That explanation is fun, and not exactly wrong, but there were many factors brewing, and attempts at just about every part of what we call the Reformation had been attempted on some level in the hundred years preceding except perhaps the allied states' standard against the HRE. Most acute factors were probably the combination of the financial crisis, simony, absent bishops, Medici cultural and political influence over Rome, peasant revolts and prior attempts at schism or reformation, discontent between German princes and HRE, increasing prevalence and affordability of printing which promulgated new understandings of Aristotle and Augustine in addition to enabling more widespread publication of dissent. It's a rich topic, certainly worth reading extensively about; I'll be sure to check out the book you linked.
I was listening to some podcast episode from the author Patrick Wyman. He was doing an interview with Mike Duncan(?) in a very casual way.
I really latched onto a point about Martin Luther - that his personality traits directly affected the course of events toward the Reformation as we know it.
History is probably a lot more chaotic than we give it credit for. Whenever an upheaval happens and the world gets turned upside down, we can always go back and trace structural trends in that direction. This fails to capture how many transformations failed to happen.
Printing was getting more affordable, but the printers themselves couldn't stop going out of business. The technology arc of lowering costs, but that doesn't map directly to profits and they just kept going bankrupt.
I'm really fascinated by the role of pamphlets. We keep talking about the press in the context of books, but Luther's legacy wasn't in publishing full-length books. This has come up again and again through history. In the 1600s, pamphlets played a role in the English revolution, and it did in the French Revolution as a whole universe of revolution presses sprung up. Were these like newspapers? Or was it some shorter and more targeted form of political hit piece?
Luther came out dropping rhetorical bombs. I get how reading stuff can radicalize you. I've felt that energy in my own life, but overwhelming volume of media we get combined with our longer life spans does some intellectual inoculation. I can only imagine the anger that could be stoked with the written word at that time. It's not a forgone conclusion, because most people are garbage at writing convincingly.
Indeed. Newspapers felt like hit pieces then, too; many of the printers were radicals and the readership wasn’t mild and broad like today.
Some of Luther’s writing (good English translations, anyway) still feel electric. Even his Small Catechism, which is written simply and was legitimately intended for daily use in the home, contains self-examinations and positive formulations of the ten commandments which imply faithlessness on the part of bishops.
