Abstract
Sometimes in history, the obvious explanation really is the most likely. Between the invention of printing and the end of the seventeenth century, all over Europe, when university professors proposed theses for discussion these were printed, distributed and pasted on the university bulletin board and in other public places. In the case of the University of Wittenberg, this bulletin board was the door of the castle church, so it was there that Martin Luther’s invitation to debate indulgences, the 95 Theses of 1517, would have been displayed. The local printer had printed his ostensibly more controversial theses on scholastic theology six weeks previously in precisely this manner. In 1961, the Catholic theologian Erwin Iserloh caused something of a stir by suggesting that this iconic event never happened, and Peter Marshall here makes the Iserloh case the centrepiece of his otherwise insightful and illuminating history of Reformation commemoration. No one in October 1517 left an eyewitness account, but there was no reason why such a routine piece of academic administration would have aroused any interest; it was only in retrospect that it assumed such iconic significance. As so often, the revisionist case flounders when constructing an alternative timeline: in Marshall’s case, postulating a posting around 11 November, for which he cheerfully confesses there is no contemporary evidence whatsoever (p. 43). Philip Melanchthon, a serious scholar and a reliable witness, would later attest to the posting of the theses, so it is perhaps best just to assume that the normal procedure was followed, and move on.
Happily, the best part of this book is yet to come. The commemoration that canonized the beginning of the Reformation in 1517 occurred with the organization, for largely political reasons, of centenary celebrations in 1617. This reinforced the emerging sense of the significance of the indulgence controversy, already recognized in Protestant history writing in the 50 years after Luther’s death. The centenary also inspired a number of visualizations of the beginning of the Reformation, but none, yet, of Luther posting the theses. The first that Marshall has traced dates from 1697; only on a medal struck for the second centenary is Luther portrayed with hammer in hand, rather than with the more prosaically accurate glue-pot. The third centenary fell fortuitously as Germans struggled for a sense of nationhood following the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. Luther was adopted as a patriotic symbol, a heroic vision taken up in the wave of history painting that characterized nineteenth-century art throughout Europe. The troubles of the twentieth century inspired the first frankly hostile treatment of Luther since the biography of his contemporary opponent Cochlaeus, a tendency reinforced by the search for historical culpability after the collapse of the Nazi state in 1945. This last main section seems underworked, and misses the opportunity to chronicle the strange progression to a positive adoption of Luther in communist East Germany. In the end, for all the breathless suspicions and curious absences, we will probably not improve on the careful summation of the American historian Ronald Bainton in 1950. Luther joined the debate on indulgences ‘by posting in accord with current practice on the door of the Castle Church a printed placard in the Latin language consisting of ninety-five theses for debate’ (quoted here at p. 184). This is not Marshall’s conclusion, but it seems by far the most congruent with the circumstantial evidence he presents.