ABSTRACT
The next period of Luther’s life, from his disputation with Eck at Leipzig onwards, takes in his formal severance from the papacy with his excommunication in the course of 1520 and his full emergence as an author for a mass readership in his major writings of the same year, the so-called ‘Reformation classics’: ‘The Address to the Christian Nobility Concerning the Reform of the Christian Estate’, ‘The Babylonian Captivity of the Church’ and ‘The Freedom of a Christian’. After considering the contents of those works, we shall recount Luther’s excommunication by the papacy in 1520 and his appearance before the German Diet at Worms in 1521. One of the key features of incidents described in this chapter is Luther’s dexterity in capturing what we might describe as the ‘theatre’ of a given occasion and his ability to exploit the propaganda value of situations presented to him.
