Living I Was Your Plague: Martin Luther’s World and Legacy

Abstract

For those with still-fresh memories of the commemorations surrounding the 500th anniversary of the Ninety-five Theses, the question may be: why more Luther, and why now? More precisely, why has Lyndal Roper—whose acclaimed 2016 work, Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet, heralded the coming of this major Lutherjahr—returned to her subject in five short years? The answer lies precisely in this abundance of attention, scholarship and fellowship around the anniversary, and Roper’s own sense of obligation, amid these celebrations, ‘to confront the less comfortable sides of his legacy’ as well as her own ‘tendency to integrate Luther’s obstreperous qualities into a relatively positive assessment of his personality’ (p. 3). Living I Was Your Plague: Martin Luther’s World and Legacy thus offers a valuable example of re-evaluation and self-reflection from a pre-eminent scholar, alongside a set of immensely readable and compelling new analyses. Roper uses her deep wealth of knowledge...