Martin Luther His Road To Reformation 1483 1521

This first volume in Martin Brecht's three-volume biography recounts Luther's youth and young adulthood up to the period of the Diet of Worms. Brecht, in a clear, eloquent translation by James Schaaf, discusses Luther's education at the University of Erfurt, his monastic life, his canonical trial in 1519, the Leipzig debate, and his earliest contributions to the beginning of the Reformation. Illustrations enrich the text.

Brecht provides a comprehensive study of the consolidation of the Reformation in the middle period of Luther's active life. He treats both Luther's personal life and the development of Lutheran doctrine and practice exhaustively. The reader is left with great admiration for Luther's talents as a theologian, translator, and church builder.

This first volume in Martin Brecht's three-volume biography recounts Luther's youth and young adulthood up to the period of the Diet of Worms. Brecht, in a clear, eloquent translation by James Schaaf, discusses Luther's education at the University of Erfurt, his monastic life, his canonical trial in 1519, the Leipzig debate, and his earliest contributions to the beginning of the Reformation. Illustrations enrich the text.

This first volume in Martin Brecht's three-volume biography recounts Luther's youth and young adulthood up to the period of the Diet of Worms. Brecht, in a clear, eloquent translation by James Schaaf, discusses Luther's education at the University of Erfurt, his monastic life, his canonical trial in 1519, the Leipzig debate, and his earliest contributions to the beginning of the Reformation. Illustrations enrich the text.

In this definitive study, the author accomplishes two important tasks. First, he contrasts the theological perspectives of earlier biographies with the results of more modern research into Luther's socio-economic context, psychological relationshps, late medieval and humanist thought, university curricula, and political factors. Second, in keeping with his theory that the historical discipline "must make its results accessible to a wider audience" unless it wishes to encourage the "historical amnesia which it so often laments", the author communicates the findings of technical Reformation scholarship to the public in a comprehensible style. -- Book jacket.

Combining biographical narrative and analytical essays, this book provides a new, comprehensive view of Martin Luther’s life and times, along with a new examination of the radical theology that sparked the Reformation and changed the Christian world forever. Drawing on sources new and old, the authors chronicle the fascinating, turbulent life of the Great Reformer from a historical point of view. Luther’s revolutionary thoughts on scripture and salvation are explored from a theological perspective, offering a fresh appraisal of the doctrine that irrevocably divided the Roman Catholic Church.

This volume reveals the political, religious, theological, institutional, and mythical ideals that formed the self-identity of the Augustinian Order from Giles of Rome to the emergence of Martin Luther. Based on detailed philological analysis, this interdisciplinary study not only transforms the understanding of Augustine's heritage in the later Middle Ages, but also that of Luther's relationship to his Order. The work offers a new interpretative model of late medieval religious culture that sheds new light on the relationship between late medieval Passion devotion, the increasing demonization of the Jews, and the rise of catechetical literature. It is the first volume of a planned trilogy that seeks to return late medieval Augustinian theology to the historical context of Augustinian religion.