ABSTRACT
When Martin Luther issued his attack on indulgences in 1517, religious polemic was already a venerable mode of writing in the Western church – found in medieval polemics around Catharism, Waldensianism, Lollardy and Hussitism, and before that in late antique polemics on Donatism and Arianism. 1 In its first years, the Luther affair was itself simply a polemical exchange conducted before all of Europe, in text and disputations, as the Augustinian friar locked horns with figures such as Professor Johannes Eck (1486–1543), Cardinal Cajetan (1469–1534) and many others. 2 These early Reformation polemics differed from those written against Hussites a century earlier in two important respects – stylistically and methodologically, they tended to employ (or be influenced by) a humanist rhetoric of persuasion, rather than an older scholastic model of devastating logical argument. 3 Secondly, they overwhelmingly took the physical form of printed books rather than hand-copied manuscripts – easier to produce en masse and disseminate at speed, with the potential to accelerate theological debate. Jesse Lander has suggested that the decades from 1517 saw the birth of what we would recognize as modern polemic, produced by the elemental forces of printing and the Reformation itself, a new technology coupled to a new idea. 4 However, beyond these new elements, was there anything fundamentally, historically distinctive about the polemics produced in, by, about and against the early Reformation?
