Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town Into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe--And Started the Protestant Reformation (2 page)
Authors: Andrew Pettegree
Tags: #Religion, #Christianity, #History, #Modern, #General, #Europe, #Western
Copyright © 2015 by Andrew Pettegree
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ISBN 978-0-698-41017-6
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C
ONTENTS
2. T
HE
M
AKING OF A
R
EVOLUTIONARY
Part 3. FRIENDS AND ADVERSARIES
8. T
HE
R
EFORMATION IN THE
C
ITIES
P
REFACE
N 2017 WE MARK
the five-hundredth anniversary of one of the seminal moments in Western civilization: the inception of the Protestant Reformation. From small beginnings, a theological quarrel in eastern Germany, emerged a tumultuous movement of renewal and reform; questioning, defiant, and ultimately utterly divisive. Within a generation the whole concept of reform had changed its meaning. Advocates of the movement now known as Protestantism had separated themselves from the Western Catholic tradition; the division was permanent and, as it turned out, irreconcilable. Over the next two centuries Europe divided into warring churches, fractured families, and hostile states. Enmity between Protestant and Catholic shaped European politics and ignited wars of murderous hatred. Christendom turned against the enemy within. All over Europe state power was enlisted to execute as heretics or traitors those who repudiated the local religion, whether this was Protestant or Catholic.
These bitter, brutal divisions would prove enduring. In 1685 the king of France would demonstrate his piety by expelling his remaining Protestant subjects: perhaps as many as nine hundred thousand were forced to leave their homes forever. Three years later England expelled its king for the offense of being Catholic; a subsequent law disqualifying anyone from inheriting the crown if he or she married a Catholic was repealed only in 2013. The divisions and corrosive loyalties of Old Europe were also transported across the Atlantic: it was only in 1960 that the United States elected its first Catholic president, and then by the narrowest of margins.
The event chosen by history to mark the beginning of these transforming events is, set in this context, astonishingly mundane. We now date the Reformation from the day, October 31, 1517, when a little-known German professor proposed an academic disputation—an event so routine in sixteenth-century universities that no one at the time thought it worth recording whether the propositions for debate were printed and posted up on the normal university billboard, the door of a local church. The professor, of course, was Martin Luther, and his propositions, the ninety-five theses against indulgences, set off an unexpectedly lively debate. Within five years the German church was in turmoil, and Luther was a condemned heretic and the most famous man in Germany.
How an academic quarrel in northeastern Germany became the seed of a great movement takes some explaining. It will not be accomplished here by offering another biography of Luther, and this is not my intention. Luther was, as will be seen, a remarkable man, a person of courage and talent who met his moment of destiny with extraordinary skill and resourcefulness. His life and works have been the subject of study and reappraisal since his own lifetime to the present day, and the anniversary will be the opportunity for a further stocktaking. The purpose of this book is rather different. What will concern us here is how, in the very different communication environment of five hundred years ago, a theological spat could become a great public event, embracing churchmen and laypeople over a wide span of the European landmass.
None of this was as it should have been. In 1517 the church hierarchy was very confident of its ability to close down the hubbub around Luther. The usual channels, a confidential letter to persons of influence, underpinned by a judicial process in Rome, should have sufficed to silence a turbulent priest. There was no reason that the criticism of indulgences, fairly commonplace already in intellectual circles, should become a toxic public event. Most of all, there was no reason to believe that Electoral Saxony, a medium-sized state far from the main centers of European power politics, could incubate an event of European importance.
To understand how this came about we need to investigate a very strange alignment of events and circumstances that allowed Luther to capture the public imagination, but first of all to survive. Luther, like most of the great figures in history, was also very lucky. He was fortunate in the protection he received from influential patrons, and in the fact that they could see how protecting him could suit their purposes. He was fortunate in his friends. He also chose his moment well. When Luther first spoke out against indulgences, Europe was beginning to embrace, albeit with some caution, a new and powerful communication process, the printing press. It was sixty years since Johannes Gutenberg had announced, to general applause, the success of his experiments printing with moveable type, but the long-term consequences of this technological development were still decidedly uncertain. Those who enthusiastically embraced the new medium found it was remarkably difficult to make money producing printed books: most of the first printers lost money and many went bankrupt. Chastened, the second generation took refuge in conservative subjects. It was by no means clear how or why printing could serve a great movement of change. Printers, in fact, discovered that the most reliable profits lay in servicing the needs of traditional religion. They would need some persuading to abandon this steady, established business.
It was thus far from certain exactly how print would be relevant to the rumbling ecclesiastical spat in the north German churches. Wittenberg, Luther’s base in Saxony, had no printing press at all until 1502; the whole of the half century of experimentation and growth since Gutenberg had passed it by. Luther himself had reached his maturity, and a position of modest responsibility and respect in his local order, without publishing a book. Yet within five years of penning the ninety-five theses, he was Europe’s most published author—ever. How he achieved this was the most extraordinary of the Reformation’s multiple improbabilities. It is also the story of this book.
It is a story that sees Luther blossoming almost overnight as a writer of extraordinary power and fluency, a natural stylist in a genre that had not to that point particularly valued these skills. In the process Luther created what was essentially a new form of theological writing: lucid, accessible, and above all short. Crucially, at an early stage of the furor caused by the criticisms of indulgences, Luther made the bold and radical decision to speak beyond an informed audience of trained theologians and address the wider German public in their own language, German. This decision to move beyond the language of scholarship, Latin, was deeply controversial, but it allowed complex theological ideas to be presented to a nonspecialist audience. It also put his opponents at a disadvantage from which they never fully recovered. Certainly it vastly increased the potential market for Luther’s books; Germany’s printers responded with a hungry enthusiasm.
Luther’s writings electrified Germany, but they also transformed the dynamics of the printing industry. By the time of the Reformation the European geography of print had achieved a fairly fixed state, and it was an infrastructure that should have had no place for little Wittenberg. The principal publishing hubs were all established in Europe’s largest commercial cities; Wittenberg, in contrast, was small and remote, and miles away from any of the large markets necessary to sustain major book production. Luther realized very early that this had to change: Wittenberg had to develop a book industry capable of sustaining the vast demand for his works, one that would also do justice to the potency of his call for fundamental Christian reform.
To accomplish this, and from very early in the period of his notoriety, Luther intervened directly and forcefully in the management of the press. Until 1517 Wittenberg had only one not very competent printing press. By the time of Luther’s death the town’s production matched that of Germany’s mightiest cities. Over the sixteenth century as a whole, Wittenberg was Germany’s largest printing center. This was Luther’s achievement, and it was a very personal one. Luther was no distracted intellectual, but a man of great practical skill. He understood and relished the practicalities of turning words and ideas into a printed artifact. Luther’s father had made his living in the copper-mining industry, and young Martin would have experienced firsthand the opportunities and perils of a life wrestling precious metal from a harsh and unforgiving landscape. Once he became a writer, he put this experience to very good use.
Luther spent his life in and out of the print shops, observing and directing. He had very firm views on how his books should look, and imposed exacting standards. Most of all, Luther understood the aesthetics of the book. He appreciated that the quality and design of the printed artifact that presented his message was itself a visual totem to its respectability and truth. In 1519 Luther took a crucial initiative to bring to Wittenberg an experienced printer who could keep up with the demand for his work, and from that point on he took a leading role in directing production within the city. Most important, he took pains that his own precious, original writings were spread around the growing number of print shops to ensure that they all remained viable.
This is a crucial part of the story of Luther’s Reformation, and it is one not often told. It was not just about the sheer volume of demand for Luther’s work, though this was also impressive. Luther was sufficiently popular to put bread on the table for publishers throughout Germany, not just in Wittenberg. It was also the case that, working with his printers, Luther transformed the look of the book. In this he had the crucial support of Lucas Cranach, court painter in Wittenberg and a significant force in the book industry as well. It is arguable, in fact, that Cranach’s most significant contribution to the Reformation came not with the iconic portraits of Luther that spread the reformer’s image and fame around Germany, but with his part in the development of a new brand identity for Wittenberg’s Reformation pamphlets. His designs clothed Luther’s works in a new and distinctive livery, immediately recognizable on a crowded bookstall. The result was the development of a form of book that was itself a powerful representative of the movement—bold, clear, and recognizably distinct from what had gone before. This was Brand Luther, and its success lay at the heart of the tumultuous events that convulsed his homeland in the years after 1517. It lies at the heart of Luther’s success, and of the transforming impact of the Reformation.
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