The Reformation Era · 1517-1580 · Saxony, then N. Europe
Lutheran Wittenberg & Its Congregations
Open for conversation
You can sit down with this tradition now.
About This Movement
Wittenberg was a small Saxon university town when one of its theology professors, an Augustinian friar named Martin Luther, wrote 95 theses against the sale of indulgences and sent them to the archbishop of Mainz on 31 October 1517. Tradition also holds that he nailed a copy to the door of the Castle Church, the university's usual notice board for an academic debate — but that detail comes only from an account written decades later, after Luther's death, and historians still disagree over whether it happened. Within a few years a movement had grown around him that reorganised worship, emptied monasteries, and put the Bible, a catechism and a hymnbook into ordinary German households. What that looked like from the pew is documented unusually well. From 1527-28 the Saxon churches sent visitors out to examine parish after parish, and their reports are frank about how little many villagers actually knew. The movement settled its own arguments in writing — the Augsburg Confession of 1530, then the Book of Concord of 1580. And the churches shaped by it spread north and east across Germany and Scandinavia, where they remain.
In Its Own Record
Formed or Influenced
- The Anabaptist Movements — The Radical Reformation defined itself against the magisterial reformers' church-state settlement as much as against Rome.
Sources
- Luther's Works (American Edition, 55 vols + new series, Concordia/Fortress), incl. the Small and Large Catechisms (1529) and the hymns as used texts (primary)
- The Saxon visitation records (from 1527-28, with Melanchthon's Instructions for the Visitors) and church ordinances in Sehling, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen des XVI. Jahrhunderts (primary) — Shows what villagers actually knew. Mostly untranslated German archival material. Historians disagree on how to read it: Strauss's 'failure' reading (Luther's House of Learning, 1978) versus critics like Scribner and Kittelson; the debate is part of what the record means.
- Argula von Grumbach, A Woman's Voice in the Reformation (ed./trans. Matheson, T&T Clark, 1995); Katharina Schuetz Zell, Church Mother (ed./trans. McKee, Chicago, 2006) (primary) — Women's voices in their own published words; Zell writes from Strasbourg, within the wider evangelical world.
- The confessional documents: Augsburg Confession (1530), Book of Concord (1580; ed. Kolb & Wengert, Fortress, 2000), read against parish registers the ordinances mandated (primary)
- Susan Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Ritual (Routledge, 1997), with Strauss (1978) as classic provocation (secondary) — A lived-practice view of parish religion.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 6, ch. 1 'Martin Luther, reformer' (Hendrix), with ch. 2 (Brady) and ch. 4 (Lehmann) (reference)