Week 26: Tuesday, May 2, 2017
The Renaissance in Germany: Martin Luther
The portrait of Martin Luther on this page was painted by Lucas Cranach in 1528, when Luther was becoming the most famous writer in Europe. We now think of Luther as a Reformation leader. But Luther was a Renaissance scholar before he became a Reformation leader. Like all the men in the Reformation movement, Luther was a great Classical scholar who knew Latin and Greek. He was a scholar, a university professor, before he was anything else. And his career before 1517, shows us that the Reformation was nourished by Renaissance scholarship before the religious fireworks exploded. The Renaissance led to the Reformation.
RECOMMENDED READING:
The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance,
Scribner, Reprint edition (June 1, 1995),
ISBN 0684803526
RECOMMENDED READING:
This is a beautiful book which covers the whole of the Renaissance in every field and every country. Margaret King is one of the greatest American scholars of the Renaissance, and she has written a very useful general book on the subject. What is especially attractive, is all the extra material: the charts, the maps, the photos, all of which make this a great study of the Renaissance. It would be a useful "textbook" for our whole year on the Renaissance. It was, of course, designed as a college textbook for a course on the Renaissance. If you buy a new copy, it is 35$ but there are many used copies listed on Amazon.
Margaret L. King, is Professor Emerita of history at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of several books on women, humanism, and Venice in the Renaissance, and is currently editor-in-chief of the Renaissance and Reformation online bibliography published by Oxford Bibliographies.
