Religion: Luther and the Reformation, 1517

The Protestant Reformation is scarcely imaginable without typography.
 
The Ninety-Five Theses. On 31 October 1517 Luther posted ninety-five theses for disputation (academic debate) at the University of Wittenberg. Wittenberg was a small university in the northeastern quarter of the Holy Roman Empire founded only nine years earlier; and posting theses in this manner was a standard academic procedure at the time. This disputation might have remained a purely local event save for the fact that the manuscript version was taken down and reproduced in thousands of copies by printers scattered throughout the Empire (Image 1). By the time of the first centenary of the Reformation in 1617, the posting of the Ninety-Five Theses had come to be perceived as the act of defiance which began the Protestant Reformation (Image 2). This broadsheet was the subject of one episode in the British Museum's History of the World in 100 Objects.
 
The German Bible. More fundamentally still, Protestantism is a textual religion. The cardinal principle of Luther’s theology was sola scriptura. The medieval Church had been founded on the twin pillars of ‘scriptura et traditio’, the Bible as interpreted by the tradition of the great Church Councils, Fathers, and Doctors ; but Luther, Calvin and the other mainstream Protestant reformers argued that Scripture alone was self-interpreting and the source of all true Christian doctrine and saving faith. From this it followed that Luther’s first priority, after breaking decisively with the Roman Church at the Synod of Worms in 1520, was to translate the Bible into German, so that it could be accessible to his fellow countrymen in their native tongue. Image 3 reproduces the title-page of his first effort in this regard: the translation of the New Testament into German, published in 1522.  Image 4 represents his final installment of this work: the last edition of the complete Bible to which Luther himself contributed.
 
Popular propaganda. Yet the Reformers exploited printed images as well as text to propagate their message. The most famous example of this kind of visual propaganda is the Passional Christi und Antichristi, a series of thirteen pairs of images designed to contrast the behavior of the Roman pontiff with the actions of Christ himself. On the left of one pair, Jesus receives the crown of thorns while on the right the pope is crowned with his three-tier papal tiara (Image 5). In other pairs, Jesus washes the feet of his disciples, while kings and princes kneel to kiss the pope’s feet; Jesus enters Jerusalem riding on an ass, while the pope enters a besieged city at the head of an army; and Jesus drives the money changers from the Temple, while the pope sells indulgences to rebuild St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. In the final pair of images, the resurrected Christ rises into heaven to sit at the right hand of the Father, while the pope is dragged down by devils into the fires of hell (Image 6). A high quality open-access facsimile of the Wittenberg edition of 1521 is available with parallel English translations of both the German and the Latin text in Taylor Editions. Further reading: R. W. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Oxford, 1981, 1994).

Commentary. Howard Hotson (April 2019)