Contents

List of Illustrations

Colour plates

Introduction

For Protestants it is almost an article of faith that the Reformation began when Martin Luther, the shy monk, nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg on 31 October 1517, the eve of All Saints’ Day, and set in motion a religious revolution that shattered Western Christendom. For Luther’s closest collaborator Philipp Melanchthon, to whom we owe the trenchant description of the event, the posting of the theses advanced the restoration of the ‘light of the gospel’. Luther himself liked to celebrate the moment as the beginning of the Reformation, and drank a toast to it with friends later in life.¹

A little historical debunking, especially with events of such significance, is always salutary. As the Catholic historian Erwin Iserloh pointed out in 1962, Luther himself never mentioned the event, but said only that he sent letters to Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz and the bishop of Brandenburg, Hieronymus Scultetus, in which he condemned the abuses of selling papal indulgences in forthright tones, and enclosed his theses.² The story that he posted them on the door of the Castle Church has come down to us through Melanchthon and Luther’s secretary, Georg Rörer, but neither of them was in Wittenberg at the time to witness the event.³ Others have suggested that, far less dramatically, the theses might have been stuck to the door, rather than nailed to it.⁴

Whether Luther used a nail or a pot of glue will probably never be known for sure, but it is certain that he sent the theses to Archbishop Albrecht, the most important churchman in all Germany, on 31 October. The accompanying letter had a tone of remarkable self-confidence, even of arrogance. After an obsequious opening, it roundly condemned the archbishop’s lack of care for his flock and threatened that if Albrecht did not take action, then ‘someone may rise and, by means of publications, silence those preachers’ who were selling indulgences which promised the buyers time off Purgatory.⁵ Luther wrote a similar letter to his immediate superior, the bishop of Brandenburg, and, more than the posting of the theses in a backwater like Wittenberg, these letters were the provocation which ensured a response. One of Luther’s talents, evident even then, was his ability to stage an event, to do something spectacular that would get him noticed.

Luther’s Reformation sundered the unity of the Catholic Church for ever, and can even be credited with starting the process of secularisation in the West, as Catholicism lost its monopoly in large parts of Europe. Yet it all began in a most unlikely place. The tiny new University of Wittenberg was struggling to make its name; the town itself was a building site of ‘muddy houses, unclean lanes, every path, step and street full of mud’. It was situated at the end of the earth, as southern humanists scoffed, far away from grand imperial cities like Strasbourg, Nuremberg or Augsburg with their connections to fashionable Italy. Even Luther remarked that it was so distant from civilisation that ‘a little further, and it would be in barbarian country’.⁶ And the man himself was an unlikely revolutionary. Just short of his thirty-fourth birthday, Luther had been a monk for twelve years, working his way up through the Augustinian order and becoming a trusted administrator and university professor. He had published almost nothing, and his experience of public writing was restricted largely to theses for disputation, works of exegesis and ghostwriting sermons for lazy colleagues. Although the Church was slow to respond, the Ninety-Five Theses took Germany by storm. There was a huge readership for them, lay as well as clerical. In just two months they were known all over Germany, and soon beyond it.

Whatever really happened on 31 October 1517, there is no doubting the significance of the theses themselves: the Reformation truly was sparked by a single text. Theses were sets of numbered propositions designed for an academic debate, although in this case that debate never occurred and Luther probably never intended it to. They were not composed in continuous prose, nor were they statements of truth; rather they set out hypothetical claims to be tested through subsequent argument, and were terse to the point of being difficult to understand. Few copies of Luther’s text survive, and there are none from Wittenberg itself.⁷ Printed single-sided on a large sheet of paper, they were meant to be posted on a wall – which suggests there may be some truth in the story of the church door – even though the size of the typeface would make them difficult to read. At the top, in a larger font, is an invitation in Luther’s name that these theses should be debated at Wittenberg.⁸

The first begins with the words ‘When our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ said “do penance” he willed the whole life of a believer to be one of repentance.’ The Latin puts the emphasis on the main verb – voluit – on what Christ willed the believer’s life to be. Luther goes straight on to say that this cannot be interpreted to mean simply performing the devotional penalties that a priest might impose, such as saying prayers, or indeed, buying indulgences. The statement is deceptive in its simplicity; in fact, it implied a root-and-branch critique of the whole edifice of the late medieval Church.⁹

How could such a simple message have such implications and cause such uproar? Luther was not even the first or the only person to criticise indulgences; Luther’s confessor, the Augustinian Johann von Staupitz, for example, had done so in sermons in 1516. At one level, Luther was simply articulating a long-standing position on the nature of grace that went back to St Augustine: the idea that our own good deeds can never ensure salvation, and that we must rely on God’s mercy. Luther, however, alleged that the sacrament of confession was being perverted from a spiritual exercise into a monetary transaction. What sparked his anger, so he later reminisced, was the preaching of a Dominican friar, Johannes Tetzel, in the nearby town of Jüterbog, who went so far as to claim that his indulgences were so efficacious that even if a person had raped the Virgin Mary they would be assured complete remission from Purgatory. Still, the issue of indulgences was a lively subject of theological and political debate, and initially, some saw the indulgences controversy as little more than one of the frequent spats between the monastic orders, part of the old rivalry between Dominicans and Luther’s Augustinians.

But it was much more. By arguing that Christians could not earn their way out of Purgatory through good works, viewing relics or acquiring indulgences, Luther was assaulting the medieval Church’s claim to be able to grant forgiveness and facilitate salvation through the dispensation of the sacraments. For him, such practices showed a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of sin, repentance and salvation. The Protestant chronicler Friedrich Myconius later recorded that some of Luther’s parishioners had complained that he ‘would not absolve them, because they showed no true penitence nor reform’ and had appeared with letters of indulgence from Tetzel as they ‘did not want to desist from adultery, whoredom, usury, unjust goods and such sins and evil’.¹⁰

By attacking the understanding of penance, Luther was implicitly striking at the heart of the papal Church, and its entire financial and social edifice, which worked on a system of collective salvation that allowed people to pray for others and so reduce their time in Purgatory. It financed a whole clerical proletariat of priests paid to recite anniversary Masses for the souls of the deceased. It paid for pious laywomen in poorhouses who said prayers for the souls of the dead, to ease their path through Purgatory. It paid for brotherhoods that prayed for their members, said Masses, undertook processions and financed special altars. In short, the system structured the religious and social lives of most medieval Christians. At its centre was the Pope who was the steward of a treasury of ‘merits’ – grace which could be disbursed to others. Attacking indulgences, therefore, would sooner or later lead to a questioning of papal power.

No one compelled people to buy indulgences, but there was a huge market for them. When the indulgence-sellers arrived at a town:

So efficiently organised was the system that the indulgences were even printed locally on parchment which could be filled in with the name of the person on whose behalf they were purchased.

Part of the explosiveness of Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses lay in the timing of their appearance. On the feast day of All Saints, the magnificent collection of relics belonging to the Elector Friedrich, ruler of Saxony and Luther’s sovereign, were displayed in Wittenberg’s Castle Church to pilgrims from miles around and indulgences granted to all who viewed them. The theses were probably posted on or just before this celebration. True, illiterate pilgrims could not have read them; and even literate townsfolk would have been hard pressed to understand them. But the recipients of Luther’s letter would have fully grasped the significance of the date, as would his fellow theologians at Wittenberg. For the latter, the theses touched on their own livelihoods, as the university depended on funding from the All Saints foundation, derived from the saying of Masses for the dead and from the pilgrims who came to see the relics in order to gain time off Purgatory.

What Luther did not know at the time was that the particular ‘indulgence scandal’ he attacked involved much more than the crude preaching of Johannes Tetzel, whose advertising jingle allegedly ran ‘As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from Purgatory springs’. Rather, Tetzel‘s activities fed into a series of fundamental practices which financed the Church. The money raised by the preacher was supposed to go to Rome, to pay for the rebuilding of St Peter’s. In fact, half of it was going directly to the Fugger banking family in Augsburg, the richest merchant capitalists of the day, to whom Albrecht of Mainz owed money. The younger son of a powerful princely family, Albrecht had become archbishop of Magdeburg at the age of twenty-three. But then there had been an unexpected vacancy in the archbishopric of Mainz, the richest of the German sees. This was not a chance to miss, but the papacy was trying to stop bishops amassing multiple offices and, after Albrecht’s succession to Magdeburg, had also ordered that henceforth bishops would have to be at least thirty years old.¹²

The conflict was resolved in Albrecht’s favour when he agreed to pay a contribution of 21,000 ducats to support the building of St Peter’s, money he did not have. So he borrowed from the Fuggers, even though their involvement in monopoly capitalism was regarded as usury by the Church. He then moved to divert money, such as that collected by Tetzel, into paying the debt. Luther’s theses, in other words, not only attacked papal power, but also, unbeknown to him, one of the most powerful people in Germany and the richest financial house in Europe.

In the short run, not much happened in response to the Ninety-Five Theses. No disputation took place. The bishop of Brandenburg does not seem to have answered Luther’s letter. Instead, when Luther sent him his fuller explanations and defence of the theses, the bishop recommended a delay in publication which Luther appears to have – mistakenly – believed showed sympathy for his ideas. Albrecht of Mainz was away in Aschaffenburg when the theses arrived, but did not reply either when he eventually received them. Instead, he sent the document to the University of Magdeburg for theological judgement, and then on to Rome. This step ensured that the theses would become a serious matter by triggering a papal investigation for heresy. Albrecht’s bureaucratic act meant that the matter was no longer an issue affecting a small part of Germany: it had become an event concerning the universal Church.

*

Luther’s life and habits were very parochial. He was born in Eisleben in Saxony, and by strange chance, he died there too. He was brought up in the mining town of Mansfeld, seven miles to the north, went to university in Erfurt, forty-five miles to the south-west, and spent most of the rest of his life in Wittenberg, fifty miles to the north-east. He only once ventured outside the boundaries of the Holy Roman Empire when he visited Rome, and this merely provided a fount of anti-papal anecdotes and nourished his intolerance of everything that was not German. He travelled widely within Saxony, but when he was placed under imperial ban he was unable to venture further afield where he would not have the protection of the Saxon ruler. By the end of his life, he was further confined by poor health, reliant on a little cart even to get to church to preach. However, he developed a network of correspondents and pastors, whose appointments he had arranged and whose careers he furthered, which spanned the empire and beyond. And the effects of his Reformation spread from Germany to Italy, England, France, the Scandinavian lands and Eastern Europe.

The outlines of his biography are simply told. His childhood was unremarkable, except in one respect: he came from a mining area. The economy of mining was very different from the world of craft workshops and small enterprises that characterised most sixteenth-century towns, the environment that formed so many humanists and scholars. Luther’s family invested in their son’s education and destined him for the law, a profession that would have helped protect the family’s mining enterprise. But in 1505, to his father’s dismay, the young man gave up his legal studies and entered the Augustinian monastery at Erfurt. There he came under the influence of Johann von Staupitz, a leading Augustinian instrumental in establishing the new University of Wittenberg, who persuaded the young monk to move to higher studies in theology and obtain a doctorate. Progressing steadily up the rungs of the order, Luther eventually succeeded to Staupitz’s university position and became active in reforming the university. Then, in 1517, the Ninety-Five Theses burst upon the world.

The theses did not contain a full theological programme; rather, Luther was radicalised by the opposition he encountered, and the arguments and attacks of others made him develop his theology and pursue his ideas further. The Reformation emerged through a series of disputations and arguments with his antagonists at Heidelberg, Augsburg and Leipzig. Luther knew that the penalty for heresy would be burning at the stake, and that if he was imprisoned and tried by the Church he was likely to lose his life. This meant that his theology was formed under the double pressure of increasingly aggressive argument from his opponents and the threat of martyrdom.

In 1521 Luther, now known throughout Germany, was called upon to answer to the emperor at the Diet of Worms in front of the assembled estates of the entire empire. Many thought he would not take the risk of attending, but as he said, nothing would stop him, even if he had known that there were ‘as many devils as . . . tiles on the roofs’. The courage he showed at Worms was breathtaking. For a commoner to stand up to the emperor and the most powerful princes in the empire, and to resist the might of the Church, was as extraordinary as it was unforgettable. A defining event, it probably did more to win people over to the Reformation, and shape their hopes and expectations, than did his theology. Like any revolutionary movement, Luther’s ideas were magnified and refracted through what people heard in the street or in sermons, or through news of what he did.

The Diet concluded with the emperor’s emphatic condemnation. On the way back from Worms, Luther, now in mortal danger, was kidnapped on the instructions of his ruler and protector Friedrich the Wise, and taken for his safety to the Wartburg Castle, where he spent the next ten months in isolation, writing furiously and translating the New Testament. In the meantime, the Reformation at Wittenberg proceeded apace without him and, under the guidance of Andreas Karlstadt, became increasingly radical, addressing issues of poor relief and morality. When Luther returned to Wittenberg in March 1522, he immediately called for the reforms to be reversed because they had happened too fast. He also broke decisively with Karlstadt, who had begun to take a different line on the Lord’s Supper, arguing that Christ was not actually present in the bread and wine, a view Luther passionately rejected.

This split presaged the future, for people applied his theology, as they perceived it, to their own experience – a process Luther might oppose, but which was beyond his control. As the Reformation spread it also began to fragment, as many people in south Germany, the Swiss towns, Silesia, and even within Saxony, were persuaded by those who denied that the body of Christ was truly present in Communion. In towns and villages throughout the empire, people began to demand gospel freedom, to insist on appointing evangelical preachers, and to overturn established authorities. Just as Luther’s antagonists had predicted from the very start, his message brought revolution. In 1524, the Peasants’ War broke out, the greatest uprising yet seen in German lands and unequalled in Europe until the French Revolution. Luther at first seemed to rebuke both sides even-handedly, castigating the peasants while, like an Old Testament prophet, also criticising the rulers, but he eventually gave his support to the princes. With this stance, the social conservatism of Luther’s Reformation became apparent.

While the Peasants’ War was at its height, Luther determined to marry, ‘to spite the Devil’, as he explained – surely one of the strangest justifications a new bridegroom ever gave.¹³ The marriage was indeed shocking, but its audacity was as much a challenge to the Church as it was to the Devil. He was a priest and a monk, while his bride, Katharina von Bora, was a nun: they had both taken vows of celibacy. No longer the sallow, ascetic monk, Luther entered a new phase of life, and soon became a father. He did not have to leave the now deserted monastery, however: the Saxon rulers simply conferred the buildings on him and his heirs. There his household, with its assortment of visitors, students and colleagues, became the template of the evangelical parsonage on a grand scale.

The new Church still needed to be established, and in 1530, Emperor Charles V held another Diet on German soil, this time at Augsburg. It was now clear that there could be no accommodation between Lutherans and the Catholics; but the Reformation itself was by this time also split over Communion, and Luther’s opponents were not given a voice at the Diet. The final years of Luther’s life were dominated by attempts to reach some sort of agreement with the ‘sacramentarians’. A precarious accord was finally reached, but it left Luther convinced that he had been right all along – a psychological dynamic that stored up future trouble for the movement. At the same time, his anti-papal rhetoric became increasingly bitter. His denunciation of the Pope as the Antichrist hardened to a fundamental axiom of his theology, and his declining years were further marked by violent disputes with erstwhile followers and furious diatribes against the Jews. After Luther’s death, splits emerged between different wings of his own movement, leading to a legacy of division within Lutheranism where each side passionately claimed his authority.

*

These are the external facts, but they do not convey Luther’s inner development, which is the abiding focus of this book. How did he have the inner strength to resist the emperor and estates at Worms? What drove him to this point? Why did he break with Andreas Karlstadt, his close supporter in the early years of the Reformation? Why did Luther, time after time, fall out with those with whom he had worked most closely, creating searing enmities and leaving his followers terrified that they might also incur his wrath? How did the man who had been convinced that ‘they won’t wish a wife on me’ become the model of the married pastor? This book charts the emotional transformations wrought by the religious changes Luther set in motion. For Luther’s personality had huge historical effects – for good and ill. It was his remarkable courage and sense of purpose that created the Reformation; and it was his stubbornness and capacity to demonise his opponents that nearly destroyed it.

Psycho-history has long had a bad press due to its tendency to explain complex personalities and historical processes in terms of basic patterns set in early childhood. Luther’s life has inspired some of the most famous psycho-biographies, including Erik Erikson’s Young Man Luther and Erich Fromm’s chapter on the reformer in his The Fear of Freedom. Both men were psychoanalysts.¹⁴ Erikson was also a developmental psychologist who worked with adolescents, and his lively book, published in post-war America, remains a classic; but one of the most important features of Luther’s Reformation is that it was not that of a young man. As this book will argue, although Luther’s relationship to his father was fundamental to his personality and his religiosity, and although his understanding of paternal relations pervades his theology, father figures were only part of what shaped him.

It may seem foolhardy to attempt a psychoanalytically influenced biography of the very man whose biography has become a byword for the worst kinds of reductionist history.¹⁵ Such an approach, it could be contended, risks overestimating the role of individual agency in much the same way that sixteenth-century Lutheran hagiography did, making it impossible to understand why Luther’s ideas might have appealed to so many and how they created a social movement. It could be further argued that it also cheapens theology, reducing major ideas to the outcomes of unconscious wishes or conflicts, and making it impossible for us to grasp why ideas about the presence of God in the sacrament or the nature of repentance should have become so urgent.

However, the wealth of material that has survived on Luther is so great that we probably know more about his inner life than about that of any other sixteenth-century individual, allowing us to trace his relationships with his friends and colleagues through his correspondence and even to examine his dreams. His collected works, the famous Weimar Edition, extend to 120 volumes, including eleven volumes of letters and six volumes of his dinner-table conversations. Where many historians have used this abundance of material to trace his theological development in detail, and to date specific events with greater accuracy, I want to understand Luther himself. I want to know how a sixteenth-century individual perceived the world around him, and why he viewed it in this way. I want to explore his inner landscapes so as to better understand his ideas about flesh and spirit, formed in a time before our modern separation of mind and body. In particular, I am interested in Luther’s contradictions. Here was a man who made some of the most misogynistic remarks of any thinker, yet who was in favour not only of sex within marriage but crucially that it should also give bodily pleasure to both women and men. Trying to understand this apparent paradox is a challenge I have not been able to resist.

A man of immense charisma, Luther’s passionate friendships were matched by equally unrelenting rejections of those he believed to be wrong or disloyal. His theology sprang from his character, a connection that Melanchthon, one of the first of his biographers and his closest co-worker, insisted upon: ‘His character was, almost, so to speak, the greatest proof’ of his doctrine.¹⁶ Luther’s theology becomes more alive as we connect it to his psychological conflicts, expressed in his letters, sermons, treatises, conversations and biblical exegesis. Such a rereading of the original sources, which sets aside the accretions of denominational scholarship, will show us why seemingly remote and abstruse theological questions mattered so deeply to him and his contemporaries, and in what ways they may still be important to us today. Drawing on the insights of psychoanalysis thus yields a richer understanding not only of Luther the man but also of the revolutionary religious principles to which he dedicated his life, the legacies of which are still so powerful.

This book is not a general history of the Reformation, or even of the Reformation in Wittenberg; still less can it provide an overall interpretation of what became Lutheranism. It does argue, however, that our understanding of the Reformation in German lands has been distorted by the preoccupation of western post-war scholarship with the cities of the south. This is a legacy of the Cold War, when historians of the West found it hard to use archives in the East, while their colleagues in the German Democratic Republic were interested at first more in social movements and in the legacy of the religious radical and revolutionary Thomas Müntzer than in Luther. As a result, the social history of Lutheranism is still underdeveloped, and we lack the kind of rich, nuanced account of the progress of the movement which we have for the major cities of the south. Because West German historians after the war were so eager to identify a democratic lineage in their own past, they idealised the free independent cities with their elected councils. They wished to escape the deadening equation of the Reformation with political conformism and obedience, by pointing to the variety of local, popular Reformations, with ideas about the sacrament, images and social reform very different to those of Luther. But the result has been that our account of the Reformation has been skewed. We lack a proper assessment of Lutheranism in its home social and cultural context, which was so unlike that of the southern cities: its political values and its economic structures were not those of the south. Nor do we understand how Lutheranism developed in dialogue with what became reformed religion, the precursor of Calvinism, through bitter enmities and tragic broken friendships. This is an absence this book cannot repair, but I hope to suggest a new and unexpected approach to Luther’s theology by placing him in the social and cultural context that formed him.

*

Luther has been part of my life for longer than I care to admit. He was a feature of my childhood, because my father was for a few years a Presbyterian minister. I was only briefly a daughter of the manse, but I saw the toll that living a family life in public took on both my parents. The strange black cassock and gown seemed to transform my father into another being. He had a study lined from floor to ceiling with works of theology, but the congregation hankered after his predecessor, who had been less intellectual. All this confronted me with issues of authority – the authority the congregation invested in my father; the seriousness conferred by the pulpit and the heavy black robes, so unsuited to the Australian climate; and the strain this role put on him. We were set apart, and yet we were humiliatingly dependent – nothing could be repaired in the manse and no furnishings could be chosen except with the agreement of the congregation, one of whom opined, ‘You don’t need carpets to do the work of God.’

By a quirk of historical accident, the Melbourne Presbyterian Church at that time was more influenced by Luther than it was by its ostensible founder John Calvin, because several Australian university theologians had studied in Tübingen with Lutheran professors. Some years later, when my father had left the Church and I was beginning doctoral research, I studied in Tübingen myself with Professor Heiko Oberman, a Dutch scholar who had established the Institute for Late Middle Ages and Reformation and whose work was transforming our understanding of late medieval theology. In my first semester I attended the lectures that would become his study of Luther, a classic that is still to my mind the best biography of the man. And it was while I was at Tübingen that Hans Küng, a Catholic professor at the university, lost his licence to teach Catholic theology because he had questioned papal infallibility. It seemed that the questions of authority, freedom, and obedience, which Luther had raised centuries ago, were very much alive. These were burning issues that kept Lutheran theology at the centre of my intellectual and personal concerns.

Most biographies of Luther are written by church historians. The great exception is the magnificent recent biography by the historian Heinz Schilling, the first to put Luther in a more rounded historical context and to give equal weight to his opponent Charles V.¹⁷ I am not a church historian but I am a historian of religion, shaped by the social and cultural history of the last decades, and by the feminist movement in particular. I do not wish to idolise Luther or to denigrate him; nor do I wish to make him consistent. I want to understand him and make sense of the convulsions that he and Protestantism unleashed, not just in relation to authority and obedience, but also in regard to the relations between the sexes and how men and women perceived their physical existence.

When I began graduate study, there were very few studies by Western scholars of the Lutheran regions of the Reformation in eastern Germany, owing to the division of the country at the time. One of the few exceptions was the late Bob Scribner who wrote his PhD on the Reformation in Erfurt and who would become my doctoral supervisor. Most local studies of the Reformation were of towns in southern Germany that were influenced by the theology of reformers such as Huldrych Zwingli or Martin Bucer, not of Lutheran regions.¹⁸ For its part, East German scholarship focused on the Peasants’ War and on the figure of Luther’s antagonist Thomas Müntzer as a revolutionary leader. The social history of Wittenberg, meanwhile, remained largely untouched. As a result the history of the Reformation was profoundly distorted. Biographies were largely written with no sense of the social and cultural world of Saxony or of Wittenberg, and thus tended to reinforce the view of Luther as a lone theological hero, who stands above time and space. Even so, there have been some subversive moments. By a fine irony, the best scholarly study of Wittenberg, unmatched since, testifies to the legacy of the early women’s movement: the 1927 work by the economic and social historian Edith Eschenhagen in which she analysed Wittenberg’s tax records.¹⁹

All these works had a strong influence on me when I began work on this book in 2006, and reinforced my view that a sense of place was essential to understanding Luther’s reformation. I spent as much time as I could in the archives at Wittenberg, which are housed in Friedrich the Wise’s castle. During the lunch hour I wandered around the town. I visited all the places where Luther had lived before going to Wittenberg, and I often read in the archives, not so much to find out about Luther as to get a sense of the local economy and power structure. I read accounts of Luther by his contemporaries, foes as well as friends – and I discovered that his antagonists often proved surprisingly shrewd about his psychology and motivations. But it was reading his letters that gave me the greatest pleasure and the richest encounter with the man. I read them not to corroborate or date Reformation events, but as literary sources that conveyed his emotions and illuminated his relationships with others. Luther’s letters were designed to make things happen. His mistakes, slips, self-justifications and fondness for particular words reveal much about what moved him. In the early years of the Reformation, for example, he talked constantly of invidia, or envy, attributing it to his opponents – although it is hardly likely that they would have envied a penniless, powerless monk, whilst he, on the other hand, had every reason to be preoccupied with those he envied. I began to reflect that many of his theological concerns were closely related to the strong conflicts that shaped his psychology.

Luther’s letter-writing habits offered perhaps the most intriguing insights. Although he had had secretaries since his days as a monk, he wrote his letters himself, except when severe illness prevented him. His hand – small, neat, and well-shaped – moves confidently across the page, and Luther almost always knew what size paper he would need, suggesting a remarkable ability to judge in advance how much he was going to write. Over the years his handwriting remained largely unchanged except for a tendency to become slightly smaller and more angular, the hand muscles evidently becoming more tense. Extraordinarily, in an age when letters were routinely passed from person to person, were forged or intercepted, and when every chancellery filed drafts, Luther kept no copies. This gave his correspondents huge power, because they alone had records of what he had written, but Luther was relaxed about this, joking that he could always deny his own ‘hand’, a remark which reveals his remarkable confidence.

This breezy indifference to formalities is one of Luther’s most appealing characteristics. A brilliant, engaging personal correspondent, he had a sure sense of what would make his recipient laugh. He enquired about illness with genuine interest, but he also knew exactly how to cut to the chase, confronting a correspondent’s anguish with directness. More than anything else, the letters give us a sense of the charisma he must have radiated, and the sheer delight his correspondents must have experienced in being his friends. It was Luther’s vivid friendships and enmities which convinced me that he had to be understood through his relationships, and not as the lone hero of Reformation myth. Luther’s theology was formed in dialogue and debate with others – and it is no accident that the disputation, the form in which he proposed the Ninety-Five Theses, remained an intellectual tool he cherished right up to his death.

This book also presents an unfamiliar picture of Luther’s theology. We are used to regarding him as the advocate of ‘salvation by grace alone’, the man who insisted on sola scriptura, the principle that the Bible is sole authority on matters of doctrine. But just as important to Luther himself was his insistence on the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. This is probably the issue many modern Protestants, suspicious of ritual and of the idea that the divine can be manifest in objects, find most alien. Yet the question dominated Luther’s later years and mobilised his deepest energies; it also split the Reformation. It was here that Luther was at his most original as a thinker, refusing to make the easy distinction between sign and signified, and insisting that Christ really was present in the Eucharist, which truly was the body and blood of Christ. Though he was an intellectual, Luther mistrusted ‘reason, the whore’, as he called it.²⁰ His position on the Eucharist was at one with his striking ease with physicality, a trait which modern biographies find it hard to come to terms with. A deeply anti-ascetic thinker, Luther constantly undermined and subverted the distinction between flesh and spirit, and this aspect of his thought is among his most compelling legacies. This is also why his theology has to be understood in relation to Luther the man.

Luther’s Reformation unleashed passionate emotions, anger, fear and hatred as well as joy and excitement. Luther himself was a deeply emotional individual, yet much of the history of the Reformation edits those emotions out, as unbecoming or irrelevant to the development of his theology. It is hard for historians and theologians to tackle what now seems so alien, his disturbing obsession with the Devil, virulent anti-Semitism and crude polemic. Exploring his inner world, however, and the context into which his ideas and passions flooded, opens up a new vision of the Reformation.

1

Mansfeld and Mining

‘I am the son of a peasant,’ Luther averred, ‘my great-grandfather, grandfather and my father were all true peasants.’¹ This was only half the truth. If he came from peasant stock, Luther grew up in a mining town, and his upbringing was to have a profound influence on him. Martin’s childhood was spent in Mansfeld, a small mining town in the territory of the same name, where wagonloads of charcoal would file along the muddy roads, and where the smell of the fires of the smelters hung on the air. He would remain loyal to Mansfeld throughout his life, referring to himself as ‘from Mansfeld’, enrolling at the University of Erfurt as ‘Martinus ludher ex mansfelt’, and corresponding with the counts of Mansfeld until he died.² In 1546, he set out, ill, on what was to be his final journey to Eisleben, trying to settle yet another dispute between the counts. He knew that the trip could cost him his life, and it did: he died still trying to put matters right in Mansfeld. Yet this deep connection has been almost completely obliterated in the image of Luther we have today.³ Most biographies have little to say about Luther’s childhood. Unlike his birthplace Eisleben, and unlike Wittenberg, where he spent most of his life, Mansfeld never became a site of Lutheran pilgrimage. But to make sense of Luther, one has to understand the world from which he came.

There had been mining in the Mansfeld area since about 1200 but in the mid-fifteenth century a new process of refining allowed silver and pure copper to be separated after the initial process of smelting.⁴ Highly capital-intensive, this technological innovation led to the involvement of the big financiers of Leipzig and Nuremberg, and it brought an economic boom to the area. Mansfeld was soon amongst the biggest European producers of silver and it produced a quarter of the continent’s copper.⁵ Copper was used in combination with tin or