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 (32 page)

T
HE
R
EFORMATION
D
IALOG

The Reformation relied as much on public discourse and conversation as on the printed word. Here a priest is worsted by a worthy citizen.

Among those who met Luther on his second major trip across Germany, the confrontation with Cajetan at Augsburg, was Johann Oecolampadius, then preacher and confessor at the local cathedral. Powerfully moved by the experience, Oecolampadius withdrew to the monastery at Altomünster to resolve his own position in the Reformation debate, emerging a convinced supporter of Luther’s doctrines. By 1522 he had graduated to Basel where, after a period working for the printer Andreas Cratander, he took on a leading role in the city’s Reformation.
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Johann Briesmann, who met Luther at the Leipzig Disputation, would go on to preach in Cottbus and Königsberg. Perhaps the most interesting figure in this category was Wolfgang Capito, a distinguished and respected figure in the world of south German humanism. In 1515 he was appointed professor of theology in the University of Basel, where he also established a
close working relationship with the printer Johann Froben. He also became close to Erasmus. For Capito, Luther’s teaching seemed at first to be a natural continuation of the church reform discussed in Erasmus’s circle. It was Capito who first suggested to Froben the collected edition of Luther’s early works that brought the printer such commercial success.
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But the growing chill between Luther and Erasmus left Capito seriously embarrassed. In 1520 he moved to Mainz, where he became an intimate adviser of Albrecht of Brandenburg, archbishop of Mainz. Although advising moderation on both sides, Capito was increasingly troubled by the capacity of the Reformation to stir social unrest. He and Luther corresponded, on Luther’s side with characteristic bluntness.
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An agitated Capito then made two visits to Wittenberg, one while Luther was still in the Wartburg, then again immediately on his return. This second meeting was decisive; within a year Capito would sever his connection with Albrecht and move to Strasbourg to assist Bucer in preaching the Reformation.

With Bucer and Capito the Strasbourg Reformation had two heavyweight local advocates, but the first to preach the evangelical cause in the city was a far less celebrated figure, Matthias Zell. Zell seems to have had no personal connection with Luther. He had moved to Strasbourg from Freiburg im Breisgau (where he had been rector of the university) to take up a position in the cathedral parish church of St. Laurence in 1518. There, from his own pulpit, he was in 1521 moved to a defense of Martin Luther. He then began to preach in a Lutheran manner, and later, as conservative forces attempted to have him removed, he started to publish in his own defense.
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The process by which such men adopted the Reformation remains opaque. Not all record the blinding flash of revelation with which Johannes Bugenhagen perused the
Babylonian Captivity
. In many cases adherence to the evangelical cause followed a period of cautious deliberation. In the early years members of Germany’s humanist circles would sometimes share their reflections on reading Luther’s works in correspondence with friends. Michael Hummelberg and Joachim Vadian
were obviously already in agreement. “Your opinion of Luther greatly pleased me. I think him a man of eminent genius and erudition and of singular judgment. His writings for the most part breathe out Christ himself.”
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Thomas Blaurer’s friend John von Botzheim needed more persuading. “Please change your opinion about Luther writing more bitterly than need be. He does it for the good of the Christian flock, nor can he do it without bitterness.”
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Clearly all of these men had Luther’s works in their hands and were eager for more. “I have seen the bull against Luther printed at Paris,” wrote Boniface Amerbach to his brother Basil. “Beatus has written that the bull is published with notes by Hutten. Please send me this and any other new and agreeable German publications when you can. I mean little pamphlets, for it is sufficient to give me the titles of large books.”
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Luther did what he could to help, sending letters and copies of his published works, exhorting and offering comfortable words. It is worth making the point that despite this, many followed the same course of inquiry and took the opposite view. They read Luther and were repelled; they talked to friends and were persuaded to stay with established allegiances. But enough were persuaded to throw in their lot with Luther to furnish the leadership for movements of reform in cities across Germany.

Many of Luther’s advocates left no record at all of how they arrived at their beliefs. For many the decision to preach Luther’s Gospel was solitary and intensely personal. These, in many ways, were the boldest of the Reformation’s pioneers, acting without the support of an extended circle of fellow enthusiasts, moved solely by their sense of the rightness of the new evangelical doctrines. This could be a lonely and dangerous road, speaking in defiance of the still prevailing orthodoxy, risking livelihoods or more. Such was the case with Paul Speratus, Jacob Strauss, and Stephan Agricola, all of whom had suffered deprivation and hardship after preaching the Reformation. None of them had any known previous association with Luther; they must have been converted through reading his books. In the case of Agricola this inspired a brave but foolhardy attempt to preach the Gospel in Vienna,
the center of Habsburg authority. Agricola was arrested and imprisoned, escaping only in 1524 during the turbulence of the Peasants’ War. He made his way to Augsburg, where he was swiftly engaged in the local Reformation.
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Agricola was one of a number of preachers now gathered around Urbanus Rhegius, the leading spirit of Augsburg’s Reformation. Rhegius had come to Augsburg in 1520 on his appointment as preacher in the city’s cathedral. In this prestigious role one of his first duties was to read from the pulpit the papal bull of excommunication against Luther. Within a few months, however, Rhegius had decided that the bull, rather than the condemned writings of Luther, posed the real danger to the church. Rhegius expressed this view in a published pamphlet and from the pulpit. This sensational apostasy led to his rapid deposition. Rhegius left the city but continued to publish: he would, in fact, be the most published clerical author to emerge from outside the Wittenberg circle in the first decade of the Reformation.
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The huge popularity of these writings no doubt contributed to the public agitation for Rhegius’s return; reappointed by the city council in 1523, he would play a directing role in Augsburg’s Reformation for the next seven years.

THE WISDOM OF CROWDS

Those who preached the Gospel around Germany in these tumultuous years played a vitally important role in spreading Luther’s teachings. This was an age, we must remember, in which a large proportion of the population could not read, even in relatively sophisticated urban societies such as the German imperial cities. At a time when the overwhelming majority of a population would attend church at least once a week, the pulpit represented one of the most important instruments of public communication. What was said in the church could play a crucial role in shaping public opinion and for that reason was closely monitored. When preachers, often respected local figures like Urbanus Rhegius, spoke out
against the established order, they were heeded; but they also caused disquiet. Those who preached without proper authorization caused a public scandal. Parties were formed, civic society was divided. In such cases the first instinct of the local authorities was to close down debate, to silence the dissident preacher, and to restore authority.

This might have been the end of the matter, but for the most extraordinary aspect of the movement stirred by Luther: the determination of the laity to be heard. In the years after 1521 in cities around Germany citizen groups made it clear that they were not prepared to accept the removal of a favored preacher spreading the Gospel message. They agitated for his return, even for the right of a congregation to appoint its own minister. In many places this tussle, which was often extended over a number of years, was crucial to the final triumph of the Reformation.

What animated this resistance? No doubt in many cases it was what the city’s inhabitants had heard from the pulpit or discussed with friends. But a major role can be attributed to the tumultuous maelstrom of pamphlets cascading from the German presses. For it was in precisely these years, 1520 to 1525, that the print onslaught reached its peak: a torrent of urgent, biting satire, excoriating denunciations of traditional authority, and pious reflections on the Christian life.

The sheer scale of this publishing effort is quite astonishing. Between 1520 and 1525 the presses of Germany turned out over seven thousand editions, more than doubling output since the previous decade. Almost all of this extra capacity can be accounted for by the controversies of the Reformation. It says a great deal for the flexibility of the industry that this increased level of production could be accommodated; it is equally extraordinary that this vastly increased number of books found so ready a market. That they did so is clear not least from the number of Reformation pamphlets that went through multiple editions, the most reliable indication we have of contemporary popularity.

The obvious enthusiasm for Luther’s writings among the book-buying public also encouraged printers to risk larger editions, sometimes
up to three thousand copies, against an industry norm of three hundred to seven hundred for small pamphlets. All told, the German market may during these years have absorbed something close to four million copies of the various works of the controversy and instruction generated by the Reformation.
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This was an enormous volume of work, and it posed a significant challenge to the German book industry simply to keep up with this demand.

It helped that evangelical authors could find willing publishers in almost all of Germany’s print centers. Of Germany’s major pre-Reformation centers of the publishing industry only Cologne was wholly closed to the evangelical cause. The other five (Augsburg, Nuremberg, Strasbourg, Leipzig, and Basel), together with Wittenberg and Erfurt, accounted for over 85 percent of the published writings of Luther and his colleagues. They also began during these years to publish the works of local Reformation preachers, a crucial enhancement of the message emanating from Wittenberg.

The pattern of production varied from place to place. In Strasbourg all five of the major publishing firms engaged themselves to some extent with printing for the Reformation, though less so in the case of the determinedly Catholic Johann Grüninger.
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In Augsburg, which had long specialized in the production of cheap books in the vernacular, the publication of Luther’s works was spread among at least ten different printers.
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In contrast, Basel had to this point been largely a center of scholarly Latin publishing. This created a clear opportunity for Adam Petri, who was able to corner the local market in evangelical works.

Why did this print onslaught matter? Partly, of course, for what these works contained. Although many of Germany’s citizens did not read, the highest proportion of readers was definitely concentrated in the cities, precisely where the Reformation was most hotly debated. In the first years, 1517 to 1520, the most important readers were to be found among the clergy and local intelligentsia, men who would then go on to be leaders in their own right. This was the period when a relatively high proportion of the literature of the Reformation was still in Latin, the language of clerical conversation. But in the five years after Luther’s condemnation at Worms in 1521, 85 percent of the published editions of his works were in German; this applied also in the case of works written by Luther’s followers and allies.
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