The key to any successful collection of essays is focusing all the contributions tightly around a single, important theme. Not only does this volume on Reformation letter-writing achieve that goal, but it also represents a worthy tribute to its dedicatee, Stefan Rhein, who in 2023 retired as the director of the Luther sites in Saxon-Anhalt and whose indefatigable work in preparation for the 2017 anniversary of the Reformation was the crowning achievement of his career. Anyone interested in exploring more deeply the history or theology of the Reformation would be well served by the essays in this book.

The breadth of these essays will assist historians and other scholars to reimagine what takes place when they read a letter from the past. Matthias Dall’Asta, who works on the publication of Philip Melanchthon’s correspondence, poses fascinating questions about what it means to be reading a letter that its sender requested be destroyed, or at least kept private. Thomas Fuchs, from the University of Leipzig and its library, poses the related question of how letters have come down to us by examining the various collection at his library. The sometimes arbitrary way in which letters have been preserved (for example, by autograph collectors) challenges historians of all stripes to pay attention not just to the letter itself but to its varied and sometimes surprising life after the ink dried. The librarian at the remarkable collection in Gotha, Daniel Gehrt, introduces readers to the social networks that letters represent, using the 16,000 letters written to and from the theologians at the University of Wittenberg and focusing on the communications with pastors and other leaders in Thuringia and Silesia. At the other end of the spectrum, Johannes Schillling’s public lecture focuses on a single letter written in 1530 by Martin Luther to the famous composer, Ludwig Senfl, showing both how this one letter elucidates Luther’s love for music and the spiritual strength it afforded him in the midst of life’s turmoil, and how Senfl, court musician first in Vienna and then in Munich, was so well liked, and sung, at Luther’s church and in his home. Armin Kohnle, professor of church history at Leipzig, takes a closer look at the private correspondence of the Saxon elector Frederick the Wise, challenging scholars to expand their definition of the sixteenth-century letter (der Brief, the meaning of which still included legal briefs) to include a far broader collection of documents. He also uncovers a far more complex and interesting personality in Frederick than the rather dour character played by Peter Ustinov in the film, one who was far more open to Luther’s thought than is usually portrayed (especially on p. 105, where ‘selczams’ means not strange writings of Luther but rare or unique). Turning from the private post of princes to their public briefs, Stefan Michel and Dagmar Blaha offer a new look at the electoral chancery of John the Steadfast. After his brother Frederick’s death, he ruled Saxony from 1525 to 1532, just as early modern central Europe was moving from a feudal state to a more highly bureaucratised one, in which affairs of state for Protestant princes included oversight of churchly affairs. The researchers were able to identify the names and functions of these bureaucrats (both noblemen and commoners) and in many cases even who had written the original ‘brief’.

Christina Mundhenk, director of the Melanchthon Research Center in Heidelberg, looks at the role of gift-giving in Melanchthon’s correspondence, and just how the ‘do ut des’ (I give so that you may give) functioned in Reformation interactions. Of course, the most frequent gift consisted of the publications by Melanchthon and others, including a copy of Homer’s Iliad by the Aldine Press for Erasmus with a Greek inscription in Melanchthon’s hand. But the most precious gift of the entire collection of essays comes from the pen of Esther Wipfler, who works at the Central Institute for Art History in Munich. She examines early modern portraits and discovers a trove of examples (with sixteen coloured illustrations) that include notes or letters, often in the subject’s hand, that elucidate important aspects of their life, theology, erudition or social status. A self-portrait of Anthonis Mor depicts him in front of a note, written in Greek, proclaiming him a better artist than the ancient Apelles; a set of portraits of Erasmus and Peter Gillis, prepared for Thomas More, show the role of friendship in not only the letters depicted but also in More’s letter back to Gillis (included with translation in an appendix). It is an area of research that deserves more attention and proves the centrality of letter-writing in the world of Renaissance and Reformation.

Although Luther complained when Joachim Camerarius wrote to him in Greek, the use of Greek as the ‘secret language’ of humanist scholars was widespread, as Stefan Weise, a teacher of Classics in Wuppertal, demonstrates. He examines especially the correspondence of Reuchlin, Erasmus and Melanchthon for this kind of communication, which functioned early on as a badge of humanist erudition and later (as in the case Melanchthon’s letter to Joachim Camerarius assessing Luther’s 1525 marriage) as a secret code to prevent the uninformed from prying into the letter-writer’s private thoughts. The contribution of Matthias Meinhardt, head of Wittenberg’s Reformation research library, investigates the secret correspondence between the court in Württemberg and Duke Julius of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, as he resisted his father Duke Heinrich’s anti-Reformation policies and prepared for the duchy’s reform. Volker Leppin, now professor at Yale Divinity School, examines some of the 284 letters that Christoph Scheurl (one-time law professor at Wittenberg and then jurist in Nuremberg) assembled during his lifetime and shows how that collection reflects Scheurl’s vain attempt to establish a lasting humanist network of like-minded scholars and theologians in Wittenberg and elsewhere (including Luther and Johannes Eck). The Reformation transformed and/or ended such networks.

Enno Bünz, professor of Saxon territorial history in Leipzig, provides a look at a late medieval ‘open letter’ to a fictive Johannes about the nine devils with which a parish priest had to wrestle. Not only has he tracked down twenty-five separate, incunabular printings of the short tract, but he also points to Luther’s reprint of 1540, published to prove that despite the papacy Word and Sacrament were alive and well in the late medieval Church. Another gem in this fine collection comes from Markus Matthias, professor of Luther and Lutheranism’s history and theology at the Protestant Theological University in Amsterdam-Groningen. He examines in microscopic, philological detail the letters exchanged between Luther and Erasmus, showing how double-sided Luther’s initial letter was, how intricate Erasmus’s replies, and how such examination can correct the false assumptions of other scholars, especially Thomas Kaufmann. The author pleads for a far more careful use of such letters for circumscribing the breadth of meaning a document offers – even when it cannot be proven to what extent the letter-writer or recipient was aware of these nuances. Finally, Irene Dingel, a retired professor from the Leibniz Institute in Mainz, offers a glimpse at the personal side of Reformation letter-writing. Focusing on the exchanges between Philip Melanchthon and two of his former students (Flacius and Gallus), who went from friends to enemies over the course of just a few years in the aftermath of the Schmalkald War, she teases out not simply the theological differences that led to their split but, even more important, the emotional side of their correspondence, putting to rest the myth of Melanchthon’s irenicism to show just how emotionally he could write. With a short laudatio for Stefan Rhein, this fine collection concludes. These essays all reminded us of how rich Reformation sources are and how we may employ them in so many different ways to get at the intricacies of this remarkable time in the Church’s history. A truly fitting tribute to someone whose entire career has been dedicated to this pursuit.