ABSTRACT
In this book we shall be considering the Protestant Reformation, launched by Martin Luther from 1517 onwards, as a major event in world history and especially within the great saga of the history of human freedom as well as of religious truth. In this Introduction, we shall be considering in particular the way that the religious changes Luther instigated have been debated in English and other European historical writing since the 16th century: our concluding chapter will also return to some of these themes. Our subject, Luther, saw himself as a liberator and has been
represented in the tradition of historical writing about him – the ‘historiography’ – as one who struck some of the heaviest blows ever delivered for human progress by his work as a theologian in freeing Christians of his own and subsequent ages from a burdensome Catholic religious system. As it gained its own historiography between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, Protestant ideology justified the Reformation as a liberating movement setting masses of people free from an essentially corrupt and unfree medieval Catholic system, which had seized the once pure Christian Church of New Testament antiquity and created a tyranny of oppression and lies. Thomas A. Brady Jr captures with particular vividness the historiographical image of Martin Luther as a great, brave, antiauthoritarian and heroic public liberator and innovator, and one to whom a newly organised mass opinion, brought into being by the media revolution of print, responded with a novel and massively favourable immediacy, Luther inspiring, as well as directing, a religious and social renewal whose magnetic appeal leapt over the hitherto uncrossable boundaries between laity and clergy, men and women:
Martin Luther’s words and the news of his heroic resistance to pope and emperor struck [a] logjam of reform like a mighty hammer. By separating the question of salvation from ecclesiastical authority, he issued a passport to the early reform movements. This radical theology spread through public opinion, a new kind of milieu stimulated by an inundation of printed words and images on an absolutely unprecedented scale. Its flooding tide struck an ecclesiastical world immobilized by its past and distracted by many preoccupations. The movement swept up both traditional anticlericalism and a newly virulent anti-Romanism, which … inspired priests and laymen as well as women to speak and act for the reform of religious life in their own hometowns.1
