Biographies of the sixteenth-century German reformer Martin Luther traverse overbeaten terrain. Towards this end, Heinz Schilling locates Luther within late medieval reform movements and the social, economic, and political contexts of late medieval Germany as a narrative about Luther's reciprocal relation to his medieval world. Schilling's approach aids both scholars and advanced non-specialists in clearly imagining Luther within his late medieval environment as he was formed by and formative of his historical circumstances.

“With the care of an archeologist” (3) Schilling excavates the “historical Luther” from layers of nineteenth- and twentieth-century reception history that construed Luther as a “trailblazer” for purposes of national and religious identity. The book “is not about a Luther in whom we can find the spirit of our own time; this book is about a Luther who was different, a Luther whose thoughts and actions are out of kilter with the interests of later generations, no matter how often they have been employed to legitimize actions in the present, and will continue to be employed to that end” (3). This aim initiates a reconstructive endeavor to establish a “direct route” (4) to the “uncontaminated Luther” (3) contextualized within a medieval world that is different but not unconnected from our own. To accomplish this ambitious goal, Schilling balances Luther's autobiographical statements, often problematically recorded years after a particular event, with contemporaneous accounts from Luther's colleagues, opponents, and other sources that documented events as they unfolded. This approach helps the author avoid the problematic self-stylization of Luther as God's prophet in the reformer's personal accounts that further magnifies Luther as a “trailblazer.”

Schilling divides Luther's life into three major episodes, attempting to interweave details of Luther's physical location, professional activities, and personal life into a cohesive narrative. Part 1 covers roughly 1483–1511 and details the historical situation into which Luther was born, his childhood and home life in Eisleben and Mansfeld, and his education in Mansfeld, Magdeburg, Eisenach, and Erfurt. Here the reader encounters the existential and educational crises that led Luther to join the monastery in 1505 and the mystical and nominalist intellectual influences percolating in the Augustinian monastery. Part 2 recounts years of dynamic change in Luther's professional and personal life from 1511 to 1525. This includes Luther's permanent transition to Wittenberg, his early lectures and controversies with Rome as professor of Bible, his exile at the Wartburg and Luther's first inner-Reformation controversies, the 1524–1525 Thuringian peasant uprising, and Luther's marriage to Katharine von Bora. Part 3 chronicles the “older-Luther” (301) from 1525 to 1546 but largely abandons the narrative structure enlivening parts 1 and 2 for a more topical discussion. These topics range from Luther's impact on church society as the reformer sought to develop Reformation churches, moral discipline, and education; to Luther's political theology and economics; to finally Luther's “conflicted emotions” of joy in music and the arts along with his apocalyptic fears associated with the Ottoman Empire (the “Turks”) and the Jews. On this latter topic, the author adopts an “ethnological approach” (487) to uncover the Sitz im Leben of medieval anti-Judaism, which was further animated by Luther's apocalyptic fervor. Here Schilling works diligently to parse Luther's reception and appropriation in the twentieth century from Luther's own words and thoughts themselves. He carefully nuances Luther's culpability for “hate-filled polemic” (486) embedded in a particular theological and eschatological worldview from the racial anti-Semitism of the National Socialists who “decisively departed from the reformer's own teachings” insofar as the reformer “always insisted that Jews who converted should be treated as ‘brothers'” (487). In this way, Schilling neither exonerates nor indicts Luther's anti-Judaism for twentieth-century atrocities. The book concludes with an epilogue that works to bring to fruition the author's objective to excavate Luther's late medieval world out from our own while showing the connections. Here, Schilling concisely locates Luther as part of an “age of reforms” (525) that forms the necessary preconditions for Luther's success and prominence as “the reformer” (527) among generations of reform. He shows that Luther and his movement were propelled by the reforming forces of the day and age while Luther also helped to reciprocally shape and alter those forces as they moved forward into modernity.

The author helps move the genre of the Luther biography away from the psychological readings of Luther's life that unfortunately continue to animate some English-language Luther scholarship. This contribution emerges from the strongest element of the book, namely the author's narrative approach to Luther's life in its late medieval context. The first chapter of each of the three major parts of the book lays out in vivid, detailed imagery the sights, sounds, smells, and ideas in Luther's environment. Such details include the building of military fortifications in the Wittenberg town wall erected directly alongside of Luther's study, causing noisy disruptions in the late 1510s before overtaking his study in the 1530s (101). One even envisions Luther's small children “shitting, peeing, crying” near Luther's study as he tried to work (296). Such details lend new historical relevance to Luther's view of God as a loving father or to his famous hymn, “A Mighty Fortress is our God.” Careful detailing of this sort helps both scholars and non-specialists to imagine Luther and his works more fully within their own world, depicting Luther's radical insights percolating within a variety of lived experiences.

The work is not without difficulty, however. The most significant concern of this reviewer is the author's abandonment of the narrative style for the late Luther. The topical turn that appears in part 3 challenges the reader to construct her own narrative of Luther's late life and fails to fully reflect the major developments in Luther's theological understandings of the Trinity, pneumatology, and theological anthropology in this period, which all grew out of his changing experiences as a husband, father, pastor, and professor in the years after 1530. In this regard, Schilling's biography reinstantiates the scholarly preference for the early Luther and his so-called “reformation breakthrough” popularized by the very twentieth-century German historical reception the author critiques. In doing so, Schilling actually extends the scholarly disinterest in the late Luther's contributions to modern European culture and Protestant theology that warrant greater investigation within the field.