This volume is an English translation by Tony Crawford of the original Erlöste and Verdammte: Eine Geschichte der Reformation, published by C.H. Beck in 2016, a fourth edition of the German volume appearing as early as the following year. Prof. Euan Cameron of Union Theological Seminary acted as historical adviser for the translation.

Thomas Kaufmann is Professor of Church History at the University of Göttingen and will be well known to Reformation historians. Prof. Lyndal Roper’s endorsement of the work identifies its author as ‘the greatest living authority on Martin Luther’. Indeed, the principal protagonist is where the first of six chapters begins – ‘in the beginning was Luther’ (p. 6).

In this chapter, Kaufmann addresses the tendency nowadays for scholars to speak of Reformation in the plural, just as has become the case with Enlightenment (or, indeed, one might add, early Christianity), but in doing so he strikes a cautionary note, identifying as a drawback its blurring of ‘the contours of the formerly distinct, unambiguous historical term of the “Reformation”’. While Kaufmann eschews employing ‘the Reformation’ as a catch-all term, he nonetheless takes it as referring to a ‘certain historic complex of events that was condensed under the historical concept of “Reformation” as early as the end of the sixteenth century and widely commemorated, especially in the tradition of “Reformation jubilees”’ (p.7), something that Kaufmann has written about elsewhere, and returns to in chapter five of the book. Distinguishing this movement from the many impulses of late medieval reform, the significance of the phrasing of his concession that ‘many traditions of the late Middle Ages lived on – and still older predispositions regained vitality – in, with, and under the Reformation [my emphasis]’ (p. 8) will not be lost on readers familiar with Luther’s theology.

The second chapter is titled European Christendom, c. 1500, and it sets out the geo-political context of Europe on the eve of the Reformation, and also its spiritual and cultural underpinnings. Kaufmann highlights the significance of the clerical caste for the nobility, terming careers as bishops, abbots, canons and abbesses ‘fall-back positions befitting the rank of noble descendants’ (p. 18). He also helpfully reminds readers of elements of continuity from the pre-Reformation period which are occasionally overlooked. On the matter of the jurisdiction of the papacy in particular realms, for instance, he recalls how, owing to the Liberties of the Gallican Church, confirmed in 1516 in a concordat between King Francis I and Pope Leo X, 110 bishoprics, and around 400 abbeys were under the jurisdiction of the French king, ‘a disposition that no kind of reformation could have improved’ (p. 22). Similarly, English monarchs acted as de facto lords over the country’s clergy, and in particular, its episcopacy, owing, in part, to a growing English remoteness from the papacy which he traces to the Avignon papacy of the fourteenth century. Kaufmann maintains that ‘secular politics of principalities and powers’ would continue to dominate the Reformation period (p. 27). These politics also included the fear of external forces, not least the rapid Ottoman expansion which preoccupied the minds of many more Christians in 1517 than did the perennial challenge of ecclesial reform. In line with revisionist historiography of the past forty years or so, Kaufmann also takes care to acknowledge the vitality of the pre-Reformation church in certain respects – he notes, for instance, that the eve of the Reformation saw more building done for the church than ever before or since; more than 1,200 church buildings were built in France alone in the second half of the fifteenth century (p. 37).

This volume offers us a portrait of Luther that fully acknowledges his complexity; in many respects he was a bundle of contradictions. First and foremost, he remarks, Luther’s most important tool was language. He mastered ‘an extraordinarily broad range of expression from sensitivity to harshness, from empathy to pugnacity’ (p. 57). Luther, moreover, was more than aware of his own combative style. Surveying an early draft of the Confessio Augustana (Augsburg Confession), Luther commented approvingly on Melanchthon’s work, but added ‘I cannot tread so gently and quietly’ (p. 121). The passion, even bitterness of Luther’s invective against his opponents, Kaufmann suggests, ‘may have had its roots in the fervent love with which he had devoted himself to [the] Church as a monk and priest’ (p. 57). That same passion often meant that some of Luther’s opponents could sometimes see the long-term consequences of Luther’s line of argument more clearly than he himself did. Kaufmann offers the example of Cardinal Cajetan, who while confronting Luther in Augsburg, identified Luther’s questioning of papal power over the church’s treasury of merit as a fundamental attack on the authority of Christ’s vicar himself.

Luther’s forceful personality quickly transformed him into a heroic figure, and one who could rarely be ignored. Hieronymus Aleander, the papal nuncio who was present at the Diet of Worms, reported witnessing people in the marketplace declaring that Luther was without sin, and that he had never erred; images depicting him as a saint were also reported to be in circulation. If either was the case, Luther would surely have been horrified.

Kaufmann regards Luther’s publication of De Servo arbitrio in 1524, in which he locked horns with Erasmus on the question of free will, as marking a turning point in his career – Luther, no longer the incomparable hero of Worms, was quickly becoming a figure beset by conflicts, ‘unable to master the spirits he had conjured’ (p. 121). One of those spirits might be identified as inspiring the so-called Peasants’ War of 1525. The Peasants’ War arose from the argument that universal redemption through Christ’s death implied freedom, and hence serfdom needed to be abolished. Luther, however, would see the peasants’ demands, some of which he had sympathy for, as ultimately an illegitimate instrumentalization of scripture; peasants should not mix religion and politics and certainly should not use force to exert their grievances. Very soon, however, his attitude would harden and he would posit a close association between the actions of the peasants and the apocalypticism of Thomas Müntzer, a conclusion which scholars have since judged not fully justified. Meanwhile, Luther’s later eucharistic controversy with Zwingli saw him adopt a strongly literal interpretation of the words Hoc est corpus meum, for him, the copula meaning precisely that, and distancing himself from the Zwinglian significat. Luther argued that ‘the text is too powerfully present, and will not allow itself to be torn from its meaning by mere verbiage’ (p. 115).

The presentation of the Confessio Augustana in 1530, Kaufmann avers, formally marked the existence of a schism in the Latin Church. Indeed, he suggests that ‘never before had Latin European Christendom so intensely and controversially revisited fundamental issues of the Christian faith in such a short time as in the ten years from 1520 to 1530’ (p. 153).

Luther’s views on some matters could change radically over the course of his lifetime. His later vitriolic diatribes against the Jews are a case in point. And yet, despite his many faults, when it came to his death, Kaufmann argues, Luther was utterly irreplaceable as a ‘chosen witness of God’. Only he was excused for his polemical extremes; the ‘saint’s’ death, he continues, ‘left a gap that nothing and no one could fill’ (p. 195); certainly not Melanchthon, notwithstanding his more irenic personality, and his more systematic exposition of early Reformation theology. At another level, Luther always remained a simple family man, who was not motivated by acquisitiveness or the accumulation of wealth; in this regard, Kaufmann suggests, he remained a monk (p. 58).

Chapter four discusses early Reformation movements outside the empire, in regions such as the Netherlands, France and England, Scandinavia, Italy and Spain, and eastern Europe. There are some interesting statistics to be found here. Kaufmann informs us, for example, that Luther was reprinted earlier, and more often, in Holland than in any other country, and was translated into Dutch far more frequently than any other European language (p. 137). Indeed, Luther was translated into eleven languages during his own lifetime alone. Czech translations of Luther’s works were especially numerous in the early years of the Reformation, owing in no small part to Luther’s contacts with the Utraquists and the Unitas Fratrum in Bohemia. However, the particular case of Ireland, which problematizes the later Confessionalization thesis, is left unexplored.

Despite the fractious nature of the early Reformation movement, Kaufmann argues that it was able to prevail historically because of its shared opposition to the Roman church, its acceptance of the sole authority of scripture, and its solidarity with Luther who was widely regarded as having been unjustly condemned. Meanwhile, Kaufmann reminds us that the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 was not the result of growing tolerant attitudes, but rather the wearied acceptance that neither side would manage to impose its will on the other. He adds that although the Peace was designed to remain in force indefinitely, it was understood to be valid until such period that the churches would be reunited. It was unimaginable to contemporaries that two competing churches, with mutually exclusive claims to the true form of Christianity, should exist for all time (p. 201).

Kaufmann’s treatment of Calvin and ‘Calvinism’ comes with some important caveats. First, the term Calvinism itself was a polemical epithet, which was certainly not in keeping with Calvin or his followers, who considered the cult of personality abhorrent (Calvin famously refused any kind of funerary monument). Kaufmann considers it utterly reductionist to adopt Calvin’s theology as a shorthand for the multiplicity of positions within Reformed theology, while also correcting the common perception that Calvinism had a particular affinity with the bourgeoisie (p. 175).

There is, of course, much more to be savoured in Kaufmann’s volume, and this review can hardly do justice to the breadth of topics which the author covers with a degree of confidence and fluidity that only comes from a mastery of one’s subject, including a comprehensive treatment of the radical reformation in its many guises, and the world of Catholic reform in the sixteenth century. Chapter five is especially useful for those who are interested in the historiography of the Reformation and it builds on work Kaufmann has previously done on reformation jubilees.

Kaufmann is particularly good at emphasizing the effect of print on the early Reformation movement. One startling statistic is that by the year 1500 there were more than a thousand printers in over 150 cities throughout Europe and these had produced some 30,000 distinct titles in about nine million copies (p. 47). The Swiss theologian, Oswald Myconius, claimed, for instance, that Luther’s 95 theses traversed Germany in fourteen days, and ‘all Christendom in four weeks, as if the angels themselves had been couriers and brought them before all people’s eyes’ (p. 3).

Kaufmann’s book is a delight; it is both scholarly and engaging, clearly displaying the author’s mastery of his subject. This is a book where you will find complex ideas expressed concisely and clearly, and often with the additional benefit of a pithy, memorable phrase. In this, too, the work of the translator Tony Crawford is to be highly commended. Kaufmann also appreciates the occasional humorous anecdote. His tale of Portuguese sailors celebrating their first Mass on Indian soil in a church adorned with what they first considered to be images of unfamiliar saints, only later realizing it was likely a Hindu temple, is a good example (p. 11).

One regrettable point; this English language edition of Kaufmann’s history lacks the sumptuous colour illustrations and maps of the German original, which boasted 103 illustrations, 58 of them in colour. By contrast, this volume contains just 25 illustrations, all in black and white. Some vestiges of the richer fare of Erlöste and Verdammte have, however, crept into the text on a couple of occasions. On pages 152 and 240 respectively we find embedded in the text some image captions for the title page of a text by Mathis Blochinger and Dr Martin Luther’s Miracle 1618.

This minor quibble aside, Kaufmann’s history is an essential read for all Reformation scholars, and especially for those who teach courses on Reformation history; they will greatly profit from its insights, and will find it a useful reading to assign to their students. It belongs in every institutional library and on every scholar’s bookshelf.