ABSTRACT
Augsburg’s Lutheran church of St Anna is a cool, peaceful oasis in the midst of the city’s bustling pedestrian shopping zone. Shoppers and tourists frequently escape the heat by stepping into St Anna’s cloister, a vestige of the church’s preReformation identity as a Carmelite monastery. Once inside, visitors are invited to ascend the ‘Luther Steps’ to the ‘Luther Study’, a series of small rooms lled with eighteenth-century editions of the works of Martin Luther. Tradition holds that Luther stayed with his Carmelite brethren at St Anna’s in 1520, when he was called to Augsburg to answer the Pope’s charges before Cardinal Cajetan, and he may have rested and prepared in those very rooms.1 Luther gained a staunch follower in the convent’s prior, Johannes Frosch, who abandoned his oce in 1523, married, and celebrated Augsburg’s rst Lutheran communion service in the church of St Anna on Christmas Day, 1525.2 Since then, the church of St Anna has served as the pre-eminent Lutheran church in Augsburg and the city’s major memorial to Martin Luther.
