Almost as soon as Luther started the Reformation, alternative Reformations arose in other localities. From town to town, preachers told the citizenry what it should no longer put up with, whereupon they stood a good chance of being shoved aside—indeed, strung up—by other preachers. Religious houses began to close down. Luther led the movement mostly by his writings. Meanwhile, he did what he thought was his main job in life, teaching the Bible at the University of Wittenberg. The Reformation wasn’t led, exactly; it just spread, metastasized.

And that was because Europe was so ready for it. The relationship between the people and the rulers could hardly have been worse. Maximilian I, the Holy Roman Emperor, was dying—he brought his coffin with him wherever he travelled—but he was taking his time about it. The presumptive heir, King Charles I of Spain, was looked upon with grave suspicion. He already had Spain and the Netherlands. Why did he need the Holy Roman Empire as well? Furthermore, he was young—only seventeen when Luther wrote the Ninety-five Theses. The biggest trouble, though, was money. The Church had incurred enormous expenses. It was warring with the Turks at the walls of Vienna. It had also started an ambitious building campaign, including the reconstruction of St. Peter’s Basilica, in Rome. To pay for these ventures, it had borrowed huge sums from Europe’s banks, and to repay the banks it was strangling the people with taxes.

It has often been said that, fundamentally, Luther gave us “modernity.” Among the recent studies, Eric Metaxas’s “ Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World ” (Viking) makes this claim in grandiose terms. “The quintessentially modern idea of the individual was as unthinkable before Luther as is color in a world of black and white,” he writes. “And the more recent ideas of pluralism, religious liberty, self-government, and liberty all entered history through the door that Luther opened.” The other books are more reserved. As they point out, Luther wanted no part of pluralism—even for the time, he was vehemently anti-Semitic—and not much part of individualism. People were to believe and act as their churches dictated.

The fact that Luther’s protest, rather than others that preceded it, brought about the Reformation is probably due in large measure to his outsized personality. He was a charismatic man, and maniacally energetic. Above all, he was intransigent. To oppose was his joy. And though at times he showed that hankering for martyrdom that we detect, with distaste, in the stories of certain religious figures, it seems that, most of the time, he just got out of bed in the morning and got on with his work. Among other things, he translated the New Testament from Greek into German in eleven weeks.

Luther was born in 1483 and grew up in Mansfeld, a small mining town in Saxony. His father started out as a miner but soon rose to become a master smelter, a specialist in separating valuable metal (in this case, copper) from ore. The family was not poor. Archeologists have been at work in their basement. The Luthers ate suckling pig and owned drinking glasses. They had either seven or eight children, of whom five survived. The father wanted Martin, the eldest, to study law, in order to help him in his business, but Martin disliked law school and promptly had one of those experiences often undergone in the old days by young people who did not wish to take their parents’ career advice. Caught in a violent thunderstorm one day in 1505—he was twenty-one—he vowed to St. Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary, that if he survived he would become a monk. He kept his promise, and was ordained two years later. In the heavily psychoanalytic nineteen-fifties, much was made of the idea that this flouting of his father’s wishes set the stage for his rebellion against the Holy Father in Rome. Such is the main point of Erik Erikson’s 1958 book, “ Young Man Luther ,” which became the basis of a famous play by John Osborne (filmed, in 1974, with Stacy Keach in the title role).

Today, psychoanalytic interpretations tend to be tittered at by Luther biographers. But the desire to find some great psychological source, or even a middle-sized one, for Luther’s great story is understandable, because, for many years, nothing much happened to him. This man who changed the world left his German-speaking lands only once in his life. (In 1510, he was part of a mission sent to Rome to heal a rent in the Augustinian order. It failed.) Most of his youth was spent in dirty little towns where men worked long hours each day and then, at night, went to the tavern and got into fights. He described his university town, Erfurt, as consisting of “a whorehouse and a beerhouse.” Wittenberg, where he lived for the remainder of his life, was bigger—with two thousand inhabitants when he settled there—but not much better. As Lyndal Roper, one of the best of the new biographers, writes, in “ Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet ” (Random House), it was a mess of “muddy houses, unclean lanes.” At that time, however, the new ruler of Saxony, Frederick the Wise, was trying to make a real city of it. He built a castle and a church—the one on whose door the famous theses were supposedly nailed—and he hired an important artist, Lucas Cranach the Elder, as his court painter. Most important, he founded a university, and staffed it with able scholars, including Johann von Staupitz, the vicar-general of the Augustinian friars of the German-speaking territories. Staupitz had been Luther’s confessor at Erfurt, and when he found himself overworked at Wittenberg he summoned Luther, persuaded him to take a doctorate, and handed over many of his duties to him. Luther supervised everything from monasteries (eleven of them) to fish ponds, but most crucial was his succeeding Staupitz as the university’s professor of the Bible, a job that he took on at the age of twenty-eight and retained until his death. In this capacity, he lectured on Scripture, held disputations, and preached to the staff of the university.

He was apparently a galvanizing speaker, but during his first twelve years as a monk he published almost nothing. This was no doubt due in part to the responsibilities heaped on him at Wittenberg, but at this time, and for a long time, he also suffered what seems to have been a severe psychospiritual crisis. He called his problem his Anfechtungen —trials, tribulations—but this feels too slight a word to cover the afflictions he describes: cold sweats, nausea, constipation, crushing headaches, ringing in his ears, together with depression, anxiety, and a general feeling that, as he put it, the angel of Satan was beating him with his fists. Most painful, it seems, for this passionately religious young man was to discover his anger against God. Years later, commenting on his reading of Scripture as a young friar, Luther spoke of his rage at the description of God’s righteousness, and of his grief that, as he was certain, he would not be judged worthy: “I did not love, yes, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners.”

There were good reasons for an intense young priest to feel disillusioned. One of the most bitterly resented abuses of the Church at that time was the so-called indulgences, a kind of late-medieval get-out-of-jail-free card used by the Church to make money. When a Christian purchased an indulgence from the Church, he obtained—for himself or whomever else he was trying to benefit—a reduction in the amount of time the person’s soul had to spend in Purgatory, atoning for his sins, before ascending to Heaven. You might pay to have a special Mass said for the sinner or, less expensively, you could buy candles or new altar cloths for the church. But, in the most common transaction, the purchaser simply paid an agreed-upon amount of money and, in return, was given a document saying that the beneficiary—the name was written in on a printed form—was forgiven x amount of time in Purgatory. The more time off, the more it cost, but the indulgence-sellers promised that whatever you paid for you got.

Actually, they could change their minds about that. In 1515, the Church cancelled the exculpatory powers of already purchased indulgences for the next eight years. If you wanted that period covered, you had to buy a new indulgence. Realizing that this was hard on people—essentially, they had wasted their money—the Church declared that purchasers of the new indulgences did not have to make confession or even exhibit contrition. They just had to hand over the money and the thing was done, because this new issue was especially powerful. Johann Tetzel, a Dominican friar locally famous for his zeal in selling indulgences, is said to have boasted that one of the new ones could obtain remission from sin even for someone who had raped the Virgin Mary. (In the 1974 movie “ Luther ,” Tetzel is played with a wonderful, bug-eyed wickedness by Hugh Griffith.) Even by the standards of the very corrupt sixteenth-century Church, this was shocking.

In Luther’s mind, the indulgence trade seems to have crystallized the spiritual crisis he was experiencing. It brought him up against the absurdity of bargaining with God, jockeying for his favor—indeed, paying for his favor. Why had God given his only begotten son? And why had the son died on the cross? Because that’s how much God loved the world. And that alone, Luther now reasoned, was sufficient for a person to be found “justified,” or worthy. From this thought, the Ninety-five Theses were born. Most of them were challenges to the sale of indulgences. And out of them came what would be the two guiding principles of Luther’s theology: sola fide and sola scriptura .

Sola fide means “by faith alone”—faith, as opposed to good works, as the basis for salvation. This was not a new idea. St. Augustine, the founder of Luther’s monastic order, laid it out in the fourth century. Furthermore, it is not an idea that fits well with what we know of Luther. Pure faith, contemplation, white light: surely these are the gifts of the Asian religions, or of medieval Christianity, of St. Francis with his birds. As for Luther, with his rages and sweats, does he seem a good candidate? Eventually, however, he discovered (with lapses) that he could be released from those torments by the simple act of accepting God’s love for him. Lest it be thought that this stern man then concluded that we could stop worrying about our behavior and do whatever we wanted, he said that works issue from faith. In his words, “We can no more separate works from faith than heat and light from fire.” But he did believe that the world was irretrievably full of sin, and that repairing that situation was not the point of our moral lives. “Be a sinner, and let your sins be strong, but let your trust in Christ be stronger,” he wrote to a friend.

The second great principle, sola scriptura , or “by scripture alone,” was the belief that only the Bible could tell us the truth. Like sola fide , this was a rejection of what, to Luther, were the lies of the Church—symbolized most of all by the indulgence market. Indulgences brought you an abbreviation of your stay in Purgatory, but what was Purgatory? No such thing is mentioned in the Bible. Some people think that Dante made it up; others say Gregory the Great. In any case, Luther decided that somebody made it up.

Guided by those convictions, and fired by his new certainty of God’s love for him, Luther became radicalized. He preached, he disputed. Above all, he wrote pamphlets. He denounced not only the indulgence trade but all the other ways in which the Church made money off Christians: the endless pilgrimages, the yearly Masses for the dead, the cults of the saints. He questioned the sacraments. His arguments made sense to many people, notably Frederick the Wise. Frederick was pained that Saxony was widely considered a backwater. He now saw how much attention Luther brought to his state, and how much respect accrued to the university that he (Frederick) had founded at Wittenberg. He vowed to protect this troublemaker.

Things came to a head in 1520. By then, Luther had taken to calling the Church a brothel, and Pope Leo X the Antichrist. Leo gave Luther sixty days to appear in Rome and answer charges of heresy. Luther let the sixty days elapse; the Pope excommunicated him; Luther responded by publicly burning the papal order in the pit where one of Wittenberg’s hospitals burned its used rags. Reformers had been executed for less, but Luther was by now a very popular man throughout Europe. The authorities knew they would have serious trouble if they killed him, and the Church gave him one more chance to recant, at the upcoming diet—or congregation of officers, sacred and secular—in the cathedral city of Worms in 1521. He went, and declared that he could not retract any of the charges he had made against the Church, because the Church could not show him, in Scripture, that any of them were false:

Since then your serene majesties and your lordships seek a simple answer, I will give it in this manner, plain and unvarnished: Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the scriptures or clear reason, for I do not trust in the Pope or in the councils alone, since it is well known that they often err and contradict themselves, I am bound to the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not retract anything.

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The Pope often errs! Luther will decide what God wants! By consulting Scripture! No wonder that an institution wedded to the idea of its leader’s infallibility was profoundly shaken by this declaration. Once the Diet of Worms came to an end, Luther headed for home, but he was “kidnapped” on the way, by a posse of knights sent by his protector, Frederick the Wise. The knights spirited him off to the Wartburg, a secluded castle in Eisenach, in order to give the authorities time to cool off. Luther was annoyed by the delay, but he didn’t waste time. That’s when he translated the New Testament.

During his lifetime, Luther became probably the biggest celebrity in the German-speaking lands. When he travelled, people flocked to the high road to see his cart go by. This was due not just to his personal qualities and the importance of his cause but to timing. Luther was born only a few decades after the invention of printing, and though it took him a while to start writing, it was hard to stop him once he got going. Among the quincentennial books is an entire volume on his relationship to print, “ Brand Luther ” (Penguin), by the British historian Andrew Pettegree. Luther’s collected writings come to a hundred and twenty volumes. In the first half of the sixteenth century, a third of all books published in German were written by him.

By producing them, he didn’t just create the Reformation; he also created his country’s vernacular, as Dante is said to have done with Italian. The majority of his writings were in Early New High German, a form of the language that was starting to gel in southern Germany at that time. Under his influence, it did gel.

The crucial text is his Bible: the New Testament, translated from the original Greek and published in 1523, followed by the Old Testament, in 1534, translated from the Hebrew. Had he not created Protestantism, this book would be the culminating achievement of Luther’s life. It was not the first German translation of the Bible—indeed, it had eighteen predecessors—but it was unquestionably the most beautiful, graced with the same combination of exaltation and simplicity, but more so, as the King James Bible. (William Tyndale, whose English version of the Bible, for which he was executed, was more or less the basis of the King James, knew and admired Luther’s translation.) Luther very consciously sought a fresh, vigorous idiom. For his Bible’s vocabulary, he said, “we must ask the mother in the home, the children on the street,” and, like other writers with such aims—William Blake, for example—he ended up with something songlike. He loved alliteration—“ Der Herr ist mein Hirte ” (“The Lord is my shepherd”); “ Dein Stecken und Stab ” (“thy rod and thy staff”)—and he loved repetition and forceful rhythms. This made his texts easy and pleasing to read aloud, at home, to the children. The books also featured a hundred and twenty-eight woodcut illustrations, all by one artist from the Cranach workshop, known to us only as Master MS. There they were, all those wondrous things—the Garden of Eden, Abraham and Isaac, Jacob wrestling with the angel—which modern people are used to seeing images of and which Luther’s contemporaries were not. There were marginal glosses, as well as short prefaces for each book, which would have been useful for the children of the household and probably also for the family member reading to them.

These virtues, plus the fact that the Bible was probably, in many cases, the only book in the house, meant that it was widely used as a primer. More people learned to read, and the more they knew how to read the more they wanted to own this book, or give it to others. The three-thousand-copy first edition of the New Testament, though it was not cheap (it cost about as much as a calf), sold out immediately. As many as half a million Luther Bibles seem to have been printed by the mid-sixteenth century. In his discussions of sola scriptura , Luther had declared that all believers were priests: laypeople had as much right as the clergy to determine what Scripture meant. With his Bible, he gave German speakers the means to do so.

In honor of the five-hundredth anniversary, the excellent German art-book publisher Taschen has produced a facsimile with spectacular colored woodcuts. Pleasingly, the book historian Stephan Füssel, in the explanatory paperback that accompanies the two-volume facsimile, reports that in 2004, when a fire swept through the Duchess Anna Amalia Library, in Weimar, where this copy was housed, it was “rescued, undamaged, with not a second to lose, thanks to the courageous intervention of library director Dr. Michael Knoche.” I hope that Dr. Knoche himself ran out with the two volumes in his arms. I don’t know what the price of a calf is these days, but the price of this facsimile is sixty dollars. Anyone who wants to give himself a Luther quincentennial present should order it immediately. Master MS’s Garden of Eden is full of wonderful animals—a camel, a crocodile, a little toad—and in the towns everyone wears those black shoes like the ones in Brueghel paintings. The volumes lie flat on the table when you open them, and the letters are big and black and clear. Even if you don’t understand German, you can sort of read them.

Among the supposedly Biblical rules that Luther pointed out could not be found in the Bible was the requirement of priestly celibacy. Well before the Diet of Worms, Luther began advising priests to marry. He said that he would marry, too, if he did not expect, every day, to be executed for heresy. One wonders. But in 1525 he was called upon to help a group of twelve nuns who had just fled a Cistercian convent, an action that was related to his reforms. Part of his duty to these women, he felt, was to return them to their families or to find husbands for them. At the end, one was left, a twenty-six-year-old girl named Katharina von Bora, the daughter of a poor, albeit noble, country family. Luther didn’t want her, he said—he found her “proud”—but she wanted him. She was the one who proposed. And though, as he told a friend, he felt no “burning” for her, he formed with her a marriage that is probably the happiest story in any account of his life.

One crucial factor was her skill in household management. The Luthers lived in the so-called Black Monastery, which had been Wittenberg’s Augustinian monastery—that is, Luther’s old home as a friar—before the place emptied out as a result of the reformer’s actions. (One monk became a cobbler, another a baker, and so on.) It was a huge, filthy, comfortless place. Käthe, as Luther called her, made it livable, and not just for her immediate family. Between ten and twenty students lodged there, and the household took in many others as well: four children of Luther’s dead sister Margarete, plus four more orphaned children from both sides of the family, plus a large family fleeing the plague. A friend of the reformer, writing to an acquaintance journeying to Wittenberg, warned him on no account to stay with the Luthers if he valued peace and quiet. The refectory table seated between thirty-five and fifty, and Käthe, having acquired a large market garden and a considerable amount of livestock (pigs, goats), and now supervising a staff of up to ten employees (maids, a cook, a swineherd, et al.), fed them all. She also handled the family’s finances, and at times had to economize carefully. Luther would accept no money for his writings, on which he could have profited hugely, and he would not allow students to pay to attend his lectures, as was the custom.

Luther appreciated the sheer increase in his physical comfort. When he writes to a friend, soon after his marriage, of what it is like to lie in a dry bed after years of sleeping on a pile of damp, mildewed straw, and when, elsewhere, he speaks of the surprise of turning over in bed and seeing a pair of pigtails on the pillow next to his, your heart softens toward this dyspeptic man. More important, he began to take women seriously. He objects, in a lecture, to coitus interruptus, the most common form of birth control at the time, on the ground that it is frustrating for women. When he was away from home, he wrote Käthe affectionate letters, with such salutations as “Most holy Frau Doctor” and “To the hands and feet of my dear housewife.”

Among Käthe’s virtues was fertility. Every year or so for eight years, she produced a child—six in all, of whom four survived to adulthood—and Luther loved these children. He even allowed them to play in his study while he was working. Of five-year-old Hans, his firstborn, he wrote, “When I’m writing or doing something else, my Hans sings a little tune for me. If he becomes too noisy and I rebuke him for it, he continues to sing but does it more privately and with a certain awe and uneasiness.” That scene, which comes from “ Martin Luther: Rebel in an Age of Upheaval ” (Oxford), by the German historian Heinz Schilling, seems to me impossible to improve upon as a portrait of what it must have been like for Luther to have a little boy, and for a little boy to have Luther as a father. Luther was not a lenient parent—he used the whip when he felt he needed to, and poor Hans was sent to the university at the age of seven—but when, on his travels, the reformer passed through a town that was having a fair he liked to buy presents for the children. In 1536, when he went to the Diet of Augsburg, another important convocation, he kept a picture of his favorite child, Magdalene, on the wall of his chamber. Magdalene died at thirteen. Schilling again produces a telling scene. Magdalene is nearing the end; Luther is holding her. He says he knows she would like to stay with her father, but, he adds, “Are you also glad to go to your father in heaven?” She died in his arms. How touching that he could find this common-sense way to comfort her, and also that he seems to feel that Heaven is right above their heads, with one father holding out a hand to take to himself the other’s child.

One thing that Luther seems especially to have loved about his children was their corporeality—their fat, noisy little bodies. When Hans finally learned to bend his knees and relieve himself on the floor, Luther rejoiced, reporting to a friend that the child had “crapped in every corner of the room.” I wonder who cleaned that up—not Luther, I would guess—but it is hard not to feel some of his pleasure. Sixteenth-century Germans were not, in the main, dainty of thought or speech. A representative of the Vatican once claimed that Luther was conceived when the Devil raped his mother in an outhouse. That detail comes from Eric Metaxas’s book, which is full of vulgar stories, not that one has to look far for vulgar stories in Luther’s life. My favorite (reported in Erikson’s book) is a comment that Luther made at the dinner table while in the grip of a depression. “I am like a ripe shit,” he said, “and the world is a gigantic asshole. We will both probably let go of each other soon.” It takes you a minute to realize that Luther is saying that he feels he is dying. And then you want to congratulate him on the sheer zest, the proto-surrealist nuttiness, of his metaphor. He may feel as though he’s dying, but he’s having a good time feeling it.

The group on which Luther expended his most notorious denunciations was not the Roman Catholic clergy but the Jews. His sentiments were widely shared. In the words of Heinz Schilling, “Late medieval Christians generally hated and despised Jews.” But Luther despised them dementedly, ecstatically. In his 1543 treatise “On the Ineffable Name and the Generations of Christ,” he imagines the Devil stuffing the Jews’ orifices with filth: “He stuffs and squirts them so full, that it overflows and swims out of every place, pure Devil’s filth, yes, it tastes so good to their hearts, and they guzzle it like sows.” Witness the death of Judas Iscariot, he adds: “When Judas Schariot hanged himself, so that his guts ripped, and as happens to those who are hanged, his bladder burst, then the Jews had their golden cans and silver bowls ready, to catch the Judas piss . . . and afterwards together they ate the shit.” The Jews’ synagogues should be burned down, he wrote; their houses should be destroyed. He did not recommend that they be killed, but he did say that Christians had no moral responsibilities to them, which amounts to much the same thing.

This is hair-raising, but what makes Luther’s anti-Semitism most disturbing is not its extremity (which, by sounding so crazy, diminishes its power). It is the fact that the country of which he is a national hero did indeed, quite recently, exterminate six million Jews. Hence the formula “ From Luther to Hitler ,” popularized by William Montgomery McGovern’s 1941 book of that title—the notion that Luther laid the groundwork for the slaughter. Those who have wished to defend him have pointed out that his earlier writings, such as the 1523 pamphlet “That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew,” are much more conciliatory in tone. He seemed to regret that, as he put it, Christians had “dealt with the Jews as if they were dogs.” But making excuses for Luther on the basis of his earlier, more temperate writings does not really work. As scholars have been able to show, Luther was gentler early on because he was hoping to persuade the Jews to convert. When they failed to do so, he unleashed his full fury, more violent now because he believed that the comparative mildness of his earlier writings may have been partly responsible for their refusal.

Luther’s anti-Semitism would be a moral problem under any circumstances. People whom we admire often commit terrible sins, and we have no good way of explaining this to ourselves. But when one adds the historical factor—that, in Luther’s case, the judgment is being made five centuries after the event—we hit a brick wall. At the Nuremberg trials, in 1946, Julius Streicher, the founder and publisher of the Jew-baiting newspaper Der Stürmer , quoted Luther as the source of his beliefs and said that if he was going to be blamed Luther would have to be blamed as well. But, in the words of Thomas Kaufmann, a professor of church history at the University of Göttingen, “The Nuremberg judges sat in judgment over the mass murderers of the twentieth century, not over the delusions of a misguided sixteenth-century theology professor. . . . Another judge must judge Luther.” How fortunate to be able to believe that such a judge will come, and have an answer.

Luther lived to what, in the sixteenth century, was an old age, sixty-two, but the years were not kind to him. Actually, he lived most of his life in turmoil. When he was young, there were the Anfechtungen . Then, once he issued the theses and began his movement, he had to struggle not just with the right, the Roman Church, but with the left—the Schwärmer (fanatics), as he called them, the people who felt that he hadn’t gone far enough. He spent days and weeks in pamphlet wars over matters that, today, have to be patiently explained to us, they seem so remote. Did Communion involve transubstantiation, or was Jesus physically present from the start of the rite? Luther, a “Real Presence” man, said the latter. Should people be baptized soon after they are born, as Luther said, or when they are adults, as the Anabaptists claimed?

When Luther was young, he was good at friendship. He was frank and warm; he loved jokes; he wanted to have people and noise around him. (Hence the fifty-seat dinner table.) As he grew older, he changed. He found that he could easily discard friends, even old friends, even his once beloved confessor, Staupitz. People who had dealings with the movement found themselves going around him if they could, usually to his right-hand man, Philip Melanchthon. Always sharp-tongued, Luther now lost all restraint, writing in a treatise that Pope Paul III was a sodomite and a transvestite—no surprise, he added, when you considered that all popes, since the beginnings of the Church, were full of devils and vomited and farted and defecated devils. This starts to sound like his attacks on the Jews.

His health declined. He had dizzy spells, bleeding hemorrhoids, constipation, urine retention, gout, kidney stones. To balance his “humors,” the surgeon made a hole, or “fontanelle,” in a vein in his leg, and it was kept open. Whatever this did for his humors, it meant that he could no longer walk to the church or the university. He had to be taken in a cart. He suffered disabling depressions. “I have lost Christ completely,” he wrote to Melanchthon. From a man of his temperament and convictions, this is a terrible statement.

In early 1546, he had to go to the town of his birth, Eisleben, to settle a dispute. It was January, and the roads were bad. Tellingly, he took all three of his sons with him. He said the trip might be the death of him, and he was right. He died in mid-February. Appropriately, in view of his devotion to the scatological, his corpse was given an enema, in the hope that this would revive him. It didn’t. After sermons in Eisleben, the coffin was driven back to Wittenberg, with an honor guard of forty-five men on horseback. Bells tolled in every village along the way. Luther was buried in the Castle Church, on whose door he was said to have nailed his theses.

Although his resting place evokes his most momentous act, it also highlights the intensely local nature of the life he led. The transformations he set in motion were incidental to his struggles, which remained irreducibly personal. His goal was not to usher in modernity but simply to make religion religious again. Heinz Schilling writes, “Just when the lustre of religion threatened to be outdone by the atheistic and political brilliance of the secularized Renaissance papacy, the Wittenberg monk defined humankind’s relationship to God anew and gave back to religion its existential plausibility.” Lyndal Roper thinks much the same. She quotes Luther saying that the Church’s sacraments “are not fulfilled when they are taking place but when they are being believed.” All he asked for was sincerity, but this made a great difference. ♦

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Printing, propaganda, and public opinion in the age of martin luther.

• David Bagchi David Bagchi University of Hull
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.013.269
• Published online: 31 August 2016

Luther had a notoriously ambivalent attitude towards what was still the new technology of the printing press. He could both praise it as God’s highest act of grace for the proclamation of God’s Word, and condemn it for its unprecedented ability to mangle the same beyond recognition. That ambivalence seems to be reflected in the judgment of modern scholarship. Some have characterized the Reformation as a paradigmatic event in the history of mass communications (a Medien- or Kommunikationsereignis ), while others have poured scorn on any reductionist attempt to attribute a complex movement to a technological advance and to posit in effect a doctrine of “Justification by Print Alone.”

The evidence in favor of some sort of correlation between the use of printing and the success of the Reformation in Germany and Switzerland is certainly formidable. Thousands of German Reformation pamphlets ( Flugschriften ) survive to this day in research libraries and other collections (with Luther’s own works predominant among them), suggesting that the Holy Roman Empire was once awash with millions of affordable little tracts in the vernacular. Contemporary opponents of the Reformation lamented the potency of cheap print for propaganda and even for agitation among “the people,” and did their best either to beat the evangelical writers through legislation or else to join them by launching their own literary campaigns. But, ubiquitous as the Reformation Flugschrift was for a comparatively short time, the long-term impact of printing on Luther’s Reformation was even more impressive, above all in the production and dissemination of Bibles and partial Bibles that used Luther’s German translation. The message of the Lutheran Reformation, with its emphasis on the proclamation of God’s Word to all, seemed to coincide perfectly with the emergence of a new medium that could, for the first time, transmit that Word to all.

Against this correlation must be set the very low literacy rate in the Holy Roman Empire in the early 16th century, which on some estimates ranged between only 5 and 10 percent. of the entire population. Even taking into account the fact that historical literacy rates are notoriously difficult to estimate, the impact of printing on the majority must have been negligible. This fact has led historians to develop more nuanced ways of understanding the early-modern communication process than simply imagining a reader sitting in front of a text. One is to recognize the “hybridity” of many publications—a pamphlet might contain labeled illustrations, or be capable of being read out aloud as a sermon, or of being sung. Luther himself published many successful hybrid works of this kind. Another is the notion of the “two-stage communication process,” by which propagandists or advertisers direct their message principally to influential, literate, opinion-formers who cascade the new ideas down. Clearly much work remains to be done in understanding how Luther’s propaganda and public opinion interacted. The fact that our present generations are living through a series of equally transformative and disruptive communications revolutions will no doubt inspire new questions as well as new insights.

• Martin Luther
• public opinion
• Reformation pamphlets
• Flugschriften
• priesthood of all believers

Printing and the Reformation: Two Views

Luther was not the first condemned heretic to write books, but he was the first to benefit from the rapid and cheap dissemination of ideas made possible by the printing press. It is significant that, at the Diet of Worms in 1521 , Luther was required to retract not his ideas but the books that contained them, and the resulting Edict made special mention of the unauthorized printing of books calculated to spread heresy. Far from putting an end to the propagation of Luther’s cause through the press, the Diet and its Edict were followed by an even more massive output of religious publishing than had gone before. The year 1520 had seen 275 editions of Luther’s works leave the presses. In 1523 , two years after Worms, that figure rose to 390. 1 Reformation literature in general, and Luther’s works in particular, transformed the German-language book market, which (again in terms of editions) quadrupled between 1518 and 1520 and almost doubled again between 1520 and 1524 . 2

It was inevitable that such an astonishing phenomenon, combined with the success of Luther’s Bible translations from 1522 , should have encouraged evangelicals to regard the coincidence of the new technology and the Reformation as providential. Luther once famously hailed printing as “the latest and greatest gift, by which God intends the work of true religion to be known throughout the world and translated into every tongue.” 3 Twelve years later, in 1542 , one of the first historians of the German Reformation, Johann Sleidan, also identified printing as a special gift from God, by which the German people would become the means of bringing the light of the gospel to the whole world. 4 More recent commentators have also been inclined to see in printing a cause—or at least a necessary precondition—of the Reformation. For Lawrence Stone (following Marshall McLuhan), both printing and the Reformation marked a shift from “image culture” to “word culture,” with a growing concentration on printed Bibles as the Word of God, at the expense of images as the book of the laity. 5 For Elizabeth Eisenstein, the Reformation was one of three revolutions brought about by the printing press. 6 For Bernd Hamm, the Reformation was a “media event.” 7 The case was put starkly by Bernd Moeller in a famous slogan: “without printing, no Reformation.” 8

Other scholars have expressed unease with what they see as a species of technological determinism, as ridiculed by A. G. Dickens’s quip about “Justification by Print Alone.” 9 The Reformation was not primarily a technological event. Moreover, low rates of literacy (probably only 5 percent in German-speaking lands) meant that, for the most part, the new faith must have come by hearing, in a range of formal and informal situations: from hedge-, street-, and saloon-bar preaching as much as from the pulpit; from public disputations and private conversations; and from plays and popular songs. 10 On this view, printing was therefore, at best, only a secondary means by which the Reformation message was conveyed. It may even be the case that Reformation historians have been misled into according the printing press more importance than it actually warrants. Estimates for the volume of 16th-century printing are extrapolated from the copies that survive in libraries. In most cases, however, these survivals are not random but have at some point been collected and preserved. There is a danger, in other words, that our perception of the 16th-century book trade and its characteristics (for instance, the popularity of Luther and Karlstadt and the relative unpopularity of Catholic authors) is simply a reflection of the natural bias of earlier collectors towards famous or favored names.

Even the apparent advantages offered by the printing press, such as the ability to produce pamphlets and broadsheets quickly and in large numbers, could be counter-productive. The temptation to rush a sure-fire bestseller into print before one’s publishing rivals was too strong for many to resist; yet a rushed, or even a pirated, print job risked distorting the very message it was supposed to carry. By 1525 , Luther was so exercised by these underhand practices that he prefaced his collection of Lenten sermons with a foreword addressed to “my dear printers, who so openly rob and steal from each another.” “I could put up with their crimes [of theft and fraud],” he admitted, “did they not corrupt and ruin my books so badly in the process. But they print them so quickly that when they come back to me I no longer recognize them: something is missing in that place; that bit has been transposed; that has not been corrected.” 11 With such careless work in mind, Luther himself could at times curse the proliferation of books through printing with as much enthusiasm as he praised it. 12 Little wonder that, the year before, he began using complex woodcut logotypes that could not easily be reproduced to identify his original publications, and thereby was one of the first authors to claim intellectual property rights. 13

Caveats about low literacy rates and the over-estimation of the impact of print on the dissemination of Protestantism were joined towards the end of the last century by a stern reassessment of the Reformation pamphlet’s value as a historical resource. Anonymous and pseudonymous pamphlets had often been taken for what they claimed to be, the expression of the fears and hopes and beliefs of “the common people,” which was only too ready to ally itself with Luther and against the financial and spiritual tyranny of Rome. 14 But now these pamphlets were treated as a propaganda ruse by educated reformists hoping to create the impression of an unstoppable groundswell of public opinion on Luther’s side. 15 As a result, historians generally ceased to regard pamphlets as offering credible evidence of popular mentalities and turned instead to the civil, legal, and ecclesiastical archives for echoes of the genuine voices of the people. 16

By the late 1980s and the early 1990s, scholarly scepticism about the role of printing for the Reformation was widespread. It is significant, for example, that the survey volume Reformation Europe: A Guide to Research II , published in 1992 , contained no chapter specifically on the subject of pamphleteering or on printing more generally. This is in telling contrast to its predecessor of ten years before, when pamphlet research was flourishing, and to its successor, published in 2008 , when the history of the book was once again in rude health. 17 This skepticism was an understandable reaction to those treatments, which too readily identified the rise of the handpress and the rise of Protestantism, or which regarded the Reformation pamphlet as representative of “popular opinion” tout simple . But a position that denies an important role to print in the dissemination of Reformation propaganda has to ignore too much evidence. Catholic authorities—civic and ecclesiastical—in the Empire and Switzerland clearly took both the effectiveness of the press and its association with heterodoxy with the utmost seriousness. Local ordinances, in support of the Edict of Worms, were issued in many cities and were strictly enforced. 18 Naturally, there were corresponding bans on unauthorized preaching, but it was recognized that the printed word had a potency and danger peculiar to it: the Catholic apologist Johann Cochlaeus pointed out that an heretical book corrupts not only its first readers, but can be picked up by an unwary soul fifty or more years later and corrupt an entirely new generation, in much the same way as Luther and his followers were misled by the writings of Wycliffe and Huss long after those heresiarchs themselves had expired. 19 These Catholic testimonies show that the reformers’ high evaluation of the importance of printing as a key factor in spreading the new teachings was shared by their opponents.

The notion that Reformation pamphlets were produced and consumed solely by a well-educated elite also seems less secure than it once did. Socially marginalized groups, like women and male manual workers, did write pamphlets, and they appealed to the characteristically Lutheran doctrine of universal priesthood to justify doing so. 20 There is evidence that pamphlets were read aloud by literate members of a community for the benefit of their unlettered colleagues. Indeed, partisans claimed that, because of the availability of pamphlets, better sermons could be heard in taverns than in churches, and in the pubs of Basel it seems that impromptu preaching out of books did take place. 21 Many pamphlets were particularly suited to this treatment, either because they were themselves the texts or summaries of sermons or else because the diction and rhythm adopted was that of spoken German, as was especially the case with Eberlin von Günzburg’s works. 22 Rather than compartmentalize the Reformation pamphlet as a literary product of and for a literate elite, we should think instead of the “hybridization” of media, whereby print (both word and image) and other visual and oral forms worked together in a completely integrated manner to convey Reformation propaganda. 23 The contents of pamphlets might be summarized in short ditties by the colporteurs who sold them, 24 or they might be communicated through woodcut illustrations accompanying the text. A good example of the latter is the thoroughly bi-medial pamphlet The Passional of Christ and Antichrist , with words by Melanchthon and Schwertfeger (though evidently inspired by Luther’s To the Christian Nobility of 1520 ) and illustrations by Cranach. The message embodied in the Reformation pamphlet was accessible by more means than literacy alone.

In the same way that our definition of 16th-century literacy is perhaps too restrictive, so our estimates of literacy may be too conservative. Edwards has argued that the very large number of pamphlets produced in the early 1520s—some six million copies for a total population of only twelve million, or twenty copies for each literate person—suggests that we have seriously underestimated the extent of literacy in the Holy Roman Empire. 25 The ready availability of worthwhile reading material would itself have been an incentive to greater literacy: Reformation publishing created a market, as well as catering for one. Evidence of extensive book ownership, and we assume of literacy, crops up in unlikely places. One would hardly expect the harsh conditions endured by the miners of the Austrian Tyrol to be conducive to reading. But we find that, in the middle of the 16th century, they owned a wide selection of theological books, in Latin as well as in German, including many of the works of Luther, Eck, and Sachs. 26 (Pettegree reminds us that book ownership does not necessarily imply literacy, citing the case of Lieven de Zomere, a Ghent baker who claimed to own many books by Luther but who took his copy of The Babylonian Captivity of the Church to a local cleric to have it read to him. Pettegree suggests that de Zomere and other illiterates might have purchased Reformation pamphlets less to read them than to buy into the excitement of the new and illicit ideas they contained. 27 That is certainly plausible; but in de Zomere’s case it might simply have been that he read Dutch and Low German but not Latin.)

Those who warn against seeing printing in general, and the pamphlet in particular, as a significant factor in the dissemination and reception of the Reformation message in the Holy Roman Empire may be guilty of too much caution. Is the same true of those historians who discount the value of pamphlets as sources for determining public opinion? Here again, it might be mistaken to assume that all pamphleteers were denizens of ivory towers, remote from the concerns of the common people, of which some falsely purported to be. Most pamphlets were published anonymously, so there is extremely little hard evidence available about the social background of those who wrote them. But, thanks to R. W. Scribner, we do have information about an analogous group. Scribner collected biographical data on 176 Protestant preachers active in Germany up to about 1550 . We can see from this that, despite their extraordinarily high standard of education, more than 40 percent of the first Reformation preachers were from rural poor, urban poor, or artisan families. 28 Many of Scribner’s preachers were also pamphleteers, and we can assume that the profiles of both groups were at least broadly similar. Such writers would have continued to share much of the outlook and interests of the class from which they had emerged, and would have felt qualified to voice the concerns of “the common man” in their writings. We should of course be wary of assuming a total community of interest: education changed perspectives and expectations then as now. But of all those in 16th century Germany who could articulate complex ideas in writing, upwardly mobile pamphleteers were indeed best qualified to represent “the common people.”

From Broadsheet to Pamphlet

The commercial success of the Reformation pamphlet was due to a number of factors: it was relatively cheap, it was a handy size, it could be produced quickly and in large numbers, and (above all) its subject matter was what the public wanted to read. But it did not appear overnight to satisfy the demands of religious controversy and persuasion. The cheap, small format book had been a familiar feature of life in France, Germany, and the Low Countries for many decades. Even before the invention of moveable metal type, saints’ lives, devotional guides for dying well, and picture bibles ( biblia pauperum praedicatorum ) had been printed from woodcuts. These continued to be produced in volume even after letterpresses became common, and of course, the woodcut remained the cheapest and most convenient means of illustrating books for two hundred years. 29

Printing from blocks had some advantages. It required no special equipment other than a block of wood, a knife, ink, and paper. But its strength lay in its facility for reproducing single sheets and relatively short books in relatively short print runs. While this did not put it at any particular disadvantage in contrast with moveable type at first, when short runs were the norm, the block printing of texts was overtaken by the newer invention after about 1460 . But it continued to serve an important purpose, not least in helping to satisfy the huge demand for devotional works in the 15th century with cheap and plentiful prints and booklets.

One reason for the eclipse of block printing by moveable type was the coarseness of the paper used in western Europe at this time. Metal type applied by screw press made a much clearer impression than woodblocks but naturally it required a deal of preparation. First, a punch in a hard metal such as steel had to be engraved for each of the characters for a particular font; these punches were then used to strike matrices in a softer metal, which could in turn be used as molds for turning out the alloy types (or sorts ) themselves. The sorts would be made up into pages and set in a rigid frame (or forme ). The forme would be turned face-up and inked (using a suitable fatty ink specially formulated to adhere to the metal) and a sheet of paper forced onto the forme by a mechanical press. The sheets could then be folded, sewn into gatherings, and, if required, bound. It was little wonder that the first printers were highly skilled workers, such as goldsmiths and moneyers, rather than enterprising block printers. The earliest printed books included veritable works of art such as the Psalter of Johann Fust and Peter Schoeffer, and the 42-line Bible traditionally attributed to Johann Gutenberg; but from our point of view it is significant that, contemporaneously with these fine works, the Mainz presses were turning out more popular and ephemeral material, such as vernacular printed calendars and letters of indulgence. 30 Some sixty printing shops had been established in German-speaking lands by 1500 , to keep up with a growing demand. No doubt the growing availability of printed material helped to stimulate the growth of literacy, in 15th- and 16th-century Germany as in 17th-century England. But the invention of printing also coincided with an explosion of the German population, from around 10 million in 1470 to perhaps 20 million in 1600 . The reading public must have doubled at least during that period.

This popular end of the market included small booklets of a few, unbound pages, but was dominated by the production of single sheets, printed on one side, usually containing a woodcut in the upper portion and text (often in verse) in the lower half. These were the forerunners of the modern newspaper, and it would not be too misleading to characterize them in modern terms as broadsheet in size but tabloid in content. Typically, their subjects were reports of notable events, astrological predictions, or sensationalist reports of strange phenomena, such as deformities in new-born children or animals. Such reporting might be used to influence public opinion, by interpreting these phenomena as portents relating to contemporary political and social affairs. The court of Emperor Maximilian I routinely used broadsheets and pamphlets for propaganda purposes (for example, a child born with two heads in 1495 was portrayed by imperial publicists as representing the double-headed eagle, and as a good omen for the house of Habsburg’s power-struggle with the German princes). 31 Small format books might be the vehicle of satire, most famously the celebrated Letters of Obscure Men, which appeared in quarto, octavo, and eventually even duodecimo. 32 Alternatively, they might be put to more sinister purposes. Franciscan friars used them to embarrass their Dominican rivals over the notorious Jetzer case in Berne, which ended in death at the stake for four Dominicans in 1509 , while some of the most virulent anti-Jewish sentiments expressed in the 16th century belong to this period. 33

The Reformation Pamphlet

Definition and physical appearance.

What was a Reformation pamphlet? The most influential attempt at a definition has been that of Hans-Joachim Köhler, director of the project, which published and cataloged all copies of 16th-century pamphlets extant in the libraries of the former West Germany. He defined a pamphlet as “a self-contained, occasional, and unbound publication consisting of more than one page, addressed to the general public with the aim of agitation (that is, the influencing of events) and/or propaganda (that is, the influencing of beliefs).” 34 In physical terms, the typical pamphlet was of a handy, quarto, size (usually about 8 inches by 6 inches), and of 16 pages or fewer in length, though some ran to 80 pages or more. 35 The gatherings might be sewn, but not bound, so that the title page was also the front cover, often embellished either with a woodcut appropriate to the content, or more likely some merely decorative devices drawn from the publisher’s own stock. By the early 16th century, the convention had already been established by which Latin was normally set in roman type and German in Fraktur or “gothic” type (the distinction lasted well into the 20th century). Pamphlets in German naturally used different dialects, according to the region of the author or compositor. There was, as with the English of this period, no standardized orthography, so that the same word might be spelled in several different ways even on the same page. The text itself was often contracted or abbreviated—usually by the omission of consonants, indicated by a special mark above the preceding vowel. This was a survival from the age of the scribe in which abbreviations, especially of Latin, were heavily used to save time and, more importantly, to ensure the neat justification of the right-hand margin. Given that justified margins could now be achieved by adding metal spacers of the required width between characters and words, and that contractions, which required extra characters in every font, made the job of setting type and replacing it after use so much more cumbersome, it was surprising that the practice only gradually died out during the century. Naturally, errors were made during the process of typesetting, which required the compositor to assemble a mirror image of the required text. Mistakes could also be made when laying out the forms in the exact manner required for each format of book, so that pages might appear in the wrong order. Proofreading could catch the worst slips, and lists of corrigenda could be added to the final page, or a loose leaf might be pasted in; but cheap pamphlets generally did not warrant the extra expense involved.

Early 16th-century pamphlets are therefore crude affairs, far from the triumphs of art and craft we normally associate with early printed books. In later centuries, they were traded for their value as scrap paper rather than as reading matter. Circulated and read unbound, many must have fallen to pieces long before they could meet such a fate. The important thing about them, then as now, was not their appearance but their contents.

Literary Characteristics, Content, and Argumentation

Sixteenth-century pamphlets covered a wide variety of subjects, from cookery and books of trades to astrology and works of traditional theology and devotion. But in the 1520s, the vast bulk of pamphlets was religious in character and related to the growing demand for reform of the Church. Typically, they portrayed the Church as a corrupt institution that oppressed the consciences of the laity even as it emptied their pockets. Monks and friars were excoriated for their hypocrisy in professing poverty while amassing great wealth. Similarly, they portrayed the Pope, while arrogating to himself the title of Vicar of Christ, as preferring the pomp and circumstance of his court to the hard life of the first disciples and of their Master. They claimed that the straightforward message of the Gospel had been displaced by human inventions—canon law, scholastic theology, the cult of the saints, masses for the dead—and that the Italian-led Church had for too long exploited the proverbial slow-wittedness of the Teutons. But at last, they proclaimed, even the Germans were waking up to their misfortune. There is indeed much in the pamphlet literature of the Reformation, both in content and in tone, to remind us of the Internet age and its predilection for conspiracy theories. Balancing the negative messages, however, were positive elements, proclaiming enlightenment through the notion of the open Bible, liberation through the doctrine of justification by faith alone, and the restoration of right order by providing support and education for the poor. 36

These arguments, both positive and negative, might be presented in a number of ways. Some Flugschriften were reasoned expositions, corresponding to pamphlets in the modern sense. Far more numerous were those that adopted a sermonic style, and indeed were often straightforward transcriptions of sermons actually preached. 37 Almost as widely used was the format of the open letter, addressed to a friend or patron, but in reality intended for a much wider readership. The letter was a form much favored by humanists, in imitation of classical models. But when Luther addressed open letters to persecuted communities, his inspiration was more likely the epistles of the New Testament and the early fathers. Some evangelicals deliberately copied the style of St Paul’s letters, for instance. 38 An example is Balthasar Stanberger’s A Letter on Loving God and One’s Neighbour of 1523 , addressed to the publisher Johann Michael. Another very popular genre was the prose dialogue between two or more antagonists. The dialogue had long been used to convey philosophical and theological ideas, from Plato to Anselm and beyond, and the Renaissance had seen a revival of the form, though Ulrich von Hutten’s inspiration, for example, was more likely the comic dialogues of Lucian. Many Reformation dialogues were more lively and direct even than Hutten’s still rather stilted efforts, and it may be that they owed their inspiration to the theatre, most notably the Shrovetide plays ( Fastnachtspiele ). 39

Other literary genres were adopted, but these were less widely used than those already mentioned; they included plays proper, such as Niklaus Manuel’s The Devourers of the Dead , performed in Berne during Lent 1523 ; 40 poems, such as Hans Sachs’s The Wittenberg Nightingale ; 41 and the apocalyptic Weissagung (prophecy) genre, associated with both prophecies (for example, those of Joachim of Fiore and Johannes Lichtenberger) and astrological predictions. 42 Those who opposed the Reformation in print used a similar array of literary styles, but here there was a far greater concentration on the more scholarly forms such as treatises and disputations. 43

In addition to classifying pamphlets in terms of genre, it is also possible to classify them in terms of subject matter. Ozment has identified seven major areas covered by Reformation pamphlets: 44 critiques of Catholic religious belief and practices, particularly aspects of the sacrament of penance, indulgences, confraternities; critiques of and satires on the clergy and religious; 45 complaints about the social and economic implications of Catholicism; defences of clerical matrimony, and advice on marriage and domestic life; treatises on Church-State relations; books of or about peasant protest and revolt; and “mirrors of a Christian” and other catechetical literature.

Such classifications by style and subject matter are artificial and, as one might expect, a high proportion of pamphlets straddle two or more genres (a treatise in the form of a letter, for example), or deal with more than one subject. The pamphleteers were, after all, addressing a general public, not a specific audience with a single interest. Their variety of approach is nowhere more evident than in individual topics treated in the pamphlets. Köhler analyzed a random sample of more than 3,000 pamphlets from the period 1520–1530 and concluded that the average pamphlet dealt with at least nine topics (such as Scripture, the doctrine of justification, and so on), and a maximum of well over twenty. 46 The topical richness of the pamphlets leads Köhler to conclude that they were not as ephemeral as is usually supposed. Certainly, it could be argued that the more devotional and edificatory pamphlets had a longer “shelf life” than the occasional and polemical pieces.

The Visual Impact of Reformation Pamphlets

The message of the pamphlets was not conveyed by words alone. Many pamphlets and most broadsheets were enlivened by woodcut illustrations. These were sometimes no more than title-page decoration to a publisher’s standard design, complete with playful putti in irrelevant (and often irreverent) poses. But sometimes, as with the broadsheets, woodcuts could be related to the text in a more appropriate way. The precise relationship between text and image, and the effectiveness of this relationship in the context of a largely illiterate society, is still the subject of debate.

During the 15th century, woodcuts of the saints, usually associated with pilgrimage sites, circulated widely both before and after the advent of the printing press. 47 Another type of woodcut with a religious theme was that included by Sebastian Brant in his writings, explicitly intended for those who could not read the text without help. 48 Cuts with an anticlerical or antipapal message were also issued before the Reformation, most famously an early example of paper engineering in which a reverential portrait of Pope Alexander VI became, at the turn of a flap, a triple-crowned devil. Finally, woodcuts were used to illustrate apocalyptic broadsheets frequently critical of ecclesiastical institutions.

On the eve of the Reformation, therefore, there existed a repertoire of printed images with a wide range of religious associations, from the devotional and edifying to the critical, which could be drawn on by Protestant illustrators both to condemn the Church of their day and to present an alternative ideology in positive terms. But how successful were they in this dual aim? It is reasonable to suppose that negative images that ridiculed or vilified the authorities would, like present-day political cartoons, have a far greater effect than more constructive images. This was certainly the view of Scribner, who believed that compared with the “undeniable success” of the anti-papal features of Reformation visual polemic, attempts to produce more positive propaganda came to little. 49 One of the most celebrated examples of the use of negative imagery is the joint publication by Luther and Melanchthon, The Significance of Two Horrible Figures ( 1523 ). This depicts and describes a misshapen calf born in 1522 , known as the Monk-Calf of Freiburg, and a strange creature found dead on the banks of the Tiber in 1496 , known as the Pope-Ass. The first was interpreted by Luther as a sign of God’s displeasure at monasticism, the second by Melanchthon as a judgement on the Papacy. The explanation of portents was a stock-in-trade of the late medieval broadsheets, and the Wittenberg reformers were able to harness anti-Roman feeling, a universal interest in strange phenomena, and fascination with the grotesque to good effect: the pamphlet went through several editions. 50

Perhaps even more negative was the frequent depiction of Luther’s opponents as animals, making them figures of fun and defusing the force of their arguments or the threat they posed. Johann Cochlaeus and Pope Leo X had names that invited their immediate transformation into a snail and a lion respectively. Hieronymus Emser’s family arms featured a wild mountain goat, and he likened himself to this noble beast before he was metamorphosed into it by his enemies; Thomas Murner’s surname suggested (at a pinch) the “murmaw” call of a tom-cat; and Jacobus Hochstraten’s name lent itself to transformation into “höchste Ratte,” “King Rat.” The reasons for identifying Johann Eck as a sow and Jakob Lemp as a dog are now lost to us. 51

Negative images were undoubtedly striking and had an important place in the arsenal of Reformation publicists. But they were neither the most characteristic, nor the most effective, nor the most enduring use to which the xylographer’s art was put in the service of reform. Köhler examined the title page illustrations of 519 pamphlets published between 1501 and 1530 and discovered that, in over 40 percent of cases, the illustration helped to explain the content of the pamphlet, while only 16 percent could be described as polemical in intent. 52 These figures might even underestimate the constructive nature of Reformation iconography, since Köhler looked only at title pages, not illustrations in the body of the text, and did not consider broadsheets. But even his raw data are a useful corrective to the common assumption that such illustrations were predominantly negative. It should also be noted that many apparently negative illustrations in reality had a dual nature, conveying a positive message alongside the negative. Several of the most famous Reformation woodcuts possess this quality, especially those that were deliberately constructed as a diptych, or that otherwise expressed a contrast between truth and falsehood. Examples of this genre include the late ( c . 1547 ) Two Kinds of Preaching by Lucas Cranach the Younger, as well as the much earlier The Old and New God , and of course the Passional of Christ and the Antichrist ( 1521 ). 53 In the last of these, by depicting a contrast between the Christ forced to carry his cross and the Pope carried in a litter, Cranach the Elder not only criticizes curial ostentation, but also makes the theological point that the true following of Christ involves suffering. It is therefore difficult to make a hard and fast distinction between positive and negative illustrations in these pamphlets, and still more difficult to conclude with Scribner that the negative had a greater popular appeal.

A similar degree of agnosticism seems called for when considering the public at which these illustrations were aimed. The traditional understanding of images as the books of the unlearned certainly underlies much Reformation publishing, in which illustrations are explicitly described as being for the sake of the simpler sort. But it has been pointed out that such illustrations often make little or no sense without some knowledge of the accompanying text. 54 Moreover, the interpretation of many images presupposes a good knowledge of Scripture or the classics. 55 For example, the woodcut of The Poor Common Ass ( 1525 ) is notoriously difficult to decipher, even with the aid of Hans Sachs’s accompanying text. 56 But it makes much more sense if the ass, which here represents the poor common people, is seen as the heroic beast of Numbers 22. Her riders (devilish personifications of Tyranny, Usury, and Hypocrisy) can then be interpreted as successive Balaams opposed to God’s will, while the ass herself balks at the angel with a drawn sword, on the extreme right of the cut, who represents the Word of God. Two other angels, representing Reason and Justice, are portrayed as ineffective in comparison. 57 The interpretation of Hans Holbein the Younger’s woodcut, Christ the Light of the World benefits from familiarity not only with the Johannine antithesis of light and darkness, but also with the allegory of the cave in Plato’s Republic . 58 In neither example would ignorance of the biblical or classical allusions hinder comprehension of the fundamental message of the woodcuts, but knowledge of them adds to their layers of meaning and to their enjoyment. Like the double-entendres of British pantomime, which can win both innocent laughter from those of tender years and salacious guffaws from adults, such images were clearly designed to work at different levels simultaneously. We are again reminded of how “literary” Reformation iconography could be, and of the closeness with which the different media of communication were integrated.

To speak of “Reformation” iconography is, however, misleading. The generous use of illustrations in printed religious matter was characteristic of the Lutheran Reformation but not of Calvinism, which in the 16th century demonstrated what has been called a fear of graphic representation. 59 We are reminded that the Reformed (Zwinglians and Calvinists) were far more exercised about the place of images in worship than were Evangelicals, and perhaps it is concern at the possible misuse of pamphlet illustrations that explains this fear. 60 That these fears were not entirely unfounded is suggested by the fate of Luther’s own image. Scribner has shown how pictures of the reformer, often in saintly guise complete with halo or other sign of divine favor, came to be treated with as much devotion and superstition as any religious image of the Middle Ages. 61

The peculiarly Lutheran predilection for images had another result, in the illustration of Lutheran bibles. In a brilliant study of the German New Testament ( 1522 ), Edwards has shown the licence with which Luther treated the physical text of Scripture, hedging it about with introductions and marginalia in an attempt to show the reader “what he should expect in this book.” 62 These aids included Cranach’s polemical woodcuts for the Revelation of St. John, most famously the depictions of the beast in the temple (Rev. 11) and of the whore of Babylon (Rev. 17) wearing papal tiaras. The tiaras proved controversial and were quickly withdrawn; but their original inclusion exemplifies the remarkable freedom Luther felt able to exercise in relation to the form of the sacred text, provided that its essence was retained. A further development of this freedom came with the production of Lutheran “lay Bibles.” Here the image was all-important, and such Bibles were often no more than collections of broadsheets, illustrating with text and woodcut the main outline of salvation history. This was not so much a case of a Bible specifically prepared for the laity, as if layfolk were second-class Christians who did not need exposure to the real thing, but a means of preparing the laity to access the Bible. 63

Pamphleteers and Printers

A large proportion—perhaps around half—of Reformation pamphlets omit any indication of author or printer or provenance or date, partly to avoid the risk of prosecution, partly perhaps to indicate a mighty but anonymous swell of popular support for reform. 64 In some cases, internal or external evidence allows us to identify the author; in other cases, telltale characteristics such as standard title page designs or typefaces or house styles can reveal the identity of the printer and/or the year of publication. But often these anonymous pamphlets keep their secrets. Nonetheless, a great number of pamphlets do carry reliable information, and allow us to make fairly firm generalizations.

It is a relatively straightforward task to name the most widely published of the evangelical pamphleteers. Luther himself comfortably heads the list of vernacular writers active between 1518 and 1525 , with 1,465 German-language printings and reprintings of his works, trailed at some distance by Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt (125), Urbanus Rhegius (77), Philipp Melanchthon (71), Ulrich Zwingli (70), Johann Eberlin von Günzburg (62), Wenceslaus Linck (53), Hans Sachs (51), Heinrich von Kettenbach (45), Johannes Bugenhagen (41), Johann Oecolampadius (42), Jakob Strauss (42), Ulrich von Hutten (41), Hartmuth von Cronberg (32), Thomas Müntzer (18), Wolfgang Capito (14), Balthasar Hubmaier (12), and Martin Bucer (7). 65 As one might imagine, this list of the most prolific evangelicals is dominated by clergy and the theologically educated: six of the eighteen had been monks or friars and eight were secular clergy. Perhaps more surprising is that the names of four laymen appear on the list: Melanchthon, Sachs, Hutten, and Cronberg.

Interestingly, this list would seem to be fairly representative of pamphleteers as a whole. No detailed prosopographical studies of evangelical writers as such exist, but analogous data is available from Scribner’s study of Protestant preachers active in Germany to 1550 (several of whom were also pamphleteers). 66 This shows that 20 percent of preachers were lay, mostly teachers, which corresponds closely to the 22 percent of our list. Thirty-two percent had backgrounds in religion, while 42 percent were secular clergy. 67 This is very close to the population of Edwards’s list, which yields 33 percent former religious and 44 percent secular clergy. Scribner’s preachers were mostly young to middle-aged when they started their evangelical preaching careers: 31 percent of those for whom we have data were under 30; a further 37 percent were aged between 31 and 40. 68 They were a well-educated group, of whom three quarters were university educated, and no fewer than half had completed or commenced a higher degree. 69 And while they were overwhelmingly urban in background, they were not necessarily privileged: 49 percent came from artisan, poor urban, or poor rural families. 70

The category of lay writers can be broken down still further. Miriam Chrisman has studied the writings of all ninety-four German lay propaganda pamphleteers (Protestant and Catholic) active in the period 1519 to 1530 , and has determined their social status as follows: noble knights, 25 percent; minor civil servants and technicians, 18 percent; urban elite, 6.5 percent; town clerks and university-educated officials, 10.5 percent; artisans, middle-ranking burghers, popular poets, 40.5 percent. 71 Given the numerical predominance of the artisan class, it is not surprising that one of the four most prolific lay writers (Hans Sachs) should belong to that group. Hutten and Cronberg came from the second most populated group, the nobility. The fourth, Melanchthon, was omitted from Chrisman’s reckoning. Chrisman further identifies six (6.5%) of her ninety-four writers as women (one from the rank of the nobility, two from the civil servant/technician class, and three from the urban elite). Three of the lay pamphleteers are identified as Catholic. A lay category omitted by Chrisman was that of peasant writers. Some thirty pamphlets were published under the names of self-styled peasants in this period, but Chrisman assumes that these were in reality the work of educated clerical reformers masquerading as peasants. 72

The same tendency to social and cultural mobility is evident in the case of the printers who produced pamphlets. Printers were typically drawn from the ranks of highly skilled manual workers—silversmiths, goldsmiths, engravers, and painters—who could use many of their skills in the art and technology of printing. Others came up from the ranks, as it were, journeymen who composed the type or pulled the sheets and who had amassed enough capital to set up in business for themselves. Yet others were highly educated men: at least twelve of the seventy-seven printers active in Strasbourg between 1480 and 1599 had been to university, while Georg Rhau became a printer in Wittenberg only after having held the chair of music at the university. 73 Printing involved art, technology, labor, commerce, and intellectual activity, and it is not surprising that printers themselves were drawn from all these worlds, and often continued to inhabit them. On the one hand was Heinrich Seybold of Strasbourg, whose printing business was ancillary to his main profession as a physician. 74 On the other hand, in the smaller shops it was not unknown for the master himself, along with his wife and children, to roll up their sleeves and share in the presswork. 75 Examples of women printers are rare but not unknown. As with all the regulated trades, it was common for businesses to pass to others through marriage or re-marriage as well as through direct (male) inheritance; but it was unusual for women to run presses themselves for any length of time, or to carry out business in their own name. Margarethe Prüss of Strasbourg, whose three husbands were all printers, ran her dead father’s shop for two brief periods of widowhood ( 1522–1525 and 1526–1527 ). Another Strasbourg woman, the unmarried Walpurg Wühinger, purchased citizenship in 1525 and joined the printers’ trade guild, but seems to have printed nothing. 76

The printers can justifiably be called unsung heroes of the Reformation, because of the dangers they ran in handling religious pamphlets. In addition to the usual commercial risks, publishers of such material in the Empire, between 1521 and 1528 , were acting in contravention of the Edict of Worms. In practice, the Edict was enforced along partisan lines, to enable an evangelical city council to act against a Catholic printer (such as Johann Grüninger in Strasbourg), or a Catholic council against evangelical printers (such as Leipzig and Dresden under Duke Georg). Partly for this reason, and partly to make a profit, some printers handled the pamphlets of both sides indiscriminately (examples include Johann Weissenberger at Landshut, Valentin Schumann at Leipzig, and Ulrich Morhart at Tübingen). But others clearly worked in accordance with their own religious convictions, such as the Catholics Peter Quentel at Cologne, Alexander Weissenhorn at Ingolstadt, who printed for Eck, and Nicholas Wolrab at Leipzig, who printed for Cochlaeus. The greatest risks were run by those who printed Anabaptist works, who could not rely on a friendly council but could depend on the hostility of Protestants and Catholics alike. One such was the Nuremberg printer Hans Hergot, who was executed in 1527 for printing the pamphlet The New Transformation of a Christian Life , which describes a communalist utopia. 77 In a display of ecumenical intolerance typical of the age, Hergot was prosecuted by Luther for publishing falsified copies of his New Testament, and by Duke Georg of Saxony on the other side of the religious divide. It was at the latter’s instigation that Hergot was killed.

The tragic example of Hergot and his vision of a society free from the tyranny of property reminds us how socially conservative the 16th century was. But in spite of its conservatism and deep concern with matters of status and rank (not even Hergot proposed the outright abolition of the nobility), it was also a period of great social mobility and the breaking down of time-honored distinctions. The rise of the commercial classes meant that the landed gentry no longer had a monopoly of wealth, while the expansion of university education challenged the Church’s claim to monopolize learning: the difference between cleric and layperson was no longer that between the lettered and the unlettered. The role of the clergy was partly confirmed, partly further undermined, by such lay movements as the devotio moderna and the popularity of lay-controlled confraternities. The Reformation, when it came, was led by clergy and monks, who preached the open Bible and the priesthood of all believers, and in doing so undermined their own position in society. We can see from the background and education of both pamphleteers and printers that they, no less than the pamphlets they produced, inhabited the social and cultural meeting-point of worlds hitherto kept apart.

Pamphlets were ephemeral productions designed to be read as soon as they came off the press. The efforts described above of pamphleteers and printers to design, produce, and market these little books would have been wasted without the prospect of an immediate, paying readership. Unfortunately, this is the aspect of the process we can say least about with any degree of certainty. One can of course deduce from the characteristics of a pamphlet the “public” at which it was aimed; but that is no firm indication of the audience actually reached. 78 Equally, one can deduce from the fact that pamphlets have survived to this day in libraries and private collections that these books were bought and owned and preserved; but book owning is not the same as book reading. Much invaluable work has been done on the inventories of books sometimes attached to 16th-century wills. 79 But pamphlets were often not considered worth recording separately, alongside more valuable bound volumes, and inventory evidence is therefore sketchy at best. It seems that our understanding of pamphlet-consumption is destined to lag behind our understanding of pamphlet production.

Review of the Literature

Despite over a century and a half of intensive research, the phenomenon of printing, propaganda, and public opinion in the time of Martin Luther remains enigmatic. The amount of printed material that has survived is considerable, and through such developments as the Universal Short-Title Catalogue and the progressive digitization of library holdings, it is now more accessible than ever before. Academics who conducted their doctoral research before the late 1990s can only envy the facilities available to their present-day successors. However, there is much we still do not know about this mass of material. We do not know how representative were the views they contain, or how effective these publications were at persuading others of those views. Precisely because it has been, and remains, so enigmatic, the field of Reformation printing has been perhaps more than usually vulnerable to the vagaries of scholarly fashion. Before suggesting how this field is likely to develop in future, it might be instructive briefly to review the manner in which it has been treated in the past.

Past Approaches to Pamphlet Literature

A pamphlet in 16th-century Germany was known in Latin as a libellus (from which the English word “libel” derives) and in German as a buchlein or, often, a schandbuchlein . The term “flying writing” ( Flugschrift in German, feuille volante in French) was first coined by C. F. D. Schubart in 1787–1788 . 80 Unlike the neutral English word “pamphlet,” both sets of terms were pejorative, one emphasizing their role in slandering their opponents, the other emphasizing their transitory nature. The terms reinforced the idea that Reformation pamphlets were cheap, crude, and aesthetically unprepossessing artefacts of far less interest to the bibliographer than literary works of more lasting value, and it is fair to say that, because of this, pamphlets received little scholarly attention until the second half of the 19th century. 81

The case for studying pamphlets as a worthwhile subject of historical and theological inquiry in their own right was first put seriously by Gottfried Blochwitz in a 1930 article. 82 Blochwitz set the agenda for much subsequent discussion by categorizing authors according to the fidelity with which they reproduced Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith alone. He concluded that these pamphlets were evidence that Luther had disseminated his message successfully to every level of society, even the lowest. Blochwitz’s research questions and conclusions reflected the interests of his day. During the 1930s and 1940s, Nazi ideology would deify “the common [German] man,” his wisdom and traditions, as was reflected in a general scholarly interest at the time in volkisch lore and movements. 83 Under the Third Reich, Luther’s mastery of the print propaganda of his time was seen explicitly as a forerunner of Hitler’s mastery of the wireless and the newsreel, as can be seen from a wartime doctoral dissertation in which Luther was presented quite explicitly as a literary Volksführer. 84 Reformation pamphlets became object lessons in the successful propagandizing of a populace, and were hailed, quite literally, as weapons in a propaganda war: two selections of pamphlets appeared in the early 1930s with uncompromisingly militaristic titles: Stormtroopers of the Reformation and Satirical Field Artillery against the Reformation . 85

The theme of “Luther and public opinion” was specifically addressed in a book of the same name by the French Germanist Maurice Gravier, who studied a select number of Reformation pamphlets from a series of perspectives: their position for or against Luther, their value for shedding light on social and economic history, and their literary merit. 86 It was perhaps over-ambitious in its scope, and it makes the mistake of assuming that the message of the pamphlets reflected public opinion. But given the personal and practical difficulties Gravier must have faced in writing about a German national hero in German-occupied France, his work deserves to be considered a landmark study.

More Recent Research

Perhaps because of the enthusiasm with which pamphlet studies were prosecuted in the Nazi era, the immediate post-war years saw a decline of interest. One of the most important works to emerge in the 1950s was Ingeborg Kolodziej’s dissertation, completed in Berlin at the height of the Cold War; although pioneering in several respects, and still widely cited to this day, it is indicative of the contemporary state of pamphlet research that it was never published. 87 Not until the mid-1970s was the interest of scholars fully revived, and this was due to three factors above all.

The Impact of Information Technology

The development of ready-made statistical programs for mainframe computers in the 1960s and 1970s enabled historians who were not programming specialists to access computers for the manipulation of large bodies of data. The analysis of catalogue entries of 16th-century book collections, broken down by author, date, provenance, publisher, language, format, and so on, was pioneered by R. G. Cole in his study of the Gustav Freytag pamphlet collection. 88 This was followed by similar computer analyses by Chrisman and Edwards, though their studies were not restricted to pamphlets. 89 A statistical approach to early printed pamphlets and books was also taken by R. A. Crofts. 90 The advent of the worldwide web transformed this field of study in two ways. First, it meant that large bibliographies could be hosted online and laid the foundation for the holy grail of researchers, a union catalogue of all 16th-century holdings extant in libraries. The Universal Short-Title Catalogue is hosted at St. Andrews and has been supported chiefly by the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly for the purposes of this entry, digital copies of holdings of regional German libraries are being made accessible online free of charge. This service lacks the sophistication of an equivalent paid-for service such as Early English Books Online (which alongside digital images provides the machine-readable text of the books), but is nonetheless likely to revolutionize the study of German Reformation pamphlets once again.

The “History of the Book” Approach

The second of the three factors behind the renaissance of pamphlet research is the adoption of the so-called “history of the book” approach. Pioneered by French scholars such as Lucien Febvre, it attempts to locate printing in its social and cultural context and is therefore an arm of cultural history. 91 The most ambitious attempt to apply this approach to 16th-century book production was E. L. Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Chrisman’s essay on the Strasbourg book trade applies the same method to a detailed local study, while Natalie Zemon Davis’s classic studies of book production in Lyon also fall under this heading. Since then, the “history of the book” has continued to develop as one of the most vibrant areas of study in early-modern history. Something of its vitality can be gauged from the Library of the Written Word series, published by Brill under the direction of Andrew Pettegree.

The Reformation “Public Sphere”

The third factor, which has particularly characterized German-language studies, is the post-war growth of methods for assessing the effectiveness of mass communications. The result has been an unlikely alliance of capitalist and Marxist methodologies brought to bear on the Reformation pamphlet. The way was led in the 1970s by Balzer’s analysis of Hans Sachs’s pamphlets according to the principles of mass communication research and market research, and by Schütte’s study of Murner’s Great Lutheran Fool using propaganda theory. 92 Behind both works lay the application to the early 16th century of Jurgen Habermas’s concept of bürgerliche Öffentlichkeit , a multivalent term usually translated into English as “the bourgeois public sphere.” While Habermas himself insisted that the condition for the development of the public sphere proper did not exist before the 18th century, the case has been put for the emergence of a reformatorische Öffentlichkeit (a “Reformation public sphere”) in the 1520s. 93 These limited studies were followed by the work of H.-J. Köhler and his pamphlet research unit based at Tübingen, who subjected much larger samples of pamphlets to an array of approaches, including communication theory and propaganda analysis and opinion research. 94 Bernd Moeller’s Flugschriften project at Göttingen also produced a series of valuable studies based on more traditional content analysis. 95

The public sphere approach has had the effect of demonstrating the importance of context when discussing German Reformation propaganda. First, it is now usual to speak of a communication process in which the public were not mere recipients of a propaganda message but active participants within the Reformation public sphere. It is also acknowledged that, for various reasons, the Reformation public sphere that obtained in Germany was not replicated elsewhere, and therefore that the German experience cannot be taken as indicative of the European experience as a whole. 96 Finally, the Reformation public sphere needs to be seen as one stage, and an early one at that, of a communications revolution that would last centuries and would come to include such developments as those of a postal service and the newspaper. 97 The fact that recent generations have lived through three communications revolutions in quick succession (the personal computer in the 1980s, the Internet in the 1990s, and mobile computing in the 2000s) sensitizes us to the experience of analogous change undergone by previous generations and, combined with the greater access to research materials made possible by those very advances, encourages one to believe that the study of printing, propaganda, and public opinion in the age of Luther will continue to flourish.

Primary Sources

Opportunities for getting to grips with German Reformation pamphlets are understandably limited for those who lack a reading knowledge of 16th-century German and (in some cases) Latin. An excellent starting place would be Luther’s own pamphlets, which range from the short and pithy ( The Sermon on Indulgence and Grace of 1518) to the long and pithy ( To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation of 1520), and which can readily be found in the standard Luther translations. For instance, both the above-mentioned can be found in Timothy Wengert’s The Annotated Luther. For translations of typical pamphlets by publicists other than Luther, including an example of contemporary Catholic counter-propaganda, see Erika Rummel’s Scheming Papists and Lutheran Fools. Five Reformation Satires . See also B. D. Mangrum and G. Scarizzi, A Reformation Debate: Karlstadt, Emser, and Eck on Sacred Images. It is unfortunate that more anthologies of Reformation pamphlets do not exist in English translation, though there are examples of German equivalents, which are less forbidding to the learner than a digitized or even a real pamphlet. Thanks to its being reprinted in 1967, there are still copies of Otto Clemen’s valuable edition of Flugschriften aus den ersten Jahren der Reformation in university libraries. More recent anthologies include a series that originated in the German Democratic Republic and reflects Marxist principles of selection: Adolf Laube and Hans‑Werner Seiffert, Flugschriften der Bauernkriegszeit ; Adolf Laube Flugschriften der frühen Reformationsbewegung (1518–1524, Flugschriften vom Bauernkrieg zum Täufferreich (152–1535) , and Flugschriften gegen die Reformation (1525–1530. Many examples of printed broadsheets can be found in Max Geisberg and W.L Strauss, The German Single-Leaf Woodcut: 1500–1550. 98

For the more advanced student, the digitized holdings of German regional libraries are proving to be a wonderful, free, resource. The process is not yet complete, but it has already transformed the field, especially for scholars based outside Germany. Notable collections include those of Bavaria , Erfurt-Gotha , and Saxony-Anhalt . The best finding aid for German pamphlets since 2000 has been the Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachbereich erschienenen Drucke des 16 , abbreviated as VD16 . 99 A version of this is now online, hosted by the Bavarian State Library . As of April 2012, about 30 percent of the entries in VD16 had been digitized. For pamphlets printed outside Germany, the best starting-point is the USTC (Universal Short Title Catalogue).

Further Reading

• Behringer, Wolfgang . “Communications Revolutions: A Historiographical Concept.” German History 24.3 (2006): 333–374.
• Chrisman, Miriam U. Conflicting Visions of Reform: German Lay Propaganda Pamphlets, 1519–1530 . Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996.
• Dickens, Arthur Geoffrey . The German Nation and Martin Luther . London: Harper & Row, 1974.
• Edwards, Mark U., Jr. Printing, Propaganda, and Martin Luther . Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1994.
• Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
• Gilmont, Jean François , ed. The Reformation and the Book . Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 1998.
• Matheson, Peter . The Rhetoric of the Reformation . London: T&T Clark, 1998.
• Moeller, Bernd . “Flugschriften der Reformationszeit,” Theologische Realenzyklopädie , Vol. 11, ed. Siegfried M. Schwertner . Berlin: de Gruyter, 1983.
• Ozment, Steven . The Serpent and the Lamb: Cranach, Luther, and the Making of the Reformation . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011.
• Pettegree, Andrew , and Matthew Hall . “The Reformation and the Book: A Reconsideration.” Historical Journal 47 (2004): 1–24.
• Pettegree, Andrew . Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
• Scribner, Robert W. For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation . 2d ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981.

1. Mark U. Edwards Jr. , Printing, Propaganda, and Martin Luther (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1994) ; see Table 1 on 18f.

2. Hans-Joachim Köhler , “Erste Schritte zu einem Meinungsprofil der frühen Reformationszeit,” in Martin Luther: Probleme seiner Zeit , Volker Press and Dieter Stievermann (eds), Spätmittelalter und Frühe Neuzeit (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1986), 250 . Miriam U. Chrisman , Lay Culture, Learned Culture: Books and Social Change in Strasbourg (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982) .

3. WA TR 1:523, no. 1038.

4. Cited in Elizabeth L. Eisenstein , The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 305 .

5. Lawrence Stone , “Literacy and Education in England, 1640-1900,” Past and Present 42 (1969): 69–139 .

6. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, passim .

7. Berndt Hamm , “Die Reformation als Medienereignis,” Jahrbuch für biblische Theologie 11 (1996): 137–166.

8. Bernd Moeller , “Stadt und Buch: Bemerkungen zur Struktur der reformatorischen Bewegung in Deutschland,” in Stadtbürgertum und Adel in der Reformatio: Studien zur Sozialgeschichte der Reformation in England und Deutschland , ed. W. J. Mommsen (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1979), 25–39 , at 30.

9. Arthur Geoffrey Dickens , The German Nation and Martin Luther (London: Harper & Row, 1974), 103.

10. Robert Scribner , “Oral Culture and the Diffusion of Reformation Ideas,” History of European Ideas 5 (1984): 238.

11. Luther, foreword to Fastenpostille (WA 17/II: 2–3).

12. WA 4:476–478, no. 4763. Other anti-book-proliferation sentiments can be found at 6:458 (the doleful influence of Aristotle’s books); WA 15:50 (against monastic books); WA 53:217f. (that not all books are good); WA TR 4:75, no. 4012 (that the books of some Latin poets should be banned); WA TR 4:84f., no. 4025 (that there are too many books and only the Bible should be read); WA TR 4:432f., no. 4691 (against “the infinite sea of books”); WA TR 5:662–665, no. 6442 (the existence of the Bible in German makes other publications unnecessary).

13. John L. Flood , “Le livre dans le monde germanique à l’époque de la Réforme,” in Jean-François Gilmont , ed., La Réforme et le livre. L’Europe de l’imprimé (1517–v.1570) (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1990), 61f .

14. An influential example is Gottfried Blochwitz , “Die antirömischen deutschen Flugschriften der frühen Reformationszeit (bis 1522) in ihrer religiös-sittlichen Eigenart,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 27 (1930): 145–254.

15. See, for example, Hans-Joachim Köhler , “‘Der Bauer wird witzig’: Der Bauer in den Flugschriften der Reformationszeit,” in Zugänge zur Bauerlichen Reformation, ed. Peter Blickle (Zurich: Chronos, 1987), 196–198 ; Miriam Usher Chrisman , Conflicting Visions of Reform. German Lay Propaganda Pamphlets, 1519–1530 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), 7 ; Peter Matheson , The Rhetoric of the Reformation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), 84 .

16. Scribner, “Oral culture,” 238, 251. Contrast the approach taken by Steven Ozment in Protestants: The Birth of a Revolution (New York: Doubleday, 1992).

17. Steven E. Ozment , ed., Reformation Europe: A Guide to Research (St. Louis, MO: Center for Reformation Research, 1982) ; W. S. Maltby , ed., Reformation Europe: A Guide to Research II (St. Louis, MO: Center for Reformation Research, 1992) ; David Whitford , ed., Reformation and Early Modern Europe: A Guide to Research (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2008) .

18. Flood, “Le livre dans le monde germanique,” 100.

19. Johann Cochlaeus , Auff Luthers Trostbrieff an ettliche zu Leiptzigk, Antwort und grundtliche unterricht, was mit denselbigen gehandelt (Dresden: Wolfgang Stöckel, 1533) , sig. aiir-v. Cochlaeus makes this point in an interesting foreword, in which he compares the huge sums wasted each year on heretical books in Germany with the fabulous wealth accruing to those more loyal Catholic realms, Spain and Portugal, from their newfound lands.

20. Martin Arnold , Handwerker als theologische Schriftstelle: Studien zu Flugschriften der frühen Reformation (1523–1525) (Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1990), 330 . Peter Matheson , Argula von Grumbach: A Woman’s Voice in the Reformation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), 136 et passim .

21. Heinrich von Kettenbach , Ein Sermon zu der löblichen Statt Ulm zu seynem Valete in Flugschriften aus den ersten Jahren der Reformation , 4 vols., ed. Otto Clemen (1907–1911; repr. 1967), 2: 107 . Other evidence of pamphlets being read aloud is collated by Scribner, “Oral culture,” 241–243. Andrew Pettegree questions whether this would have been a widespread practice, given the strict social distance between the literate and the illiterate. See his Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 117–120.

22. Monika Rössing-Hager , “Wie stark findet der nichtlesekundige Rezipient Berücksichtigung in der Flugschriften?” in Flugschriften als Massenmedium der Reformation , ed. H.-J. Köhler , Spätmittelalter und Frühe Neuzeit 13 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981), 77–137 . See also R.W. Scribner , “Oral culture and the transmission of Reformation ideas” in Helga Robinson-Hammerstein , ed., The Transmission of Ideas in the Lutheran Reformation (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1989), 83–104 .

23. Scribner , For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation , second edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), xv . The concept of hybridization is borrowed from McLuhan.

24. Flood, “Le livre dans le monde germanique,” 90.

25. Edwards, Printing, Propaganda , 39 and 172.

26. Flood, “Le livre dans le monde germanique,” 94, 95.

27. Pettegree, Culture of Persuasion , 169ff. See also his comments on reasons for purchasing books “which have little or nothing to do with reading” on 156–159.

28. R. W. Scribner , “Practice and Principle in the German towns: Preachers and People,” in Reformation Principle and Practice: Essays Presented to Arthur Geoffrey Dickens, ed., Peter Newman Brooks (London: Scolar Press, 1980), 97–117 , see at Table 4. Scribner gives the example of Bartholomeus Rieseberg, an agricultural labourer until the age of 17, when he sought an education. Attaching himself to a succession of tutors and schools, he eventually enrolled at the university of Wittenberg in 1518. He became a convinced Lutheran and eventually returned to his own village as its pastor (p. 106).

29. Kai-Wing Chow , “Reinventing Gutenberg: Woodblock and Movable-Type Printing in Europe and China,” in Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, eds., Sabrina Alcorn Brown , Eric N. Lindquist , and Eleanor F. Shevlin (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 169–192.

30. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein , The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 30 ; Lucien Febvre and H.-J. Martin , L’apparition du livre (Paris: Albin Michel, 1974), 56 .

31. See Robinson-Hammerstein, The Transmission of Ideas, 18, and the literature cited there.

32. Bernd Moeller , “Flugschriften der Reformationszeit,” Theologische Realenzyklopädie, Vol. 11 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1983) 240 . See the Universal Short-Title Catalogue (USTC) for details of formats.

33. Moeller, Theologische Realenzyklopädie, Vol. 11, 240; Herbert Walz , Deutsche Literatur der Reformationszeit: Eine Einführung (Darmstadt, Germany: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1988), 66 . On the Jetzer case, Luther’s later literary opponent Thomas Murner, OFM, published the tract Die war History von der vier Ketzer Prediger Ordens zu Bern verbrant (Strasbourg, Germany: Johann Knobloch, 1510); Johannes Pfefferkorn, the former Jew who opposed Reuchlin over the banning of the Talmud, advised the expulsion or enslavement of all Jews in the Holy Roman Empire in his pamphlet Ich bin ain büchlinn der Juden veindt ist mein namen (Augsburg, 1509).

34. H.-J. Köhler , “Die Flugschriften. Versuch der Präzisierung eines geläufigen Begriffs,” in Festgabe für Ernst Walter Zeeden zum 60: Geburtstag, eds. H. Rabe and Hansgeorg Molitor (Münster: Aschendorff, 1976), 36–61 , at 50. Köhler’s definition is helpfully expanded by Johannes Schwitalla in his Deutsche Flugschriften, 1460–1525. Textsortengeschichtliche Studien (Tübingen, Germany: Niemeyer Max Verlag, 1983), 14.

35. See Tables 2 and 3 in Richard G. Cole, “The Reformation pamphlet and communication processes” in Köhler, Flugschriften als Massenmedium , 139–161.

36. Useful introductions to the message of the Reformation pamphlet in English can be found in Ozment, Protestants , 45–86 and in two books by Peter Matheson : The Rhetoric of the Reformation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998) and The Imaginative World of the Reformation (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001).

37. The German word Sermon is a linguistic “false friend” for modern English-speakers, usually representing the Latin sermo (“reasoned discourse”). For example, Luther’s Eyn Sermon von dem Newen Testament of 1519 was in fact a treatise. A sermon proper was normally entitled “ein Predigt.”

38. See Ralph Keen’s analysis of Bugenhagen’s Epistola ad Anglos (1525) in his Johannes Cochlaeus: Responsio ad Bugenhagium Pomeranum (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1988), 17–22.

39. For examples translated into English, see Erika Rummel , Scheming Papists and Lutheran Fools. Five Reformation Satires (New York: Fordham University Press, 1993) , which contains selections from Hutten and others. See also W. Lenk , Die Reformation im zeitgenössischen Dialog (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1968) and Bernd Balzer , Bürgerliche Reformationspropaganda: Die Flugschriften des Hans Sachs in den Jahren, 1523–25 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1973), 99–104 .

40. Text in F. Vetter , ed., Niklaus Manuels Spiel evangelischer Freiheit: Die Totenfresser. “Vom Papst und seiner Priesterschaft” 1523 (Leipzig: H. Haessel, 1923).

41. “Die wittembergisch Nachtigall, die man ietz horet uberall,” in Ausgewählte Werke, Vol. 1, Hans Sachs (Leipzig: Insel, 1923), 8–24.

42. See D. Kurze , Johannes Lichtenberger: Eine Studie zur Geschichte der Prophetie und Astrologie , Historische Studien 379 (Lübeck, Germany: Matthiesen, 1960) ; also M. Steinmetz, “Johann Virdung von Hassfurt, sein Leben und seine astrologischen Flugschriften,” in Köhler, Flugschriften als Massenmedium , 353–372; and Paolo Zambelli , ed., “Astrologi hallucinati” : Stars and the End of the World in Luther’s Time (Berlin: de Gruyer, 1986).

43. See David V. N. Bagchi , Luther’s Earliest Opponents. Catholic Controversialists, 1518–1525 , second ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009), 195.

44. See Steven E. Ozment , “Pamphlet literature of the German Reformation,” in Reformation Europe: A Guide to Research (St Louis, 1982), 85–105 , esp. 90–105.

45. The anticlericalism presented in around 400 pamphlets was analyzed by Hans-Christoph Rublack in his essay “Anticlericalism in German Reformation Pamphlets,” in Anticlericalism in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, eds., P. A. Dykema and H. A, Oberman (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1993), 462–489 . In the same volume, Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia (“Anticlericalism in German Reformation Pamphlets: A Response,” 491–498) challenged Rublack’s assumption that the pamphlets constitute a coherent historical source.

46. H.-J. Köhler, “The Flugschriften and Their Importance in Religious Debate: A Quantitative Approach,” in Zambelli, Astrologi hallucinati , 161–162.

47. A. M. Hind , An Introduction to the History of Woodcut (New York: Dover, 1963), 76.

48. See R. Engelsing , Analphabetentum und Lektüre. Zur Sozialgeschichte der Lesens in Deutschland zwischen feudaler und industrieller Gesellschaft (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1973), 22–23.

49. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk , 228.

50. Deuttung der czwo grewlichen Figuren, Bapstesels czu Rom und Munchkalbs zu Freyerberg ijnn Meysszen funden (Wittenberg: J. Rhau-Grünenberg, 1523), in 11: 375–385. On the Pope-Ass, see most recently Lawrence P. Buck , The Roman Monster. An Icon of the Papal Antichrist in Reformation Polemics (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2014).

51. See Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk , ills 43, 46, and 51.

52. H.-J. Köhler, “Erste Schritte,” 262f. The categories used by Köhler are: polemical (82 examples); illustrative/explanatory (213); heraldic motifs/portraits (134); devotional images/saints/Biblical motifs (84); theological instruction (6).

53. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk , ills 165f., 48, 115–126.

54. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk , 231; Pettegree, Culture of Persuasion , 111–117.

55. R. G. Cole , “Pamphlet woodcuts in the communication process of Reformation Germany,” in Pietas et Societas. New Trends in Reformation Social History: Essays in Memory of Harold J. Grimm , eds., K. C. Sessions and P. N. Bebb , Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies 4 (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1985), 103–121 . See also Konrad Hoffman , “Typologie, Exemplarik und reformatorische Bildsatire,” in Kontinuität und Umbruch: Theologie und Frömmigkeit in Flugschriften und Kleinliteratur an der Wende vom 15. zum 16. Jahrhundert , eds. J. Nolte (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1978), 203f .

56. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk , ill. 93.

57. Hoffmann, “Typologie,” 194–202. Scribner himself did not recognize the allusion to Balaam’s ass and so misinterpreted the picture as ambiguous and fatalistic ( Simple Folk , 122f.).

58. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk , ill. 33. Again, in his explanation of this cut, Scribner seems unaware of its classical dimension.

59. Jean-François Gilmont , “Pour une typologie du ‘Flugschrift’ des débuts de la Réforme,” Revue d’Histoire Ecclesiastique 78 (1983), 788–809 , at 297.

60. On the 16th-century iconoclastic controversy, see the classic study by C. M. N. Eire , War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

61. R. W. Scribner , “The Incombustible Luther: The Image of the Reformer in Early Modern Germany,” Past and Present 110 (1986), 38–68.

62. Edwards, Printing , Propaganda, 109–130.

63. Robinson-Hammerstein, Transmission , 31f; Ruth B. Bottigheimer , “Bible Reading, ‘Bibles’, and the Bible for Children in Early Modern Germany,” Past and Present 139 (1993), 66–89.

64. Walz ( Deutsche Literatur , 64f.) suggests that anonymity was a deliberate tactic to hint at greater popular support than there was. In his analysis of the Freytag Collection of pamphlets, Richard G. Cole shows that some 57 percent (930 out of 1624) polemical pamphlets were anonymous (see Cole, “Reformation Pamphlet and Communication Processes,” Table 4), while 45 percent of all pamphlets lack some note of publisher, place, or date (Cole, “Reformation in Print”). Of the much larger number of pamphlets examined in the Tübingen project, 71 percent lack indication of provenance, 47 percent lack a date (see Flood, “Le livre dans le monde germanique,” 53).

65. Figures taken from Edwards, Printing , Table 5. These indications of prolificity are not entirely trustworthy. There was no contemporary German equivalent of the English Stationers’ Company or its records, so modern bibliographies are based on existing library collections, which may well betray a collecting bias in favour of more famous authors.

66. Scribner, “Practice and Principle in the German Towns.”

67. Scribner, “Practice and Principle in the German Towns,” Table 1.

68. Ibid , Table 2.

69. Ibid , Table 3.

70. Ibid , Table 4.

71. Chrisman, Conflicting Visions of Reform. The categories and statistics presented here are abstracted from Fig. 6.

72. Chrisman, Conflicting Visions , 7. See also H.-J. Köhler , “‘Der Bauer wird witzig’: der Bauer in den Flugschriften der Reformationszeit,” in Zugänge zur Bäuerlichen Reformation, ed. Peter Blickle (Zurich: Chronos, 1987), 187–218 . Contrast David Bagchi , “Poets, Peasants, and Pamphlets: Who Wrote and Who Read Reformation Flugschriften ?” Studies in Church History 42 (2006), 189–196.

73. Chrisman, Lay Culture , Table 4; Flood. “Le livre dans le monde germanique,” 46.

74. Chrisman, Lay Culture , 10.

75. Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin , The Coming of the Book. The Impact of Printing 1450–1800 (London and New York: Verso, 1990), 131.

76. Chrisman, Lay Culture , 22, 23.

77. Chrisman, Conflicting Visions , 129f.

78. Natalie Zemon Davis’s famous stricture, cited in Jean‑François Gilmont, “L'imprimerie à l'aube du XVIe siècle,” in idem, La Réforme et le livre , 24.

79. For England, see Elisabeth S. Leedham-Green , ed., Books in Cambridge Inventories , 2 vols. (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1987–1988) ; Robert J. Fehrenbach , ed., Private Libraries in Renaissance England , 7 vols. (Binghamton, NY, and Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1992–2009) , now supplemented by PLRE.Folger . For Strasbourg, see Chrisman, Lay Culture .

80. See Walz, Deutsche Literatur , 62 and Hella Tompert , “Die Flugschrift als Medium religiöser Publizistik. Aspekte der gegenwärtigen Forschung” in Kontinuität und Umbruch. Theologie und Frömmigkeit in Flugschriften und Kleinliteratur an der Wende vom 15. zum 16. Jahrhundert , eds., Josef Nolte , Hella Tompert , and Christof Windhorst (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1978), 216.

81. An important turning point in the development of pamphlet studies was the publication of Oskar Schade’s three-volume edited selection, Satiren und Pasquille aus der Reformationszeit , 3 vols. (Hanover: C. Rümpler, 1856–1858).

82. Gottfried Blochwitz , “Die antirömischen deutschen Flugschriften der frühen Reformationszeit (bis 1522) in ihrer religiös-sittlichen Eigenart,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 27 (1930), 145–254.

83. For a summary of this trend, with suggestions for further reading, see R. W. Scribner , “Ritual and Popular Religion in Catholic Germany at the Time of the Reformation,” in Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany , ed. R. W. Scribner (London: Hambledon, 1987), 17. On Blochwitz in context, see P. Bockmann , “Der gemeine Mann in den Flugschriften der Reformationszeit,” in Formensprache Studien zur Literaturästhetik und Dichtungsinterpretation , ed. P. Bockmann (Hamburg, 1966), 11–44.

84. Alexander Centgraf , “Martin Luther als Publizist: Geist und Form seiner Volksführung” (Berlin, 1940) , cited in Tompert, “Aspekte,” 218.

85. Arnold E. Berger (ed.), Die Sturmtruppen der Reformation: Ausgewählte Flugschriften der Jahre, 1520–25 (Leipzig, 1931) and idem, Satirische Feldzüge wider der Reformation: Thomas Murner, Daniel von Soest (Leipzig: Diesterweg, 1933).

86. Maurice Gravier , Luther et l’opinion publique: Essai sur la littérature satirique et polémique en langue allemande pendant les années décisives de la Réforme (1520–1530) (Paris: Editions Montaigne, 1942).

87. Ingeborg Kolodziej , “Die Flugschriften aus den ersten Jahren der Reformation (1517–1525),” (PhD iss., Freie-Universität, Berlin, 1956).

88. Richard G. Cole , “The Reformation in Print: German Pamphlets and Propaganda,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 66 (1975), 93–102.

89. Chrisman, Lay Culture ; Mark U. Edwards Jr. , “Catholic Controversial Literature, 1518–1555: Some Statistics,” ARG 79 (1988), 189–204 ; Mark U. Edwards Jr. , “Statistics on Sixteenth-Century Printing,” in P.N. Bebb and S. Marshall (eds), The Process of Change in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of Miriam Usher Chrisman (Athens, OH, 1989), 149–163 . For an earlier analysis of Luther’s literary output, Edwards had written a program for that specific purpose. See Luther’s Last Battles: Politics and Polemics, 1531–46 (Leiden, The Netherlands, 1983), 211.

90. R. A. Crofts , “Books, Reform, and the Reformation,” ARG 71 (1980), 21–36 ; R. A. Crofts , “Printing, Reform and the Catholic Reformation in Germany (1521-1545),” Sixteenth Century Journal 16 (1985), 369–381.

91. Lucien Febvre and H.-J. Martin , L’apparition du livre (Paris, 1974).

92. Bernd Balzer , Bürgerliche Reformationspropaganda: Die Flugschriften des Hans Sachs in den Jahren 1523–25 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1973) ; J. Schütte , “Schympf red”: Frühformen bürgerliche Agitation in Thomas Murners “Grossen Lutherischen Narren” (1522) (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1973).

93. See Rainer Wohlfeil , “Reformatorische Öffentlichkeit,” in Literatur und Laienbildung im Spätmittelalter und in der Reformationszeit , eds., Ludger Grenzmann and Karl Stackmann (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1984), 41–54 ; Rainer Wohlfeil , Einführung in die Geschichte der deutschen Reformation (Munich: Beck, 1981).

94. Köhler, ed., Flugschriften als Massenmedium ; Kohler, “Erste Schritte.”

95. Bernd Moeller , “Die frühe Reformation als Kommunikationsprozeß,” in Kirche und Gesellschaft im Heiligen Römischen Reich des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts, ed., Harmut Boockmann (Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994), 148–164 ; Bernd Moeller , “Das Berühmtwerden Luthers,” Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 15 (1988), 65–92 ; Thomas Hohenberger , Lutherische Rechtfertigungslehre in den reformatorischen Flugschriften der Jahre 1521–1522 (Tübingen, Germany: J. C. B. Mohr, 1996) is an excellent example of the Göttingen approach.

96. Andrew Pettegree and Matthew Hall , “The Reformation and the Book: A Reconsideration,” Historical Journal 47 (2004), 1–24.

97. Wolfgang Behringer , “Communications Revolutions: A Historiographical Concept,” German History 24.3 (2006), 333–374.

98. Timothy Wengert , ed., The Annotated Luther, Vol. 1: The Roots of Reform (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2015) . For translations, see Erika Rummel, Scheming Papists and Lutheran Fools . See also B. D. Mangrum and G. Scarizzi , eds, A Reformation Debate: Karlstadt, Emser, and Eck on Sacred Images (Toronto: Dovehouse Editions, 1991) . Reprinted in 1967; Otto Clemen , Flugschriften aus den ersten Jahren der Reformation , 4 vols. (Leipzig: Haupt, 1907–1911) can be found in university libraries. Recent anthologies include Adolf Laube and Hans‑Werner Seiffert , eds., Flugschriften der Bauernkriegszeit (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1975) ; Adolf Laube , Annerose Schneider , and Sigrid Looss , eds., Flugschriften der frühen Reformationsbewegung (1518–1524) , 2 vols. (Vaduz: Akademie-Verlag, 1983) ; Adolf Laube , Annerose Schneider , and Sigrid Looss , eds., Flugschriften vom Bauernkrieg zum Täuferreich (1526–1535) , 2 vols. (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1992) ; and Adolf Laube , Annerose Schneider , and Sigrid Looss , eds., Flugschriften gegen die Reformation (1525–1530) , 2 vols. (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2000) . Printed broadsheets, Max Geisberg and W. L Strauss , eds., The German Single-Leaf Woodcut: 1500–1550 (New York: Hacker Art, 1974).

99. Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachbereich erschienenen Drucke des 16 . Jahrhunderts , ed. Irmgard Bezzel , 22 vols. (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1983–2000) , abbreviated as VD16 . This is a digitized collection of 16th century German publications.

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8 Martin Luther

• Published: July 2017
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This chapter examines Martin Luther’s theology of the sacraments. Luther maintained that sacraments were a form of the Word instituted by Christ that conveyed the forgiveness of sins, and were connected with an external sign—and as such were a powerful way for believers, many of whom were illiterate, to experience firsthand and personally the grace of God. He identified Baptism and Eucharist as sacraments, and occasionally Confession (Penance) as well, though not as a separate sacrament but as an extension of the sacrament of Baptism. Baptism marked not only the establishment of one’s relationship with God, but also identification as part of the church community, and was therefore a sign of oneness in God. Regarding Eucharist, Luther rejected transubstantiation and the idea of Christ being “re-sacrificed” at the Mass, and yet he took Christ’s words of institution literally in identifying the bread and wine as the Body and Blood of Christ, and thus, “food of the soul.” As connected to Luther’s “theology of the cross,” by which believers are utterly dependent upon the grace of God in Jesus Christ, sacraments are a means by which believers can receive and be nourished by that grace.

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Martin Luther and the 95 Theses

By: History.com Editors

Updated: June 6, 2019 | Original: October 29, 2009

Born in Eisleben, Germany, in 1483, Martin Luther went on to become one of Western history’s most significant figures. Luther spent his early years in relative anonymity as a monk and scholar. But in 1517 Luther penned a document attacking the Catholic Church’s corrupt practice of selling “indulgences” to absolve sin. His “95 Theses,” which propounded two central beliefs—that the Bible is the central religious authority and that humans may reach salvation only by their faith and not by their deeds—was to spark the Protestant Reformation. Although these ideas had been advanced before, Martin Luther codified them at a moment in history ripe for religious reformation. The Catholic Church was ever after divided, and the Protestantism that soon emerged was shaped by Luther’s ideas. His writings changed the course of religious and cultural history in the West.

Martin Luther (1483–1546) was born in Eisleben, Saxony (now Germany), part of the Holy Roman Empire, to parents Hans and Margaretta. Luther’s father was a prosperous businessman, and when Luther was young, his father moved the family of 10 to Mansfeld. At age five, Luther began his education at a local school where he learned reading, writing and Latin. At 13, Luther began to attend a school run by the Brethren of the Common Life in Magdeburg. The Brethren’s teachings focused on personal piety, and while there Luther developed an early interest in monastic life.

Did you know? Legend says Martin Luther was inspired to launch the Protestant Reformation while seated comfortably on the chamber pot. That cannot be confirmed, but in 2004 archeologists discovered Luther's lavatory, which was remarkably modern for its day, featuring a heated-floor system and a primitive drain.

Martin Luther Enters the Monastery

But Hans Luther had other plans for young Martin—he wanted him to become a lawyer—so he withdrew him from the school in Magdeburg and sent him to new school in Eisenach. Then, in 1501, Luther enrolled at the University of Erfurt, the premiere university in Germany at the time. There, he studied the typical curriculum of the day: arithmetic, astronomy, geometry and philosophy and he attained a Master’s degree from the school in 1505. In July of that year, Luther got caught in a violent thunderstorm, in which a bolt of lightning nearly struck him down. He considered the incident a sign from God and vowed to become a monk if he survived the storm. The storm subsided, Luther emerged unscathed and, true to his promise, Luther turned his back on his study of the law days later on July 17, 1505. Instead, he entered an Augustinian monastery.

Luther began to live the spartan and rigorous life of a monk but did not abandon his studies. Between 1507 and 1510, Luther studied at the University of Erfurt and at a university in Wittenberg. In 1510–1511, he took a break from his education to serve as a representative in Rome for the German Augustinian monasteries. In 1512, Luther received his doctorate and became a professor of biblical studies. Over the next five years Luther’s continuing theological studies would lead him to insights that would have implications for Christian thought for centuries to come.

Martin Luther Questions the Catholic Church

In early 16th-century Europe, some theologians and scholars were beginning to question the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. It was also around this time that translations of original texts—namely, the Bible and the writings of the early church philosopher Augustine—became more widely available.

Augustine (340–430) had emphasized the primacy of the Bible rather than Church officials as the ultimate religious authority. He also believed that humans could not reach salvation by their own acts, but that only God could bestow salvation by his divine grace. In the Middle Ages the Catholic Church taught that salvation was possible through “good works,” or works of righteousness, that pleased God. Luther came to share Augustine’s two central beliefs, which would later form the basis of Protestantism.

Meanwhile, the Catholic Church’s practice of granting “indulgences” to provide absolution to sinners became increasingly corrupt. Indulgence-selling had been banned in Germany, but the practice continued unabated. In 1517, a friar named Johann Tetzel began to sell indulgences in Germany to raise funds to renovate St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

The 95 Theses

Committed to the idea that salvation could be reached through faith and by divine grace only, Luther vigorously objected to the corrupt practice of selling indulgences. Acting on this belief, he wrote the “Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences,” also known as “The 95 Theses,” a list of questions and propositions for debate. Popular legend has it that on October 31, 1517 Luther defiantly nailed a copy of his 95 Theses to the door of the Wittenberg Castle church. The reality was probably not so dramatic; Luther more likely hung the document on the door of the church matter-of-factly to announce the ensuing academic discussion around it that he was organizing.

The 95 Theses, which would later become the foundation of the Protestant Reformation, were written in a remarkably humble and academic tone, questioning rather than accusing. The overall thrust of the document was nonetheless quite provocative. The first two of the theses contained Luther’s central idea, that God intended believers to seek repentance and that faith alone, and not deeds, would lead to salvation. The other 93 theses, a number of them directly criticizing the practice of indulgences, supported these first two.

In addition to his criticisms of indulgences, Luther also reflected popular sentiment about the “St. Peter’s scandal” in the 95 Theses:

Why does not the pope, whose wealth today is greater than the wealth of the richest Crassus, build the basilica of St. Peter with his own money rather than with the money of poor believers?

The 95 Theses were quickly distributed throughout Germany and then made their way to Rome. In 1518, Luther was summoned to Augsburg, a city in southern Germany, to defend his opinions before an imperial diet (assembly). A debate lasting three days between Luther and Cardinal Thomas Cajetan produced no agreement. Cajetan defended the church’s use of indulgences, but Luther refused to recant and returned to Wittenberg.

Luther the Heretic

On November 9, 1518 the pope condemned Luther’s writings as conflicting with the teachings of the Church. One year later a series of commissions were convened to examine Luther’s teachings. The first papal commission found them to be heretical, but the second merely stated that Luther’s writings were “scandalous and offensive to pious ears.” Finally, in July 1520 Pope Leo X issued a papal bull (public decree) that concluded that Luther’s propositions were heretical and gave Luther 120 days to recant in Rome. Luther refused to recant, and on January 3, 1521 Pope Leo excommunicated Martin Luther from the Catholic Church.

On April 17, 1521 Luther appeared before the Diet of Worms in Germany. Refusing again to recant, Luther concluded his testimony with the defiant statement: “Here I stand. God help me. I can do no other.” On May 25, the Holy Roman emperor Charles V signed an edict against Luther, ordering his writings to be burned. Luther hid in the town of Eisenach for the next year, where he began work on one of his major life projects, the translation of the New Testament into German, which took him 10 months to complete.

Martin Luther's Later Years

Luther returned to Wittenberg in 1521, where the reform movement initiated by his writings had grown beyond his influence. It was no longer a purely theological cause; it had become political. Other leaders stepped up to lead the reform, and concurrently, the rebellion known as the Peasants’ War was making its way across Germany.

Luther had previously written against the Church’s adherence to clerical celibacy, and in 1525 he married Katherine of Bora, a former nun. They had five children. At the end of his life, Luther turned strident in his views, and pronounced the pope the Antichrist, advocated for the expulsion of Jews from the empire and condoned polygamy based on the practice of the patriarchs in the Old Testament.

Luther died on February 18, 1546.

Significance of Martin Luther’s Work

Martin Luther is one of the most influential figures in Western history. His writings were responsible for fractionalizing the Catholic Church and sparking the Protestant Reformation. His central teachings, that the Bible is the central source of religious authority and that salvation is reached through faith and not deeds, shaped the core of Protestantism. Although Luther was critical of the Catholic Church, he distanced himself from the radical successors who took up his mantle. Luther is remembered as a controversial figure, not only because his writings led to significant religious reform and division, but also because in later life he took on radical positions on other questions, including his pronouncements against Jews, which some have said may have portended German anti-Semitism; others dismiss them as just one man’s vitriol that did not gain a following. Some of Luther’s most significant contributions to theological history, however, such as his insistence that as the sole source of religious authority the Bible be translated and made available to everyone, were truly revolutionary in his day.

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A New Biography of Martin Luther Reveals the Life Beyond the Theses

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MARTIN LUTHER Renegade and Prophet By Lyndal Roper Illustrated. 540 pp. Random House. $40.

Five hundred years ago an obscure German academic issued a public invitation to a theological debate. On the face of it there is no reason why we should even know about this. This was an absolutely routine practice in the university world, not least as a means of training students. True, the professor had chosen a sensitive subject: the sale of indulgences, a popular means by which pious Christians could make a financial contribution to the church in return for the hope of remission of their sins in the afterlife. But he was not the first to criticize indulgences, and he did so without much hope that theologians would heed his call to discuss the issue; in fact the debate never took place. In 1517, Martin Luther was an unknown academic in search of a cause. Only a few years later, he was the most published author in the history of Christendom. By the time of his death in 1546, the church was riven into competing confessions, Protestant and Catholic, with consequences we still live with today.

Much about Luther’s career is utterly improbable. It is hard to see how, in a world without modern communication media, so many came to hear about Luther and his scruples. He was not a particularly well-known or well-regarded author. He had published virtually nothing and was teaching at a not particularly distinguished university, tucked away in northeastern Germany. His 95 Theses had a smoldering anger that might have raised eyebrows in more sophisticated academic circles, but they were written in Latin, the language of scholarly debate. Certainly no one could have anticipated that this novice writer would develop into a powerful polemicist. In 1518, he responded to his critics not in Latin, but in German. His “Sermon on Indulgences and Grace” was the first in a series of passionate pamphlets that first piqued the interest of a wide public, and then formed a popular movement.

In later life, Luther would often look back on the extraordinary events that followed his impetuous act of conscience: the church hierarchy’s attempt to shut down his protest, his escalating acts of defiance, his condemnation and excommunication, the public outcry that followed. We know this because Luther was not a private man. He happily held forth at the dinner table, joking with companions, some of whom recorded their conversations, collected in a volume called “Table Talk.” These often incautious suppertime reminiscences, along with his correspondence, form the core of what we know of Luther’s outsize personality.

It is inevitable that the anniversary of the Reformation would bring forth a flood of new publications. “Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet” is undoubtedly one of the best and most substantial. Deeply researched over a period of more than 10 years, this biography offers a fresh and deeply illuminating study of the man who somewhat reluctantly divided a continent. What emerges is a work of impeccable scholarship and painstaking fairmindedness. In particular Roper has mined the correspondence, which illuminates every page of this book, as Luther coped with the strains of first becoming a public figure, searched for allies and unburdened himself to trusted friends. In letters that were both deeply learned and alarmingly frank, his charisma shines through, but we also see his complexity: He was a man who could, by turns, be abusive and utterly unforgiving, but also gentle, affectionate and funny.

Roper is especially good on Luther’s unusual upbringing as the son of a mining family. It was a hard life, full of risk; they lived well, but always one bad business decision away from disaster. Young Martin knew that the price of his education was an investment in the family’s future, and how much his decision to abandon his legal studies in favor of a church career would disrupt his father’s plans. But any breach between the two healed, and Luther rose steadily through the ranks of the Augustinian order. His appointment as professor in Wittenberg was at first unwelcome; Luther felt he had been exiled to a provincial backwater.

Roper gives a fine account of these events, and Luther’s increasingly voluble attempts to defend his initial position. She is excellent on the critical debate with his emerging Catholic opponents in 1519, when Luther took on the established theological heavyweight Johannes Eck at Leipzig. Here Luther was constantly wrongfooted by a confident opponent who drove him into ever more radical positions: Luther was cornered into acknowledging, for instance, that the great medieval Bohemian heretic Jan Hus had been right on several key issues. It was after Leipzig that, for the last time, the intellectual community came to Luther’s rescue, by unmasking Eck as a puffed-up womanizer. Luther swiftly moved on from the debacle in Leipzig, feeding an increasingly fascinated public a constant supply of thoughtful, outspoken and defiant theological texts.

Any attempts to restrain Luther during these years met with majestic defiance: “I beg you, if you understand the Gospel rightly, don’t think that the matter can be done without revolt, offense and unrest,” Luther wrote to one of his interlocutors. “You can’t turn the sword into a feather, or make peace out of war: The Word of God is a sword.” This was a principle from which he never deviated. Friends who had disappointed were quickly cast out, as were those who threatened the future of his young movement. In 1524, rebellion flamed across the German countryside, as the peasants took up arms against their harsh living conditions. Such revolts were not new; but since they now claimed to be inspired by Luther’s Gospel teaching, he brutally repudiated the rebels. Roper traces the roots of this back to 1522 when Luther rejected evangelical change that might offend the Elector of Saxony, Frederick the Wise, his vital protector: From this point the Lutheran Church would be in lockstep with secular power.

In this way, Luther’s was a world of narrow horizons, and he seldom moved far from his beloved Saxony in his later years, managing the growing number of churches inspired by his teaching by correspondence and by the work of his lieutenants who traveled Germany to establish the new evangelical order. Roper follows the development of this movement closely, but very much through Luther’s eyes. “I want to understand Luther himself,” she writes. “I want to explore his inner landscapes so as to better understand his ideas about flesh and spirit, formed in a time before our modern separation of mind and body.” But her decision to stay with Luther in Wittenberg deprives us of any real explanation for why so many beyond Saxony took up his cause: why priests mounted their own pulpits and risked their livelihoods to preach in his name; why ordinary citizens agitated for Gospel preaching; why princes fell under the spell of this turbulent priest. Even Luther’s wife, Katharina von Bora, in her own way one of the most shining models of an empowered femininity, is a curiously absent figure (a former nun, her marriage to Luther, a former monk, was a scandal in itself). This is a richly satisfying book, and offers some penetrating insights, but the focus on Luther’s inner life leaves us with an incomplete sense of how the man became a movement.

Andrew Pettegree, a professor of modern history at the University of St. Andrews, is the author of “Brand Luther.”

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A comprehensive edition of the papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929 –1968) clergyman, activist, and leader in the African-American Civil Rights Movement. He is best known for his role in the advancement of civil rights using nonviolent civil disobedience. King has become a national icon in the history of American progressivism. A Baptist minister, King became a civil rights activist early in his career. He led the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott and helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, serving as its first president. With the SCLC, King led an unsuccessful struggle against segregation in Albany, Georgia, in 1962, and organized nonviolent protests in Birmingham, Alabama, that attracted national attention following television news coverage of the brutal police response. King also helped to organize the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. This edition of speeches, sermons, correspondence, and other papers of America’s foremost leader of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The project was initiated by the King Center in Atlanta before moving to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford.

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Introduction

Martin Luther King, Jr., made history, but he was also transformed by his deep family roots in the African-American Baptist church, his formative experiences in his hometown of Atlanta, his theological studies, his varied models of religious and political leadership, and his extensive network of contacts in the peace and social justice movements of his time. Although King was only 39 at the time of his death, his life was remarkable for the ways it reflected and inspired so many of the twentieth century’s major intellectual, cultural, and political developments.

The son, grandson, and great-grandson of Baptist ministers, Martin Luther King, Jr., named Michael King at birth, was born in Atlanta and spent his first 12 years in the Auburn Avenue home that his parents, the Reverend Michael King  and Alberta Williams King, shared with his maternal grandparents, the Reverend Adam Daniel (A. D.)  Williams  and Jeannie Celeste Williams. After Reverend Williams’ death in 1931, his son-in-law became  Ebenezer Baptist Church ’s new pastor and gradually established himself as a major figure in state and national Baptist groups. The elder King began referring to himself (and later to his son) as Martin Luther King.

King’s formative experiences not only immersed him in the affairs of Ebenezer but also introduced him to the African-American  social gospel  tradition exemplified by his father and grandfather, both of whom were leaders of the Atlanta branch of the  National Association for the Advancement of Colored People  (NAACP). Depression-era breadlines heightened King’s awareness of economic inequities, and his father’s leadership of campaigns against racial discrimination in voting and teachers’ salaries provided a model for the younger King’s own politically engaged ministry. He resisted religious emotionalism and as a teenager questioned some facets of Baptist doctrine, such as the bodily resurrection of Jesus.

During his undergraduate years at Atlanta’s  Morehouse College  from 1944 to 1948, King gradually overcame his initial reluctance to accept his inherited calling. Morehouse president Benjamin E.  Mays  influenced King’s spiritual development, encouraging him to view Christianity as a potential force for progressive social change. Religion professor George  Kelsey  exposed him to biblical criticism and, according to King’s autobiographical sketch, taught him “that behind the legends and myths of the Book were many profound truths which one could not escape” ( Papers  1:43 ). King admired both educators as deeply religious yet also learned men and, by the end of his junior year, such academic role models and the example of his father led King to enter the ministry. He described his decision as a response to an “inner urge” calling him to “serve humanity” ( Papers  1:363 ). He was ordained during his final semester at Morehouse, and by this time King had also taken his first steps toward political activism. He had responded to the postwar wave of anti-black violence by proclaiming in a letter to the editor of the  Atlanta Constitution  that African Americans were “entitled to the basic rights and opportunities of American citizens” ( Papers  1:121 ). During his senior year King joined the Intercollegiate Council, an interracial student discussion group that met monthly at Atlanta’s Emory University.

After leaving Morehouse, King increased his understanding of liberal Christian thought while attending  Crozer Theological Seminary  in Pennsylvania from 1948 to 1951. Initially uncritical of liberal theology, he gradually moved toward Reinhold  Niebuhr ’s neo-orthodoxy, which emphasized the intractability of social evil. Mentored by local minister and King family friend J. Pius  Barbour , he reacted skeptically to a presentation on pacifism by  Fellowship of Reconciliation  leader A. J.  Muste . Moreover, by the end of his seminary studies King had become increasingly dissatisfied with the abstract conceptions of God held by some modern theologians and identified himself instead with the theologians who affirmed  personalism , or a belief in the personality of God. Even as he continued to question and modify his own religious beliefs, he compiled an outstanding academic record and graduated at the top of his class.

In 1951, King began doctoral studies in systematic theology at  Boston University ’s School of Theology, which was dominated by personalist theologians such as Edgar  Brightman  and L. Harold  DeWolf . The papers (including his  dissertation ) that King wrote during his years at Boston University displayed little originality, and some contained extensive plagiarism; but his readings enabled him to formulate an eclectic yet coherent theological perspective. By the time he completed his doctoral studies in 1955, King had refined his exceptional ability to draw upon a wide range of theological and philosophical texts to express his views with force and precision. His capacity to infuse his oratory with borrowed theological insights became evident in his expanding preaching activities in Boston-area churches and at Ebenezer, where he assisted his father during school vacations.

During his stay in Boston, King also met and courted Coretta  Scott , an Alabama-born Antioch College graduate who was then a student at the New England Conservatory of Music. On 18 June 1953, the two students were married in Marion, Alabama, where Scott’s family lived.

Although he considered pursuing an academic career, King decided in 1954 to accept an offer to become the pastor of  Dexter Avenue Baptist Church  in Montgomery, Alabama. In December 1955, when Montgomery black leaders such as Jo Ann  Robinson , E. D.  Nixon , and Ralph  Abernathy  formed the  Montgomery Improvement Association  (MIA) to protest the arrest of NAACP official Rosa  Parks  for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man, they selected King to head the new group. In his role as the primary spokesman of the year-long  Montgomery bus boycott , King utilized the leadership abilities he had gained from his religious background and academic training to forge a distinctive protest strategy that involved the mobilization of black churches and skillful appeals for white support. With the encouragement of Bayard  Rustin , Glenn  Smiley , William Stuart  Nelson , and other veteran pacifists, King also became a firm advocate of Mohandas  Gandhi ’s precepts of  nonviolence , which he combined with Christian social gospel ideas.

After the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed Alabama bus segregation laws in  Browder v. Gayle  in late 1956, King sought to expand the nonviolent civil rights movement throughout the South. In 1957, he joined with C. K.  Steele , Fred  Shuttlesworth , and T. J.  Jemison  in founding the  Southern Christian Leadership Conference  (SCLC) with King as president to coordinate civil rights activities throughout the region. Publication of King’s memoir of the boycott,  Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story  (1958), further contributed to his rapid emergence as a national civil rights leader. Even as he expanded his influence, however, King acted cautiously. Rather than immediately seeking to stimulate mass desegregation protests in the South, King stressed the goal of achieving black voting rights when he addressed an audience at the 1957  Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom .

King’s rise to fame was not without personal consequences. In 1958, King was the victim of his first assassination attempt. Although his house had been bombed several times during the Montgomery bus boycott, it was while signing copies of  Stride Toward Freedom  that Izola Ware  Curry  stabbed him with a letter opener. Surgery to remove it was successful, but King had to recuperate for several months, giving up all protest activity.

One of the key aspects of King’s leadership was his ability to establish support from many types of organizations, including labor unions, peace organizations, southern reform organizations, and religious groups. As early as 1956, labor unions, such as the  United Packinghouse Workers of America  and the United Auto Workers, contributed to MIA, and peace activists such as Homer  Jack  alerted their associates to MIA activities. Activists from southern organizations, such as Myles Horton’s  Highlander Folk School  and Anne  Braden ’s Southern Conference Educational Fund, were in frequent contact with King. In addition, his extensive ties to the  National Baptist Convention  provided support from churches all over the nation; and his advisor, Stanley  Levison , ensured broad support from Jewish groups.

King’s recognition of the link between segregation and colonialism resulted in alliances with groups fighting oppression outside the United States, especially in Africa. In March 1957, King traveled to  Ghana  at the invitation of Kwame  Nkrumah  to attend the nation’s independence ceremony. Shortly after returning from Ghana, King joined the  American Committee on Africa , agreeing to serve as vice chairman of an International Sponsoring Committee for a day of protest against South Africa’s  apartheid  government. Later, at an SCLC-sponsored event honoring Kenyan labor leader Tom  Mboya , King further articulated the connections between the African American freedom struggle and those abroad: “We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality” ( Papers  5:204 ).

During 1959, he increased his understanding of Gandhian ideas during a month-long visit to  India  sponsored by the  American Friends Service Committee . With Coretta and MIA historian Lawrence D.  Reddick  in tow, King met with many Indian leaders, including Prime Minister Jawaharlal  Nehru . Writing after his return, King stated: “I left India more convinced than ever before that non-violent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom” ( Papers  5:233 ).

Early the following year, he moved his family, which now included two children— Yolanda King  and Martin Luther King, III —to Atlanta in order to be nearer to SCLC headquarters in that city and to become co-pastor, with his father, of Ebenezer Baptist Church. (The Kings’ third child, Dexter King , was born in 1961; their fourth, Bernice King , was born in 1963.) Soon after King’s arrival in Atlanta, the southern civil rights movement gained new impetus from the student-led lunch counter  sit-in  movement that spread throughout the region during 1960. The sit-ins brought into existence a new protest group, the  Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee  (SNCC), which would often push King toward greater militancy. King came in contact with students, especially those from Nashville such as John  Lewis , James  Bevel , and Diane  Nash , who had been trained in nonviolent tactics by James  Lawson . In October 1960, King’s arrest during a student-initiated protest in Atlanta became an issue in the national presidential campaign when Democratic candidate John F.  Kennedy  called Coretta King to express his concern. The successful efforts of Kennedy supporters to secure King’s release contributed to the Democratic candidate’s narrow victory over Republican candidate Richard  Nixon .

King’s decision to move to Atlanta was partly caused by SCLC’s lack of success during the late 1950s. Associate director Ella  Baker  had complained that SCLC’s Crusade for Citizenship suffered from lack of attention from King. SCLC leaders hoped that with King now in Atlanta, strategy would be improved. The hiring of Wyatt Tee  Walker  as executive director in 1960 was also seen as a step toward bringing efficiency to the organization, while the addition of Dorothy  Cotton  and Andrew  Young  to the staff infused new leadership after SCLC took over the administration of the Citizenship Education Program pioneered by Septima  Clark . Attorney Clarence  Jones  also began to assist King and SCLC with legal matters and to act as King’s advisor.

As the southern protest movement expanded during the early 1960s, King was often torn between the increasingly militant student activists, such as those who participated in the  Freedom Rides , and more cautious national civil rights leaders. During 1961 and 1962, his tactical differences with SNCC activists surfaced during a sustained protest movement in Albany, Georgia. King was arrested twice during demonstrations organized by the  Albany Movement , but when he left jail and ultimately left Albany without achieving a victory, some movement activists began to question his militancy and his dominant role within the southern protest movement.

As King encountered increasingly fierce white opposition, he continued his movement away from theological abstractions toward more reassuring conceptions, rooted in African-American religious culture, of God as a constant source of support. He later wrote in his book of sermons,  Strength to Love  (1963), that the travails of movement leadership caused him to abandon the notion of God as “theologically and philosophically satisfying” and caused him to view God as “a living reality that has been validated in the experiences of everyday life” ( Papers  5:424 ). 

During 1963, however, King reasserted his preeminence within the African-American freedom struggle through his leadership of the  Birmingham Campaign . Initiated by SCLC and its affiliate, the  Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights , the Birmingham demonstrations were the most massive civil rights protests that had yet occurred. With the assistance of Fred Shuttlesworth and other local black leaders, and with little competition from SNCC and other civil rights groups, SCLC officials were able to orchestrate the Birmingham protests to achieve maximum national impact. King’s decision to intentionally allow himself to be arrested for leading a demonstration on 12 April prodded the Kennedy administration to intervene in the escalating protests. The widely quoted “ Letter from Birmingham Jail ” displayed his distinctive ability to influence public opinion by appropriating ideas from the Bible, the Constitution, and other canonical texts. During May, televised pictures of police using dogs and fire hoses against young demonstrators generated a national outcry against white segregationist officials in Birmingham. The brutality of Birmingham officials and the refusal of Alabama’s governor George C.  Wallace  to allow the admission of black students at the University of Alabama prompted President Kennedy to introduce major civil rights legislation.

King’s speech  at the 28 August 1963  March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom , attended by more than 200,000 people, was the culmination of a wave of civil rights protest activity that extended even to northern cities. In his prepared remarks, King announced that African Americans wished to cash the “promissory note” signified in the egalitarian rhetoric of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Closing his address with extemporaneous remarks, he insisted that he had not lost hope: “I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream ... that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’” He appropriated the familiar words of “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” before concluding, “When we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’” (King, “I Have a Dream”).

Although there was much elation after the March on Washington, less than a month later, the movement was shocked by another act of senseless violence. On 15 September 1963, a dynamite blast at Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church killed four young school girls. King delivered the eulogy for three of the four girls, reflecting: “They say to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers” (King,  Eulogy for the Martyred Children ).

St. Augustine, Florida  became the site of the next major confrontation of the civil rights movement. Beginning in 1963, Robert B.  Hayling , of the local NAACP, had led sit-ins against segregated businesses. SCLC was called in to help in May 1964, suffering the arrest of King and Abernathy. After a few court victories, SCLC left when a biracial committee was formed; however, local residents continued to suffer violence.

King’s ability to focus national attention on orchestrated confrontations with racist authorities, combined with his oration at the 1963 March on Washington, made him the most influential African-American spokesperson of the first half of the 1960s. He was named  Time  magazine’s “Man of the Year”  at the end of 1963, and was awarded the  Nobel Peace Prize  in December 1964. The acclaim King received strengthened his stature among civil rights leaders but also prompted  Federal Bureau of Investigation  (FBI) director J. Edgar Hoover to step up his effort to damage King’s reputation. Hoover, with the approval of President Kennedy and Attorney General Robert  Kennedy , established phone taps and bugs. Hoover and many other observers of the southern struggle saw King as controlling events, but he was actually a moderating force within an increasingly diverse black militancy of the mid-1960s. Although he was not personally involved in  Freedom Summer  (1964), he was called upon to attempt to persuade the  Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party  delegates to accept a compromise at the Democratic Party National Convention.

As the African-American struggle expanded from desegregation protests to mass movements seeking economic and political gains in the North as well as the South, King’s active involvement was limited to a few highly publicized civil rights campaigns, such as Birmingham and St. Augustine, which secured popular support for the passage of national civil rights legislation, particularly the  Civil Rights Act of 1964 .

The Alabama protests reached a turning point on 7 March 1965, when state police attacked a group of demonstrators at the start of a march from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery. Carrying out Governor Wallace’s orders, the police used tear gas and clubs to turn back the marchers after they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the outskirts of Selma. Unprepared for the violent confrontation, King alienated some activists when he decided to postpone the continuation of the  Selma to Montgomery March  until he had received court approval, but the march, which finally secured federal court approval, attracted several thousand civil rights sympathizers, black and white, from all regions of the nation. On 25 March, King addressed the arriving marchers from the steps of the capitol in Montgomery. The march and the subsequent killing of a white participant, Viola Liuzzo, as well as the earlier murder of James  Reeb  dramatized the denial of black voting rights and spurred passage during the following summer of the  Voting Rights Act of 1965 .

After the march in Alabama, King was unable to garner similar support for his effort to confront the problems of northern urban blacks. Early in 1966 he, together with local activist Al  Raby , launched a major campaign against poverty and other urban problems, and King moved his family into an apartment in Chicago’s black ghetto. As King shifted the focus of his activities to the North, however, he discovered that the tactics used in the South were not as effective elsewhere. He encountered formidable opposition from Mayor Richard Daley and was unable to mobilize Chicago’s economically and ideologically diverse black community. King was stoned by angry whites in the Chicago suburb of Cicero when he led a march against racial discrimination in housing. Despite numerous mass protests, the  Chicago Campaign  resulted in no significant gains and undermined King’s reputation as an effective civil rights leader.

King’s influence was damaged further by the increasingly caustic tone of black militancy in the period after 1965. Black radicals increasingly turned away from the Gandhian precepts of King toward the  black nationalism  of  Malcolm X , whose posthumously published autobiography and speeches reached large audiences after his assassination in February 1965. Unable to influence the black insurgencies that occurred in many urban areas, King refused to abandon his firmly rooted beliefs about racial integration and nonviolence. He was nevertheless unpersuaded by black nationalist calls for racial uplift and institutional development in black communities. 

In June 1966, James  Meredith  was shot while attempting a “March against Fear” in Mississippi. King, Floyd  McKissick  of the  Congress of Racial Equality , and Stokely  Carmichael  of SNCC decided to continue his march. During the march, the activists from SNCC decided to test a new slogan that they had been using,  Black Power . King objected to the use of the term, but the media took the opportunity to expose the disagreements among protesters and publicized the term.

In his last book,  Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?  (1967), King dismissed the claim of Black Power advocates “to be the most revolutionary wing of the social revolution taking place in the United States,” but he acknowledged that they responded to a psychological need among African Americans he had not previously addressed (King,  Where Do We Go , 45–46). “Psychological freedom, a firm sense of self-esteem, is the most powerful weapon against the long night of physical slavery,” King wrote. “The Negro will only be free when he reaches down to the inner depths of his own being and signs with the pen and ink of assertive manhood his own emancipation proclamation” (King, “Where Do We Go From Here?”).

Indeed, even as his popularity declined, King spoke out strongly against American involvement in the  Vietnam War , making his position public in an address, “ Beyond Vietnam ,” on 4 April 1967, at New York’s Riverside Church. King’s involvement in the anti-war movement reduced his ability to influence national racial policies and made him a target of further FBI investigations. Nevertheless, he became ever more insistent that his version of Gandhian nonviolence and social gospel Christianity was the most appropriate response to the problems of black Americans.

In December 1967, King announced the formation of the  Poor People’s Campaign , designed to prod the federal government to strengthen its antipoverty efforts. King and other SCLC workers began to recruit poor people and antipoverty activists to come to Washington, D.C., to lobby on behalf of improved antipoverty programs. This effort was in its early stages when King became involved in the  Memphis sanitation workers’ strike  in Tennessee. On 28 March 1968, as King led thousands of sanitation workers and sympathizers on a march through downtown Memphis, black youngsters began throwing rocks and looting stores. This outbreak of violence led to extensive press criticisms of King’s entire antipoverty strategy. King returned to Memphis for the last time in early April.  Addressing  an audience at Bishop Charles J. Mason Temple on 3 April, King affirmed his optimism despite the “difficult days” that lay ahead. “But it really doesn’t matter with me now,” he declared, “because I’ve been to the mountaintop.... and I’ve seen the Promised Land.” He continued, “I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land,” (King, “ I’ve Been to the Mountaintop ”). The following evening, the  assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. , took place as he stood on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. A white segregationist, James Earl Ray, was later convicted of the crime. The Poor People’s Campaign continued for a few months after King’s death, under the direction of Ralph Abernathy, the new SCLC president, but it did not achieve its objectives.

Until his death, King remained steadfast in his commitment to the transformation of American society through nonviolent activism. In his posthumously published essay, “A Testament of Hope” (1969), he urged African Americans to refrain from violence but also warned: “White America must recognize that justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society.” The “black revolution” was more than a civil rights movement, he insisted. “It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism” (King, “Testament,” 194).

After her husband’s death, Coretta Scott King established the Atlanta-based Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change (also known as the  King Center ) to promote Gandhian-Kingian concepts of nonviolent struggle. She also led the successful effort to honor her husband with a federally mandated  King national holiday , which was first celebrated in 1986. 

Introduction, in  Papers  1:1–57 .

King, “An Autobiography of Religious Development,” 12 September 1950–22 November 1950, in  Papers  1:359–363 .

King, Eulogy for the Martyred Children, 18 September 1963, in  A Call to Conscience , ed. Carson and Shepard, 2001.

King, “I Have a Dream,” Address Delivered at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, 28 August 1963, in  A Call to Conscience , ed. Carson and Shepard, 2001.

King, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” Address Delivered at Bishop Charles Mason Temple, 3 April 1968, in  A Call to Conscience , ed. Carson and Shepard, 2001.

King, “Kick Up Dust,” Letter to the Editor,  Atlanta Constitution , 6 August 1946, in  Papers  1:121 .

King, “My Trip to the Land of Gandhi,” July 1959, in  Papers  5:231–238 .

King, “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” 13 April 1960, in  Papers  5:419–425 .

King, Remarks Delivered at Africa Freedom Dinner at Atlanta University, 13 May 1959, in  Papers  5:203–204 .

King,  Strength to Love , 1963.

King, “A Testament of Hope,” in  Playboy  (16 January 1969): 193–194, 231–236.

King, “Where Do We Go From Here?,” Address Delivered at the Eleventh Annual SCLC Convention, 16 August 1967, in  A Call to Conscience , ed. Carson and Shepard, 2001.

King,  Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? , 1967.