The Reformation as a Media Event

Abstract

What did contemporary Germans make of Martin Luther? To many, particularly among the clerical orders, Luther was a man of piercing theological insights; to others a deeply divisive force, shaking the foundations of established belief, practice, and authority. The more perplexing question is quite what those beyond the ranks of church professionals made of this. Without these radiating circles of support, it is clear there would have been no Reformation movement. It was men and women of little theological education who turned a clerical spat into a matter of public interest, a public event and a media event. There were several elements of this: the emergence of Luther as a public figure; public curiosity at the scandal raised by his defiance; the stream of pamphlets that first drew people’s attention to his evolving message and then themselves became part of the story. In the process the public character of the movement both ensured Luther’s survival and effected a radical change in Europe’s media environment – as it turned out, one that was permanent. It is often inferred that none of this could have happened without print, that print made the Reformation. But to the extent that this was so, it required a wholesale reorientation of the print world. The publishing tradition of the seventy years before the Reformation would have been little use to a mass movement of insurgency, since print was such a deeply conservative force. It was a faithful servant of the established church, easily its most reliable client. It required a considerable leap of faith to imagine it could be anything else. Not the least of Luther’s achievements was to have invented a new form of theological writing: short, accessible, and above all written in the vernacular. The Sermon on Indulgences and Grace, through which Luther introduced his teaching on indulgences to a non-scholarly audience, was a masterpiece in miniature. Its radicalism lay less in its teaching, a homely distillation of criticisms of indulgences that had been rumbling around the church community for decades, than in its form. Luther presented his views in twenty short propositions, most one or two sentences long. Luther’s trenchant denunciation, the brutal clarity of the trained academic, mingled with the voice of the distraught, perplexed parishioner. The work (and in this respect the choice of sermon for the title has a certain irony) could have been read, or read aloud, in ten minutes. It