We historians of the Protestant Reformation have operated under the assumption that Catholic opponents did not make full use of the printing press, the sermon and the vernacular to persuade both the clerical and lay publics to resist the rhetorical lures of Martin Luther, Huldreich Zwingli and their ilk. This assumption is false except insofar as the number of Luther editions far exceeded anything that Catholic polemicists would see through the presses. Nevertheless, it warrants saying – and this volume does say – that some very bright, articulate and ardent Catholic men rebutted Luther's evolving teachings with all the might of their pens. This presentation of ten representative treatises by leading Catholic controversialists makes available to the teacher who strives for balance an invaluable look at the arguments of eight leading defenders of the Mother Church. Two divines, Johannes Eck and Augustin Alveldt, are present here with two texts each.

For the most part, these works have never been translated into English. Their published versions in any language were rare, and a copy of the Latin or German rendering resides in the remarkable Richard C. Kessler Reformation Collection in the Pitts Theology Library, Candler School of Theology, at Emory University. The contributors to this volume, all men, each selected one title which they translated and to which they provided essential background. Following David Bagchi's helpful orientation in the introduction, the collection proceeds chronologically, from Johann Tetzel's 1518 ‘Rebuttal made by Brother Johann Tetzel’, to a sermon Johann Eck gave on the Lord's Supper at the Regensburg Colloquy in 1541. That these writers accused Luther of heresy will not surprise even undergraduates, yet some of them were highly learned men and brought to their accusations a surprising acquaintance with Luther's published arguments. Their learning on display, they challenged one by one many of Luther's key precepts: justification by faith alone, his reading of Scripture in demolishing numerous points of Catholic teaching, the headship of the popes, and the invalidity of monastic vows. Johannes Cochlaeus’ ‘The seven-headed Luther’ features Luther's contradiction of himself, both by lifting his utterances out of context and by failing to note that long-lived thinkers do develop their thought over time and thereby alter it. We cannot demand that Cochlaeus be a modern historian. He had the task of his time and his station.

A very important lesson for our students is that these divines dearly loved their religious traditions. They did not merely try to protect their perquisites against the Lutheran onslaught. Johann Eck, in his ‘Address at Regensburg’, a sermon, is movingly attached to the Christ revealed to him in the transubstantiated eucharist. He passionately urges all his listeners to ‘wash their feet’ to be worthy of Christ's gift in the sacrament. ‘Truly’, he concludes, ‘our life, condition, conduct, and office are signified by our feet’ (p. 213).