Living I Was Your Plague: Martin Luther's World and Legacy by Lyndal Roper

Abstract

Reviewed by: Living I Was Your Plague: Martin Luther's World and Legacy by Lyndal Roper Aaron Klink Living I Was Your Plague: Martin Luther's World and Legacy. By Lyndal Roper. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. 278 pp. Oxford historian Lyndal Roper's collection of essays on Luther's thought and legacy develops her 2017 Wiles Lectures at Queens University, Belfast. The essays are not a complete Luther biography; rather, each of the seven chapters explores a facet of Luther's life and legacy. Like Roper's biography, Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet (2016), these essays employ psychoanalytic theory. Erik Erikson's Young Man Luther (1958) has made Luther scholars wary of psychoanalytic interpretations of Luther. However, Roper's modest use of psychoanalytic theory and her methodological clarity make her insights worth considering. Roper takes an extensive look at how [End Page 219] Luther's image has appeared from the Reformation to the present day, in everything from Lucas Cranach's Reformation-era portraits to a contemporary Playmobile based on a statue that had to be revised when it was accused of being anti-Semitic. Roper notes the importance of material portrayals of Luther, since "Lutheranism was as much a material and visual culture as it was a musical one" (10). The book begins with an exploration of the efforts of Wittenberg painter Lucas Cranach and his workshop to develop and propagate an image of Luther that would shape popular understandings. Immediately after Luther's marriage, Cranach often included Katie Luther in his portraits. As the shock of Luther's marriage abated among Lutherans, the paintings returned to portraits of Luther alone. Cranach's artistic dilemma, according to Roper, was to find a way of portraying Luther as a powerful reformer without making him look like a Roman Catholic saint, given Lutheranism's rejection of such veneration. In a chapter on Luther's dreams, Roper notes that despite Luther's claim that he put no stock in dreams, he wrote about his own dreams in treatises and letters. Roper especially notes a dream that Luther recounted about his confessor Johann von Staupitz. Luther's dream seems to speak of the rift between him and his beloved confessor who remained faithful to the Catholic Church. Roper notes that these dreams shed light on Luther's psyche. Roper does not say why she chooses a psychoanalytic framework to interpret Luther's dreams, rather than framing them within the biblical dreams with which Luther was familiar. In choosing the psychoanalytic frame, the chapter loses sight of other plausible interpretive frameworks. In a chapter on "Luther the anti-Semite" Roper argues that Luther's polemics against Judaism were more severe than his writings against the pope. The latter contain humor absent in Luther's writings about Judaism. Roper also notes Luther's belief that Jews sought to harm him. Luther's anti-Semitism is far more virulent than other theologians both Catholic and Protestant. Roper argues that Luther's anti-Semitism went far beyond what was considered normal even in his cultural environment. Roper's chapter on Luther's appearance in material culture during and after the Reformation makes an important contribution. She [End Page 220] adds nuance to topics covered by others and adds original insights in her analysis of Luther's appearance in material culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. For instance, Roper notes that one German postcard of World War I vintage showed Luther and Bismarck. Another more troubling image comes from the Luther Memorial Church in Mariendorf, Berlin, where the Luther Rose appears next to eagles standing on swastikas, on a pulpit portraying a Hitler youth alongside a brownshirt. In addition, she explores the Wittenberg panorama erected for the 2017 celebrations that shows a struggle between Luther and Thomas Müntzer. Roper notes that the panorama makes it seem that Luther saved the Reformation from the peasants. She notes that a different panorama unveiled in 1989 in the East German city of Frankenhausen shows Müntzer as the hero and celebrates the peasant uprising as a class struggle against wealthy elites. This presented the perspective of the Marxist government. Roper applies the methods of psychoanalytic theory while...