أمقت لوثر كما أمقت غيره من رجال الدين، وأرى من العويص والتجريدي تفسير وفهم تاريخ قارة بأكملها من منظور سيرة أعمال راهبٍ واحد. لكن في الوقت نفسه أحببت الكتاب، خاصة وأنه يقدم نظرة عن كثب على حياته وعلى عمق التأثير الديني في عصره، حيث تشابكت السياسة والاقتصاد والفلسفة والمعتقد إلى درجة جعلت أي نقد أكاديمي للأمور الدينية—مع ظهور الطباعة وانتشار الكلمة المكتوبة بين العوام—سبباً كافياً لانحلال خيوط المجتمع وتفكك الجماهير وقيام ثورة غيرت أوروبا إلى الأبد. وهكذا، قد يكون فهم تاريخ أوروبا ممكناً، إلى حد ما، من خلال تاريخ البروتستانت.
كتابة سردية ممتعة ومجهود بحثي ممتاز. ( )

A good, modern biography about the life and times of Martin Luther that reveals quite a bit of information that I was unaware of, such as that the actual family name was first written as “Luder” (modern German for slut). Like Hitler (formerly Hiedler), the sharp and hard th (t for English speakers) in Luther is crucial for the reception. If Swiss reformer Huldrych Zwingli had had a better sounding name, perhaps Luther would have been more open to his ideas.

Heinz Schilling’s portrait of Martin Luther shows a deeply conservative and medieval man, a man personally plagued by the devil (causing the truly German disease of constipation). Martin Luther wanted the church and the Christian faith to return to its origin and source. He was holier than the pope (not a difficult undertaking given the renaissance popes in power). Luther’s training as a law student and university professor made him very aware of politics. He was masterful in serving as an instrument of the powerful and preaching against the weak and foreign. Schilling has a hard task defending Luther’s ugly words against peasants, Jews and Turks. Luther was quite the German bruiser and bully, used by the powerful against the pope, the emperor, foreigners and the poor.

Luther’s enduring legacy is in his writing (and the church music he collected and texted). His productivity was enormous: On average over his life, he produced five print-ready pages per day. To sustain this effort, a powerful public relations, printing and imagining machine sprang into being in the tiny city of Wittenberg. ( )