A World on Fire

About This Book

In the autumn of 1517, an unknown professor in a small Saxon town sent a list of ninety-five objections to the sale of indulgences to his archbishop. He meant to start an academic debate. Within a fortnight his words were racing across Germany on the new printing presses; within four years he stood before the Holy Roman Emperor as a condemned outlaw, refusing to take back a single sentence; and within a lifetime the thousand-year unity of Western Christendom lay shattered forever.

E.B Cohen tells the whole story of the Reformation — not only Martin Luther's astonishing revolt, but the world that made it possible and the world it left behind. Here is the late-medieval terror of hell that gave indulgences their power; the Fugger-bank debt hidden behind the scandal; the German Bible born in a castle hideout; the peasant revolt Luther refused to lead and the radicals he could not control; the rival reformations of Zwingli and Calvin; a King of England who broke with Rome for a divorce; the Catholic Church's fierce renewal at Trent and through the Jesuits; and the century of religious war that ended only in the exhausted peace at Westphalia.

Rigorous, humane, and honest about the gulf between myth and record — the door-nailing, the ringing “Here I stand,” Luther's greatness and his ugly antisemitism alike — this is the definitive single-volume account of the movement that split the Christian world and, in splitting it, helped invent the modern one.