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 (51 page)

Wittenberg, we have often emphasized, was an unlikely hub for a major printing industry. But this obscurity had one countervailing advantage. Because there was no preexisting patrician elite, as was the case in places like Augsburg and Nuremberg, those successful in the book industry could rise very swiftly to the top of the social hierarchy. Cranach, Lufft, Goltz, and Selfisch all occupied positions of eminence on the city council.
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Here they were able to represent the interests of their trade and ensure that no regulations were introduced that would disadvantage them financially. There were other prizes for those with influence: Goltz was one of three publisher-booksellers who enjoyed an electoral privilege for the distribution of the Luther Bible. This was a substantial business, and it required increasingly intricate regulation to ensure that the profits were distributed equably, in this case between the distributors and the printer, Hans Lufft.
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But as Luther himself had always recognized, the industry was simply too important to the city for its economic interests to be ignored.

A GERMANICAL NATURE

For the cornerstone of an international movement like the Reformation, Lutheranism was a curiously parochial, German phenomenon. In the first years, fascination with Luther spread across Europe, to England and Spain, Poland and Bohemia. But it was only in Luther’s homeland, and in neighboring lands where German cultural influence was strong, that a Lutheran Church could successfully be planted. The reasons for this were often political. Dutch admirers of Luther, at one point numerous, ran into the immovable determination of Charles V not to be worsted again, in these his patrimonial lands, by the heretic monk who had eluded him at Worms. The Reformation in the Low Countries was brutally repressed. Cultural disdain contributed to the failure of the Reformation in Italy. But Luther’s own temperament played its part. Although his theological message was couched as an exhortation to all Christian people, his frame of reference, the human experiences on which he drew and his emotional sympathies, were almost entirely German. Luther lived a life almost entirely within the relatively narrow frame of northeastern Germany, and this seemed to content him. His only sortie outside the German lands, to Rome in 1510–1511, was unsettling and unhappy. This would later fuel an antipapal rhetoric that was at one level profoundly anti-Italian. Since most of his subsequent interactions with Italians were with agents of the despised papal power, this served only to confirm these prejudices. In contrast Luther was from the beginning a shrewd reader of German politics, both within his own Augustinian order and in the wider affairs of the Empire. With his appeal
To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation
he allied himself adeptly with long-held grievances against the clerical estate; this work, too, had a powerful xenophobic tinge.

Like other of the reformers and major intellectual figures of the age, Luther maintained an enormous correspondence. But this, again, was
far more geographically constrained in scope than, for instance, that of the Swiss reformers Calvin and Bullinger, or Desiderius Erasmus. Whereas Calvin and Bullinger worked systematically to build contacts and friendship networks around Europe, Luther’s connections with the movement outside Germany were more theoretical than real. The case of England is instructive. Calvin and Bullinger both corresponded with a wide circle of churchmen and potentially influential councillors, and Erasmus actually lived in England twice. In Luther’s case his contact with English affairs was almost entirely limited to those Englishmen who came to study in Wittenberg. His toxic public exchange with King Henry was hardly likely to win his movement friends. But this was not Luther’s intention. After 1525 and the sour experience of the Peasants’ War, he found it hard to conceive of a Reformation proceeding without the support of state power. When in 1531 a group of evangelicals from the Low Countries sought the reformer’s blessing for their plan to establish a separate, secret congregation in Antwerp, Luther offered them no comfort: they were advised, to their surprise and disappointment, to conform and wait for better times.
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Luther was a German figure and a German writer. His pleasures—food, music, family, beer—were not especially cerebral, and this was conveyed in an engaging style honed over many years of ministry and preaching to his Wittenberg congregation. Luther was a thoroughly educated man, but he wore this lightly. His sermons were littered with homely examples and improving tales, drawn equally from the fables of Aesop and the follies of life he observed all around him.
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All of this was integrated into a style of theological writing that Luther had essentially invented.

Luther was a cultured and purposeful theological writer. He wrote fine Latin, and his Latin works measured up well against those of talented adversaries. But it was his German writings that redefined theological debate and reshaped its audience. The decision to make the case against indulgences in German with the 1518
Sermon on Indulgence and Grace
was, as we have seen, momentous; and this proved to be only the first of
several hundred original German compositions, many like this, short, terse, and phrased with a directness and clarity that was a revelation in itself. Luther’s innovation as a writer continued with his German Bible, an experiment in style and language that shaped the way German was written and spoken from that day forth. Luther called the German people to engage in serious questions of salvation and Christian responsibility, and they responded in huge numbers. In piquing their interest, the medium—Luther’s choice of words and style, the accessibility of ideas briefly put, the visual signals of pamphlets with an increasing design homogeneity—was in many respects as important as the message.

The impact of this extraordinary literary career, the late-blooming talent of a driven man, can be measured in many ways, not least in the thousands of men and women drawn from their old allegiance to follow his teachings. Nowhere was this impact more profound than its consequence for the printing industry. Luther was the most successful author since the invention of printing. His output far outstripped that of any living contemporary, both in the number of his published works and in their success in the marketplace. His sales outstripped all of the ancients, even staples of the school curriculum such as Cicero. In the sixteenth century printers put out almost 5,000 editions of Luther’s works; a further 3,000 can be added if one reckons with other projects with which he was involved, such as the Luther Bible.
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But of these 4,790 editions, almost 90 percent were published in Germany, and almost 80 percent in the German language. For a theological writer, in an age when Latin was still the language of schooling and intellectual debate, these are extraordinary statistics. The contrast with Erasmus, Luther’s main publishing rival, is instructive. Erasmus, though comfortably outpublished by Luther, had a far more international appeal. His works circulated in Europe, with especially strong demand in France, the Low Countries, and Germany. Numerous editions were published in all of these places, but since 80 percent of the Erasmus editions were published in Latin, they crossed boundaries with ease. This contrast exposes both the potency and the limitations of Luther’s movement. But for German printers and
German readers the intensity and focus of Luther’s publishing barrage was gold dust.

Martin Luther had many strokes of good fortune in the early years of the Reformation; we have experienced them most vividly in the recapitulation of the Reformation’s torrid early years, when a word from Frederick the Wise could have doomed him to a heretic’s death. One aspect of this good fortune is less immediately obvious, but especially pertinent to this current discussion: and that is the nature and organization of the German printing industry. In contrast to most parts of Europe, Germany had no dominant printing entrepôt, but several competing centers of production. This accident of fate would serve Luther well. The multitude of jurisdictions made it virtually impossible to impose controls over output; the wealth and size of Germany’s major cities provided both a well-capitalized publishing industry and a ready audience. Many authors chafed at the ease with which their works were pirated and reprinted, but for Luther this was a great boon, particularly in the early years. Through reprints of Wittenberg editions in Augsburg, Strasbourg, and elsewhere, Luther’s works, and news of his cause, passed easily into the bloodstream of German public life. He, of course, helped by writing works of a length that made it straightforward for publishers to run off a new edition.

Of the six established centers of the German print industry only Cologne was entirely closed to Reformation publishing. The others all had a slightly different role: Leipzig as the local entrepôt as Wittenberg found its feet, Nuremberg and Augsburg the great commercial centers in the south, Basel as the center of Latin exchange, Strasbourg the gateway to the west. All made a major contribution to printing Luther as well as the works of local supporters of his movement; this endorsement by respected local figures across Germany was also crucial to the Reformation’s success. The rise of Wittenberg added a seventh major printing center to the roster. The established centers could bring both capital investment (crucial for larger works like the Luther Bible) and design sophistication to the work of spreading the word. Yet just as striking as the
engagement of these major publishing hubs was the foundation, or refoundation, of printing in numerous smaller towns across the Empire.

This wave of new foundations came in two main periods. In the mid-1520s, a print shop was planted in a number of often quite tiny places: these were often presses established as a branch office for a larger press elsewhere, and often with very specific confessional purposes. This was followed by a great wave of expansion in the middle of the century, when the Reformation was an established fact. Between 1540 and 1544 printing came to Berlin, Bonn, and Dortmund; between 1550 and 1558 to a dozen other towns, including Emden, Bautzen, Düsseldorf, and Jena. Striking is both the density of these new foundations and a perceptible shift in the industry’s center of gravity from south to north: to Lübeck on the Baltic coast and Hamburg, to Königsberg, Rostock, and Frankfurt-an-der-Oder in the north and east. Many of these places were in a region that, when Luther came to Wittenberg, he memorably characterized as beyond the boundaries of civilization. At the end of the century they were strongholds of Protestantism.

This gradual reorientation of the Empire’s publishing industry northward was mirrored by a similar shift on a wider European scale. In the first age of print Italy had swiftly usurped Germany’s early primacy and become the heart of the new industry, producing the best and most elegant books, and making the most substantial contributions of design and form as the printed book emerged as an independent artifact. Italy, especially Venice, also established a dominant role in the export market. By the end of Luther’s century this was no longer the case. Here the evidence provided by overall production statistics is dramatic. From the birth of printing to 1517, Italy and the Holy Roman Empire enjoyed virtual parity in terms of overall production, and between them dominated the European printing industry.
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By the end of the sixteenth century, Germany had forged ahead; and in the first half of the seventeenth century Germany outpublished Italy by a factor of three to one. By this point France, England, and the Low Countries, all key northern zones of
the publishing trade, had also begun to eclipse the printers of the Italian peninsula.

Obviously not all of this can be attributed to Luther, though the publication of church orders, Bibles, catechisms, and hymnbooks provided a steady bedrock of demand long after the polemical fires of the 1520s had dimmed. But the influence of Luther’s movement was more profound even than this. The Reformation was not simply a towering movement of religious renewal: it was also an astonishing, sensational, and, for a few years at least, all-consuming public event. The drama of the indulgence controversy, Luther’s defiance, the confrontations at Augsburg, Leipzig, and Worms, the Peasants’ War; these provided an astonishing rolling news event such as Europe had never known. These dramas in Luther’s life found echoes in a rippling succession of local confrontations as each German city faced its moment of decision. Luther engaged the nation’s attention as few had done before him. He created an appetite for news, for public engagement, every bit as dramatic as the fundamental questions of theology his movement posed.

Once the drama had faded, or at least become more intermittent, the appetite for news remained. Printers who had found a new public through Luther were loath to see this market disappear; so they fed it by offering other sensations, news of battles and the deeds of kings, natural disasters, spectacular crimes, or extraordinary heavenly apparitions.
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It is no surprise that by far the most lively market for these printed news pamphlets was in Luther’s homeland. These news pamphlets were remarkably similar in design and form to the Reformation
Flugschriften:
like the religious pamphlets they were usually in a neat quarto format and four or eight pages long. The developing news market also exploited another format that had developed with the Reformation, the illustrated broadsheet. Like the famous polemical images that had promoted Luther’s movement, these broadsheets were able to feed off the highly developed illustrative tradition of the German woodcut industry, the most advanced and sophisticated in Europe. In the seventeenth century these
finely drawn woodcuts would gradually be replaced by engravings, as another pan-European news event, the Thirty Years’ War, came to dominate the news sheets.
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It was about this time that a German publisher first conceived the idea of printing his bulletins of news as a regular sequence: thus was born the newspaper, at first as a weekly service, and only gradually transformed into the familiar daily. In the seventeenth century this innovation spread like wildfire through the German cities, and it remained for a long time the news medium of northern Europe.