Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 69 of 447 · 20 per page

• From Satyricon (1)

  As the solemnities did not draw to a close until late at night, we could not reach Lycurgus’ country place, so he conducted us to a villa of his, situated near the halfway point of the journey, and, leaving us to sleep there until the next day, he set off for his estate for the purpose of transacting some business. Upon his arrival, he found Lycas and Tryphaena awaiting him, and they stated their case so diplomatically that they prevailed upon him to deliver us into their hands. Lycurgus, cruel by nature and incapable of keeping his word, was by this time striving to hit upon the best method of betraying us, and to that end, he persuaded Lycas to go for help, while he himself returned to the villa and had us put under guard. To the villa he came, and greeted us with a scowl as black as any Lycas himself had ever achieved, clenching his fists again and again, he charged us with having lied about Lycas, and, turning Ascyltos out, he gave orders that we were to be kept confined to the room in which we had retired to rest. Nor would he hear a word in our defense, from Ascyltos, but, taking the latter with him, he returned to his estate, reiterating his orders relative to our confinement, which was to last until his return. On the way back, Ascyltos vainly essayed to break down Lycurgus’ determination, but neither prayers nor caresses, nor even tears could move him. Thereupon my “brother” conceived the design of freeing us from our chains, and, antagonized by the stubbornness of Lycurgus, he positively refused to sleep with him, and through this he was in a better position to carry out the plan which he had thought out. When the entire household was buried in its first sleep, Ascyltos loaded our little packs upon his back and slipped out through a breach in the wall, which he had previously noted, arriving at the villa with the dawn. He gained entrance without opposition and found his way to our room, which the guards had taken the precaution to bar. It was easy to force an entrance, as the fastening was made of wood, which same he pried off with a piece of iron. The fall of the lock roused us, for we were snoring away, in spite of our unfortunate situation. On account of the long vigil, the guard was in such a deep sleep that we alone were wakened by the crashing fall of the lock, and Ascyltos, coming in, told us in a few words what he had done for us; but as far as that goes, not many were necessary. We were hurriedly dressing, when I was seized with the notion of killing the guard and stripping the place.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Melanch- thon, he wrote, should trust in the Lord and should not worry. Nor did he like the way the younger man insisted on following his ‘authority’ all the time: the cause was common and shared.” Yet the very next day Luther was already contradicting himself, writing that ‘it’s my cause and mine even more than yours’.* The reliance on the younger man was both frustrating and infuriating: ‘I don’t know what to say, I’m so attacked by the thoughts about your extremely evil and completely vacuous worries, since I know I’m talking to a deaf person.’ He accused him of trusting in himself alone, and failing to trust others. ‘I have been in greater trouble than I hope you ever will be’, he admonished him. “So why don’t you believe us, who speak to you not out of flesh or the world but out of Holy Spirit?’* Whereas he had AUGSBURG 333 previously refused to reply, Luther now undertook a virtual letter- writing campaign. He told Jonas that Melanchthon’s problem was that he trusted in philosophy too much, and Johannes Brenz that Melanch- thon should stop playing the martyr.* He even accused him of lacking manly courage: ‘At least if I were being killed by papists I would protect our successors bravely and I would take revenge.™ Brenz replied that Melanchthon was no coward; his tears were just spurring him on to pray, and how could one pray properly if the matter did not touch one’s conscience and feeling?” It is clear that Luther was trying to reassert control over a move- ment that he feared was slipping from his grasp. By first withholding advice and then attacking Melanchthon at his most vulnerable, Luther made him reliant on his pastoral direction. In reality, Melanchthon had been working around the clock, revising the Apology, the elabor- ation of the confession which was published in 1531, and simultaneously negotiating with all sides. It was he, not Luther, who had been respon- sible not only for the final draft of the major and lasting confessional document summarising the Lutheran faith, but for its defence as well. Luther’s tiresome wrangling with Melanchthon confronted Luther with his own mortality, no doubt the result of the death of his father. ‘As I presume through weariness of old age and [bad] health and more truly of life that I think I won't have to see and endure this accursed life for long’, he wrote. He knew that his own death would raise the issue of succession. We cannot let Bugenhagen go, he mused to Melanchthon, as he contemplated his secondment to Liibeck; we need him in so many areas, in the schools, at Wittenberg; we will need others to take over after me.”

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The Diet concluded with the emperor’s emphatic condemnation. On the way back from Worms, Luther, now in mortal danger, was kidnapped on the instructions of his ruler and protector Friedrich the Wise, and taken for his safety to the Wartburg Castle, where he spent the next ten months in isolation, writing furiously and translating the New Testament. In the meantime, the Reformation at Wittenberg proceeded apace without him and, under the guidance of Andreas Karlstadt, became increasingly radical, addressing issues of poor relief and morality. When Luther returned to Wittenberg in March 1522, he immediately called for the reforms to be reversed because they had happened too fast. He also broke decisively with Karlstadt, who had begun to take a different line on the Lord’s Supper, arguing that Christ was not actually present in the bread and wine, a view Luther passionately rejected. This split presaged the future, for people applied his theology, as they perceived it, to their own experience—a process Luther might oppose, but which was beyond his control. As the Reformation spread it also began to fragment, as many people in south Germany, the Swiss towns, Silesia, and even within Saxony, were persuaded by those who denied that the body of Christ was truly present in Communion. In towns and villages throughout the empire, people began to demand gospel freedom, to insist on appointing evangelical preachers, and to overturn established authorities. Just as Luther’s antagonists had predicted from the very start, his message brought revolution. In 1524, the Peasants’ War broke out, the greatest uprising yet seen in German lands and unequaled in Europe until the French Revolution. Luther at first seemed to rebuke both sides even-handedly, castigating the peasants while, like an Old Testament prophet, also criticizing the rulers, but he eventually gave his support to the princes. With this stance, the social conservatism of Luther’s Reformation became apparent. While the Peasants’ War was at its height, Luther determined to marry, “to spite the Devil,” as he explained—surely one of the strangest justifications a new bridegroom ever gave.13 The marriage was indeed shocking, but its audacity was as much a challenge to the Church as it was to the Devil. He was a priest and a monk, while his bride, Katharina von Bora, was a nun: They had both taken vows of celibacy. No longer the sallow, ascetic monk, Luther entered a new phase of life, and soon became a father. He did not have to leave the now-deserted monastery, however: The Saxon rulers simply conferred the buildings on him and his heirs. There his household, with its assortment of visitors, students, and colleagues, became the template of the evangelical parsonage on a grand scale.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  With marriage denied the status of sacrament, and the principles of secular jurisdiction still being worked out, people now invoked Luther himself as the ultimate authority in marriage disputes — just as they had previously appealed to the Pope. With the old papist Church courts destroyed, he was increasingly asked for advice. His responses could be arbitrary and at times seemed to have been made up on the spot. So, for example, he told Josef Levin Metzsch of Wittenberg that it was fine to marry a woman related to him in the 298 MARTIN LUTHER third degree without the approval of a bishop or the Pope, but when Metzsch followed Luther's advice, he found that lawyers were counting the children as illegitimate.” He also often found it easier to sympa- thise with the husband’s point of view. On one occasion, he and his colleague Johannes Bugenhagen admonished Stefan Roth to exert his husbandly authority, and force his ill wife to leave Wittenberg and follow him to Zwickau, for her reluctance sprang not from her sick- ness but her wickedness. Roth should ‘see to it, that you be a man’ and not permit ‘marital authority, which is the glory of God... to be held in contempt by her’. He ought to realise that “The fodder was making the ass frisky’; that is, he was just making her more self-willed by giving in to her, a form of words which insinuated that she was sexually out of control as well.” The case of Wolf Hornung, a minor nobleman, became a particular obsession. Hornung’s wife, Katharina Blankenfeld, had caught the eye of none other than the Elector Joachim of Brandenburg, the brother of Luther's old antagonist Albrecht of Mainz. Joachim forced her to become his mistress, and when Hornung discovered his wife’s adultery, he assaulted and stabbed her. The Elector had then imprisoned Hornung, and humiliated him. Luther took up his cause, writing repeatedly to the errant wife, her mother, and the Elector; he prob- ably also composed Hornung’s letter of defence. When all this achieved nothing, he adopted the tactics that he had used since the beginning of the Reformation: he went public. Luther wrote and published stern letters not only to Katharina Blankenfeld and to the Elector, but also to the bishops of the region and the knights of Brandenburg, telling them to admonish their lord. Though he was careful to say in his letter to the Elector that he was neither initiating a feud nor writing a letter of insult, it is hard to imagine any campaign more uncom- promisingly aimed at destroying someone’s reputation.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Whatever really happened on October 31, 1517, there is no doubting the significance of the theses themselves: The Reformation truly was sparked by a single text. Theses were sets of numbered propositions designed for an academic debate, although in this case that debate never occurred and Luther probably never intended it to. They were not composed in continuous prose, nor were they statements of truth; rather they set out hypothetical claims to be tested through subsequent argument, and were terse to the point of being difficult to understand. Few copies of Luther’s text survive, and there are none from Wittenberg itself.7 Printed single-sided on a large sheet of paper, they were meant to be posted on a wall—which suggests there may be some truth in the story of the church door—even though the size of the typeface would make them difficult to read. At the top, in a larger font, is an invitation in Luther’s name that these theses should be debated at Wittenberg.8 The first begins with the words “When our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ said ‘do penance’ he willed the whole life of a believer to be one of repentance.” The Latin puts the emphasis on the main verb—voluit—on what Christ willed the believer’s life to be. Luther goes straight on to say that this cannot be interpreted to mean simply performing the devotional penalties that a priest might impose, such as saying prayers, or indeed, buying indulgences. The statement is deceptive in its simplicity; in fact, it implied a root-and-branch critique of the whole edifice of the late medieval Church.9 How could such a simple message have such implications and cause such uproar? Luther was not even the first or the only person to criticize indulgences; Luther’s confessor, the Augustinian Johann von Staupitz, for example, had done so in sermons in 1516. At one level, Luther was simply articulating a long-standing position on the nature of grace that went back to St. Augustine: the idea that our own good deeds can never ensure salvation, and that we must rely on God’s mercy. Luther, however, alleged that the sacrament of confession was being perverted from a spiritual exercise into a monetary transaction. What sparked his anger, so he later reminisced, was the preaching of a Dominican friar, Johannes Tetzel, in the nearby town of Jüterbog, who went so far as to claim that his indulgences were so efficacious that even if a person had raped the Virgin Mary they would be assured complete remission from Purgatory. Still, the issue of indulgences was a lively subject of theological and political debate, and initially, some saw the indulgences controversy as little more than one of the frequent spats between the monastic orders, part of the old rivalry between Dominicans and Luther’s Augustinians.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  (As one friend said later, You gotta love a date willing to do stuff he’ll regret .) Proof of David’s undying conviction, I take it as, though Lecia points out cynically that any Mary tattoo need only Blessed Virgin carved above it for reason to remount its throne. That and David’s move to my block prove, in my moronic head, some divine power’s orchestrating our future together. For a week or so, it’s bliss. Any night I don’t have Dev, David and I smoke cigars in my tree fort or read Russian short stories aloud till dawn. We watch movies where stuff blows up exclusively. Within the month, he phones Mother to announce, Mrs. Karr, I plan to marry your daughter. Mother’s heartless comeback: Didn’t you just get out of some place? Then one day, almost like a switch is thrown in us both, reality sets in, turning the whole deal inside out. I’m raking leaves, waiting to borrow David’s car for after-school pickup, but he slides alongside the curb, rolls down his window, and announces he’s going to the gym instead. Can’t I drop you at the gym and then get Dev? I want to know. David prefers to pick up Dev himself, then work out. But I’m trying to shelter Dev from David’s presence in my life, which David resents. He wants to plug into the husband slot right away. Words get sharp. I throw down the rake and stalk inside. He follows. The ensuing fight rocks the rafters—a worse tussle than Warren and I ever dragged through. And soon our every day is a rage, the whole romantic endeavor flip-flopping from cuss fight to smoochy-faced makeup—the reversals coming too fast to get down in a diary. When Dev’s home, I won’t let David sleep over, which pisses him off no end, as does my leaving early from a research trip he takes me on. I’m mad he doesn’t fit into the slot marked reliable . (Of course, his temper fits are as vivid to me now as my own are invisible. No doubt he was richly provoked, for I’m nothing if not sharp-tongued in a fight, and however young he was, neither was I in shape to partner anybody.) If David enters the mind-set he calls a black-eyed red-out , he’s inclined to hurl all manner of object—book and backpack not least. And as a verbal opponent, he’s a colossus, once driving me to that lowest of schoolyard attacks—personal appearance: At least I’m not a four-eyed, broke-nosed fop was one of many sentences I had to apologize for . Not that anything I utter warrants his pitching my coffee table at me, my sole piece of intact furniture splintering on the wall. After, I ring a lawyer girlfriend to send him a bill for it. He fires off a check with a note arguing that since he’s paid for the table, isn’t it his?

• From Satyricon (1)

  But Ascyltos threw off all restraint and ridiculed everything; throwing up his hands, he laughed until the tears ran down his cheeks. At last, one of Trimalchio’s fellow-freedmen, the one who had the place next to me, flew into a rage, “What’s the joke, sheep’s-head,” he bawled, “Don’t our host’s swell entertainment suit you? You’re richer than he is, I suppose, and used to dining better! As I hope the guardian spirit of this house will be on my side, I’d have stopped his bleating long ago if I’d been sitting next to him. He’s a peach, he is, laughing at others; some vagabond or other from who-knows-where, some night-pad who’s not worth his own piss: just let me piss a ring around him and he wouldn’t know where to run to! I ain’t easy riled, no, by Hercules, I ain’t, but worms breed in tender flesh. Look at him laugh! What the hell’s he got to laugh at? Is his family so damned fine-haired? So you’re a Roman knight! Well, I’m a king’s son! How’s it come that you’ve been a slave, you’ll ask because I put myself into service because I’d rather be a Roman citizen than a tax-paying provincial. And now I hope that my life will be such that no one can jeer at me. I’m a man among men! I take my stroll bareheaded and owe no man a copper cent. I never had a summons in my life and no one ever said to me, in the forum, pay me what you owe me. I’ve bought a few acres and saved up a few dollars and I feed twenty bellies and a dog. I ransomed my bedfellow so no one could wipe his hands on her bosom; a thousand dinars it cost me, too. I was chosen priest of Augustus without paying the fee, and I hope that I won’t need to blush in my grave after I’m dead. But you’re so busy that you can’t look behind you; you can spot a louse on someone else, all right, but you can’t see the tick on yourself. You’re the only one that thinks we’re so funny; look at your professor, he’s older than you are, and we’re good enough for him, but you’re only a brat with the milk still in your nose and all you can prattle is ‘ma’ or ‘mu,’ you’re only a clay pot, a piece of leather soaked in water, softer and slipperier, but none the better for that. You’ve got more coin than we have, have you? Then eat two breakfasts and two dinners a day. I’d rather have my reputation than riches, for my part, and before I make an end of this--who ever dunned me twice? In all the forty years I was in service, no one could tell whether I was free or a slave. I was only a long-haired boy when I came to this colony and the town house was not built then. I did my best to please my master and he was a digniferous and majestical gentleman whose nail-parings were worth more than your whole carcass. I had enemies in his house, too, who would have been glad to trip me up, but I swam the flood, thanks to his kindness. Those are the things that try your mettle, for it’s as easy to be born a gentleman as to say, ‘Come here.’ Well, what are you gaping at now, like a billy-goat in a vetch-field?”

• From Satyricon (1)

  CHAPTER THE NINETY-FIFTH. The landlord made his appearance with a part of our little supper, while this lover’s comedy was being enacted and, taking in the very disorderly spectacle which we presented, lying there and wallowing as we were, “Are you drunk,” he demanded, “or are you runaway slaves, or both? Who turned up that bed there? What’s the meaning of all these sneaking preparations? You didn’t want to pay the room-rent, you didn’t, by Hercules, you didn’t; you wanted to wait till night and run away into the public streets, but that won’t go here! This is no widow’s joint, I’ll show you that; not yet it ain’t! This place belongs to Marcus Manicius!” “So you threaten, do you?” yelled Eumolpus, giving the fellow a resounding slap in the face. At this, the latter threw a small earthenware pitcher, which had been emptied by the draughts of successive guests, at Eumolpus’ head, and cut open the forehead of his cursing adversary: then he skipped out of the room. Infuriated at such an insult, Eumolpus snatched up a wooden candlestick, ran in pursuit of his retreating foeman, and avenged his broken head with a shower of blows. The entire household crowded around, as did a number of drunken lodgers, but I seized this opportunity of retaliating and locked Eumolpus out, retorting his own trick upon the quarrelsome fellow, and found myself without a rival, as it were, able to enjoy my room and my night’s pleasure as well. In the meantime, Eumolpus, locked out as he was, was being very roughly handled by the cooks and scullions of the establishment; one aimed a spitful of hissing-hot guts at his eyes; another grabbed a two-tined fork in the pantry and put himself on guard. But worst of all, a blear-eyed old hag, girded round with a filthy apron, and wearing wooden clogs which were not mates, dragged in an immense dog on a chain, and “sicked” him upon Eumolpus, but he beat off all attacks with his candlestick. CHAPTER THE NINETY-SIXTH.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Though he was an intellectual, Luther mistrusted ‘reason, the whore’, as he called it.” His position on the Eucharist was at one with his striking ease with physicality, a trait which modern biographies find it hard to come to terms with. A 16 MARTIN LUTHER deeply anti-ascetic thinker, Luther constantly undermined and subverted the distinction between flesh and spirit, and this aspect of his thought is among his most compelling legacies. This is also why his theology has to be understood in relation to Luther the man. Luther’s Reformation unleashed passionate emotions, anger, fear and hatred as well as joy and excitement. Luther himself was a deeply emotional individual, yet much of the history of the Reformation edits those emotions out, as unbecoming or irrelevant to the develop- ment of his theology. It is hard for historians and theologians to tackle what now seems so alien, his disturbing obsession with the Devil, virulent anti-Semitism and crude polemic. Exploring his inner world, however, and the context into which his ideas and passions flooded, opens up a new vision of the Reformation. ui Mansfeld and Mining ‘I am the son of a peasant,’ Luther averred, ‘my great-grandfather, grandfather and my father were all true peasants.’ This was only half the truth. If he came from peasant stock, Luther grew up in a mining town, and his upbringing was to have a profound influence on him. Martin’s childhood was spent in Mansfeld, a small mining town in the territory of the same name, where wagonloads of charcoal would file along the muddy roads, and where the smell of the fires of the smelters hung on the air. He would remain loyal to Mansfeld throughout his life, referring to himself as ‘from Mansfeld’, enrolling at the University of Erfurt as ‘Martinus ludher ex mansfelt’, and corresponding with the counts of Mansfeld until he died.” In 1546, he set out, ill, on what was to be his final journey to Eisleben, trying to settle yet another dispute between the counts. He knew that the trip could cost him his life, and it did: he died still trying to put matters right in Mansfeld. Yet this deep connection has been almost completely obliterated in the image of Luther we have today. Most biographies have little to say about Luther’s childhood.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Thomas Miintzer, who would become Luther’s most hated opponent, was born in Stolberg, not far from Eisleben, and probably came from a family of goldsmiths or minters. He had studied in Frankfurt an der Oder and had spent some months at Wittenberg in the autumn of 1517 to hear the lectures of the humanist Johannes Aesticampianus; it was at that time that he also got to know Karlstadt. It was of course a dramatic time to be in Wittenberg, although how much Mintzer was influenced by Luther and how far he had arrived at his views himself (as he claimed) is unclear.” After a series of poorly paid and insecure positions, including acting as confessor at a nunnery, he moved to Zwickau to a temporary post replacing the evangelical preacher Johannes Egranus, where he began to develop a much more radical conception of the Reformation.* Egranus had baited the Catholics and had himself become the focus of attack; Miintzer, who had discovered a talent for preaching, would go much further. When Egranus returned, another parish was found for the bold preacher in Zwickau, at St Catherine’s, where his congregation included many poor cloth-workers, with whom he quickly established a rapport. Here he also got to know the later ‘Zwickau prophets’. Although their theologies may have been different — Nikolaus Storch seems to have been a follower of the Free Spirit heresy — there were also points of contact and influence. But all was not plain sailing in Zwickau: Miintzer also became a target of hostility. The windows of his lodgings were smashed and he received a broadsheet of threats and abuse. Some of the reasons may emerge from a letter by Luther's supporter Johann Agricola, in which he tried to get Mintzer to moderate his tone in sermons: ‘when you ought to be teaching what is right you impugn others in an unjustified way and even mention 250 MARTIN LUTHER them by name’, adding, in large letters ‘YOU BREATHE OUT NOTHING BUT SLAUGHTER AND BLOOD .” Miintzer also began preaching against Egranus, whose theology he found lacking in seriousness — Luther and Agricola would eventually agree — and Egranus replied in kind. As a result, the town council banished both preachers, appointing Nikolaus Hausmann, a close follower of Luther and a steadier head, in their place.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther had already confronted his former teachers with his views about scholasticism in February 1517,? and it could hardly have been pleasant for a senior member of the order to have their travelling companion harangue them about the emptiness of philosophy. Breaking his journey back to Wittenberg at Erfurt, Luther then turned up at Trutfetter’s door on 8 May, determined to reply in person to a critical letter his old teacher had sent."® When his servant refused to allow him in, claiming his master was too ill, Luther wrote instead. He began by assuring his former teacher that he would never shame him with ‘biting and insulting letters’ as ‘you fear I might’. But he went on to explain that ‘I simply believe that it is impossible to reform the Church if we do not root out the canons, the decretals, scholastic philosophy, logic as we have it now’, and replace them with study of the Bible and the Church Fathers. He rejected the allegation, as he had previously done to Lang, that he had been responsible for burning copies of Tetzel’s pamphlets, a dangerous insinuation which made him look like a violent rabble-rouser who did not respect other 108 MARTIN LUTHER scholars." He also denied that he had defended the Zwickau preacher Johannes Egranus against the Leipzig professors, who had been attacking saints’ legends from the pulpit, including those about St Anna, the patron saint of miners. Luther observed to Spalatin that people only honoured her because they believed she would make them rich, but all he had done was write Egranus a letter of support. Still, this was hardly as innocuous as he made it sound, as the letter had been published with Egranus’s pamphlet on the subject.” Luther was quite unapologetic to Trutfetter, however, about presenting his own theology in vernacular sermons addressed to the German people, even though he knew full well that it ‘displeases you’; it seems he was already intent on moving the debate out of the univer- sity and into the marketplace. He concluded by telling him that he had the right to attack the scholastics, and that ‘neither your authority (which is certainly most serious with me), far less that of others, would deter me from this view’, and urged him to ‘vomit up’ any objections he may have to Luther’s views.” The letter betrays little sympathy for the old man’s serious illness, about which he does not enquire, or of how it might feel to be told that his life’s work had become an irrele- vance. Small wonder that Trutfetter’s manservant judged his master would not be able to stand a visit by the rebellious monk.* This was the darker side of Luther’s personality which arose from his sense of mission, his growing preoccupation with martyrdom, and his new- found relationship with God.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  260 MARTIN LUTHER Therefore it is demonstrated by Scripture that we are free and wish to be free.» Many have claimed that the peasants misunderstood Luther’s ideas, and that they conflated the spiritual elements of his message with their worldly concerns, but Luther’s advocacy of Chris- tian freedom, his robust tone towards rulers with whom he did not agree, and the model of resistance that his stance at Worms repre- sented, were inspirational. Luther could not control how others inter- preted his words and deeds. As the uprising unfolded, Luther, the grandson of a peasant, proved increasingly unable to comprehend the peasants’ point of view, though for them, he was the vital point of reference, so much so that they even invited him to judge their case. Luther’s response to the articles of the Upper German peasants, Admonition to Peace. A Reply to the Twelve Articles of the Peasants in Swabia began with heavy-footed irony, praising the article in which the peasants offered to take instruction as by far the best. Although he opened by castigating the lords for their failure to introduce the gospel, describing the peasant uproar as God's judgement on them for their hard-heartedness, this rhetorical strategy hardly balanced out the rest of the tract, which unequivocally condemned the peasants. Luther set up a kind of moral equation: the peasants might object to the dues they are forced to pay, but that was only ‘petty robbery’, while the lords stood to be robbed of everything: their authority, their property and their rights over the peasants. This procedure of weighing wrongs reduced complex political arguments and protest into simple varieties of sin. And it depended on accepting that the existing order was right, including the ownership of individuals. Luther mocked the peasants’ use of his theology to argue that because ‘Christ has bought us all with his precious blood’, no Christian should own another as in serfdom. He even went back on his own insistence that a congrega- tion should have the right to call its own preacher, the first of the peasants’ articles. Instead, he defended property rights in the tithe. If the community owned the tithe, well and good, Luther argued, but if it did not, then the lord or institution which owned the tithe and paid the preacher should have their property rights respected, and they could appoint a preacher of their choosing. If the congregation was unhappy with the arrangement, they could raise a tax of their own to support a vicar — a completely unrealistic plan, as he well knew? THE PEASANTS WAR 261 The late medieval church was a property church, in which many individuals and institutions had a financial stake, and the peasants’ first article called this into question fundamentally. The issue of tithes was a litmus test.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Caspar Cruciger), in Jonas and Coelius, Vom christlichen abschied (eds Freybe and Brauer), fo. B [iv] (r); Melanchthon freely admitted that ‘his nature was ardent and irascible’ and recalled that he had lacked mildness in his debate with Erasmus; Melanchthon in Vandiver, Keen and Frazel (eds and trs), Luther’s Lives, 16; 21; 38-9; Philipp Melanchthon, Vita Lutheri, fo. 24 (v). Ulinka Rublack, “Grapho-Relics: Lutheranism and the Materialisation of the Word’, Past and Present, Supplement 5, 2010, 144-66. Luther may have been a little hard on Hans: on one occasion he refused to let him come into his presence for three days, insisting that he supplicate in writing and humble himself, with an apology. Katharina von Bora, Jonas Cruciger and Melanchthon all interceded to no avail, and Luther insisted he would rather have a dead son than a badly brought up one (WT 5, 6102). Luther’s hatred of jurists was legendary. When young Martin was barely six months old, Luther said to him ‘If you become a lawyer, I will hang you from a gallows’ (WT 2, 1422). 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 43. 45. 46. NOTES TO PAGES 403-420 537 One wonders what brother Hans, aged nearly six at the time, who eventually became a lawyer having been intended for the ministry, would have made of this. Ironically Martin was to be destined for law. Schwiebert, Luther and his Times, 594-602; Brecht, Luther, III, 235-44. Greschat, Bucer, 245-9. The Kacheléfen were tiled and very effective heating systems, the heart of every German home, and they were soon made in religious propagandist forms too, with tiles featuring anti-papal cartoons. Johann von Staupitz (and Johann Arndt), Zwey alte geistreiche Biichlein Doctoris Johannis von Staupitz weiland Abts zu Saltzbergk zu S. Peter Das Erste. Von der holdseligen Liebe Gottes. Das Ander. Von unserm H. Christlichen Glauben; Zu erweckung der Liebe Gottes . . . in allen Gottseligen Hertzen, Magdeburg, 1605 [VD 17 1:072800G]. Reinitzer, Gesetz und Evangelium; Roper, ‘Martin Luther's Body’; Roper, ‘Luther Relics’ in Jennifer Spinks and Dagmar Eichberger, eds., Religion, the Supernatural and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe, Leiden, 2015. Brown, Singing the Gospel, 1-25; Oettinger, Music as Propaganda, Veit, Das Kirchenlied. The first hymn books were produced in 1524; Luther wrote about forty hymns himself. WT 3, 3739. The emotional passage is so out of character with the factual reportage of the rest of the journal that its authenticity has been doubted; Schau- erte, Diirer, 235. On the self-portraits, see Koerner, Moment of Self- Portraiture. Diirer, Memoirs of Journeys, 55; 62-7. Giinzburg, The Fifteen Confederates (ed. and tr. Dipple), Third Confed- erate, around n.124, around n.120, three paras after n.119; Giinzburg, Ein vermanung, fos. I iii (r); ii (v). As he writes: ‘Oh mother with a heart of stone, how faithless you are to your child. Do you think she is made of wood or iron, that she will not necessarily feel the burning desires of the flesh, just as you felt them . . . ?’

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther’s letters were remarkable for their warmth, frankness and the depth of shared memories. But these final letters also displayed his propensity for hatred and gloom. At the same time as he wrote about his fears of the ‘breath’ of the Jews, Luther mentioned that he had one major task to which he would turn next — the Jewish question. ‘After the main issues have been settled [in Mansfeld], he wrote, ‘I have to start expelling the Jews.”° Count Albrecht does not like the Jews either, he wrote, but he does nothing about them. During his four last sermons which he would preach at Eisleben in January and February 1546, therefore, he set about ‘helping’ Albrecht, as he put it, from the pulpit, by adding an admonition against the Jews to the end of his last sermon. Like the ‘Italians’, Luther declared, the Jews knew the art of poisoning someone so that they die instantly, or a month, a year, ten or even twenty years later. They were evil people who would never stop blas- pheming against Christ, and those who protected them shared in their sin. As he neared death, Luther’s conviction that the Jews had to be dealt with became stronger.” Shortly before the party reached Eisleben, Luther became very ill, collapsing in the wagon. He remarked that this was again the work of the Devil, who always attacked him ‘whenever I have something important that I have to do’. His body was rubbed with hot cloths and he revived. In Eisleben, Luther stayed in the house of Dr Drach- stedt, a major figure in the mining business with long-standing links to Luther’s family.” Meetings had to be organised around the old man’s illness, but even his precarious physical state was not enough to get the counts to agree. Negotiations dragged on for three weeks, with Luther desperate to get home. Meanwhile, he devised a daily routine. Just as mealtimes with the whole household were central to his life in Wittenberg, so in Eisleben he kept a common table, with guests. Mealtimes were devotional occasions, as they had been in the monastery.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  They were picking up on the idea, however, expressed very early by Luther, that begging was wrong and should be stopped; ‘Nobody ought to go begging among Christians’, he had written in To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation; ‘every city should support its own poor’. Mendicant monks who asked for alms were not performing pious works but diverting money away from those who truly needed it.“° Luther, writing to Spalatin, did not exactly approve of the students’ behaviour, but then, he asked, ‘who can hold everyone in check everywhere and at all times?” The next targets of the Wittenberg reformers were Marianism — veneration of the Virgin — and the Mass. On 3 and 4 December, a group of evangelicals prevented priests in the parish church from saying the Marian office. Invading the parish church, they drove the priests from the altars, took their Mass books and threw stones at them. The town council’s report to the Elector claimed that they carried knives and weapons, concluding that several citizens had been about to stage a riot. In the Franciscan monastery, students smashed a wooden altar and posted threatening letters on the monastery door. Some suggested that next Maundy Thursday they should get the ‘bath maids’ — that is, prostitutes — to wash down the idolatrous altars with strong lye. It would be better, they had allegedly said, to turn the altar 214 MARTIN LUTHER stones into gallows and execution blocks, where they would do more for Gerechtigkeit, the word meaning both salvation and justice: ‘the hangman’s office was not as dangerous to souls as the idolatrous monks’.*” These were strong words, with hangmen being the lowest caste in sixteenth-century society. This was verbal iconoclasm, the students besmirching the holy altars with the foulest connotations they could imagine — and there was more than a hint of sexual humiliation in their reference to the prostitutes, too. The Council was careful to play the incident down in its report to the Elector, insisting that only fourteen students had been involved, with some outsiders; and that they had all been punished. Something like a popular Reformation was brewing, but its extent is clear only from the outraged comments of its opponents, who had every reason to paint it as violent and subversive.® A week later, on the night of 10 December, it was reported that about forty well-armed ‘students and nobles’ were roaming the streets with pipes and drums, threatening to storm the monasteries and kill all the monks.” The council managed to quieten things down, however, placing a guard around the Franciscan monastery. Wittenberg was not the only place where the new evangelical ideas were being put into practice. Shortly after the Diet of Worms, in the summer, there had been attacks on the houses of priests in Erfurt. Luther was appalled by these disturbances, and still more by the fact that the town council apparently approved the action, refusing to punish the culprits.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  These were men who after all had been socialised in the all-male cultures of school, monastery and university. For most of the years when Luther’s table talk was recorded, Katharina was pregnant or caring for small infants. “Let them bear children to death’ is often cited to suggest that Luther saw women as nothing but baby-machines. But he was insisting that the pains of childbirth were natural and pleasing to God, and he was arguing against a widespread belief that a woman giving birth was under the sway of the Devil, and that if she were to die before being churched, she could not be buried in the churchyard. MARRIAGE AND THE FLESH 283 Luther lived in a society where women ran household workshops, looked after apprentices and journeymen, and even engaged in the production processes. Women could incur debts, invest and in some areas do business on their own account. Yet his comments assumed a sharp division of labour that simply did not accord with most people’s lives in the sixteenth century. Instead they reflected academic life, where a radically gendered division of labour made it possible for a man like Luther to write and read undisturbed whilst Katharina provi- sioned the household, saw to the accounts, and organised the student lodgers, who were a major source of income.* Katharina and the servants thus provided the invisible labour that allowed Luther to devote himself to study. As part of her responsibilities Katharina purchased land at Ziilsdorf near Wittenberg to grow produce, in addition to the garden the family owned just outside the town walls close to the pig market. She was famed for her beer brewing, a neces- sity in a period when water was not safe to drink.” The marriage infuriated his opponents beyond measure. They soon turned their fire on Katharina herself, and in 1528 two young gradu- ates from Leipzig wrote a couple of scurrilous pamphlets. Johann Hasenberg’s letter-cum-dialogue, addressed to ‘Martin Luther disturber of the peace and of piety’, called on him repeatedly to ‘convert, revert , and was twinned with an offering by Joachim von der Heyde. His pamphlet called on Katharina to leave her “damned and shameful life’, and insulted her as a nun who had donned lay clothes and tripped off to the university at Wittenberg like a ‘dance girl’. Other nuns had been misled by her example, and gave up ‘true freedom’ of body and soul for the ‘fleshly freedom’ Luther advocated in his pestilential writ- ings. They would end up, wrote the pamphleteer, not in their lovely convents with their good food but in ‘dishonourable brothels’ where they would be beaten, their clothes sold, and they themselves pawned like common whores.” Luther responded with a virtuoso display of invective, News from Leipzig, that far outclassed the young scholars’ feeble efforts.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Erasmus wrote his reply in ten days, got his old friend Johann Froben in Basle to print it using six presses at once, and the response made it to Frankfurt in time.*° Erasmus also complained to the Elector about the attack, which was guaranteed to annoy Luther, who wrote to Erasmus after publication, appearing to apologise for his ‘passionate’ tone. He had certainly not minced his words. “You are confident you can lead the world wherever you want with your empty verbal bubbles’, Luther had written in De servo arbitrio, mocking Erasmus as a ‘Proteus’ constantly shifting his ground.* But it was not so much the insults to ‘my dear Erasmus’, as he addressed him throughout, which caused the greatest offence, as the way Luther had managed to present the great scholar as an insincere quibbler, someone lacking in true faith, and who put shallow academic achievement above biblical truth. Someone may laugh at me for explaining the obvious and offering great men such an elementary tidbit of syntax, as if I were teaching boys learning their alphabet. What am I to do when I see them seeking out darkness in full daylight and making a deliberate effort to be blind, reckoning up so many centuries, so many talents, so many saints, so many martyrs, so many doctors, and boasting with so much authority about this place in Moses, and still not deigning to look at the syllables and not curbing their thoughts so as to actually consider the place they are boasting about?” Luther also wrote to the Elector in no uncertain terms telling him not to get mixed up in the matter, as the ‘viper’ demanded; if he must 290 MARTIN LUTHER write, he should tell Erasmus that it was a matter for ‘a far greater Judge than a secular prince’. Luther had no desire to heal the rift with Erasmus.” At the same time, the bitter conflict with Karlstadt, now living in Luther’s house, continued. While it had arisen over the pace and leadership of the Reformation, it soon spread to encompass the ritual at the heart of Christianity, the Eucharist. This was much more than a matter of doctrine: the Eucharist shaped a Christian community’s deepest understanding of itself and the world, encompassing every- thing from politics and morals to its conception of reality. Luther’s position on the sacrament was complex. On the one hand, he rejected the Catholic idea of transubstantiation in the miracle of the Mass, whereby the ‘accidents’ of the bread and wine — taste, smell, appearance — remained the same while their ‘essence’ was transformed into the body and blood of Christ. For Luther, this was not biblical but a human doctrine based on the philosophy of Aristotle, a tradition which he rejected.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Part of the explosiveness of Luther’s Ninety-five Theses lay in the timing of their appearance. On the feast day of All Saints, the magnificent collection of relics belonging to the Elector Friedrich, ruler of Saxony and Luther’s sovereign, were displayed in Wittenberg’s Castle Church to pilgrims from miles around and indulgences granted to all who viewed them. The theses were probably posted on or just before this celebration. True, illiterate pilgrims could not have read them, and even literate townsfolk would have been hard-pressed to understand them. But the recipients of Luther’s letter would have fully grasped the significance of the date, as would his fellow theologians at Wittenberg. For the latter, the theses touched on their own livelihoods, as the university depended on funding from the All Saints foundation, derived from the saying of Masses for the dead and from the pilgrims who came to see the relics in order to gain time off Purgatory. What Luther did not know at the time was that the particular “indulgence scandal” he attacked involved much more than the crude preaching of Johannes Tetzel, whose advertising jingle allegedly ran “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from Purgatory springs.” Rather, Tetzel’s activities fed into a series of fundamental practices that financed the Church. The money raised by the preacher was supposed to go to Rome, to pay for the rebuilding of St. Peter’s. In fact, half of it was going directly to the Fugger banking family in Augsburg, the richest merchant capitalists of the day, to whom Albrecht of Mainz owed money. The younger son of a powerful princely family, Albrecht had become archbishop of Magdeburg at the age of twenty-three. But then there had been an unexpected vacancy in the archbishopric of Mainz, the richest of the German sees. This was not a chance to miss, but the papacy was trying to stop bishops amassing multiple offices and, after Albrecht’s succession to Magdeburg, had also ordered that henceforth bishops would have to be at least thirty years old.12 The conflict was resolved in Albrecht’s favor when he agreed to pay a contribution of 21,000 ducats to support the building of St. Peter’s, money he did not have. So he borrowed from the Fuggers, even though their involvement in monopoly capitalism was regarded as usury by the Church. He then moved to divert money, such as that collected by Tetzel, into paying the debt. Luther’s theses, in other words, attacked not only papal power, but also, unbeknownst to him, one of the most powerful people in Germany and the richest financial house in Europe.

• From Satyricon (1)

  But his passion for dancing was interrupted at this stage by a stenographer who read aloud, as if he were reading the public records, “On the seventh of the Kalends of July, on Trimalchio’s estates near Cumae, were born thirty boys and forty girls: five hundred pecks of wheat were taken from the threshing floors and stored in the granaries: five hundred oxen were put to yoke: the slave Mithridates was crucified on the same date for cursing the genius of our master, Gaius: on said date ten million sesterces were returned to the vaults as no sound investment could be found: on said date, a fire broke out in the gardens at Pompeii, said fire originating in the house of Nasta, the bailiff.” “What’s that?” demanded Trimalchio. “When were the gardens at Pompeii bought for me?” “Why, last year,” answered the stenographer, “for that reason the item has not appeared in the accounts.” Trimalchio flew into a rage at this. “If I’m not told within six months of any real estate that’s bought for me,” he shouted, “I forbid it’s being carried to my account at all!” Next, the edicts of his aediles were read aloud, and the wills of some of his foresters in which Trimalchio was disinherited by a codicil, then the names of his bailiffs, and that of a freedwoman who had been repudiated by a night watchman, after she had been caught in bed with a bath attendant, that of a porter banished to Baioe, a steward who was standing trial, and lastly the report of a decision rendered in the matter of a lawsuit, between some valets. When this was over with, some rope dancers came in and a very boresome fool stood holding a ladder, ordering his boy to dance from rung to rung, and finally at the top, all this to the music of popular airs; then the boy was compelled to jump through blazing hoops while grasping a huge wine jar with his teeth. Trimalchio was the only one who was much impressed by these tricks, remarking that it was a thankless calling and adding that in all the world there were just two things which could give him acute pleasure, rope-dancers and horn blowers; all other entertainments were nothing but nonsense. “I bought a company of comedians,” he went on, “but I preferred for them to put on Atellane farces, and I ordered my flute-player to play Latin airs only.” CHAPTER THE FIFTY-FOURTH.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The letter may well have lent credence to the rumours that Karlstadt had got the idea from Luther himself.°° In a letter to Spalatin in October 1524, Luther referred to Karlstadt as his ‘Absalom’, the man who stole away the hearts of the Israelites. But the term also hinted at the depths of his feeling for Karlstadt: Absalom was David’s handsome son, whose rebellion broke his father’s heart, because he was forced to act against the child he loved so much.” Increasingly Luther linked Miintzer and Karlstadt; but his most hostile thetoric was reserved for Karlstadt alone, as is evident in Luther’s monumental Against the Heavenly Prophets, the first part of which was published in late 1524. The treatise articulated what Luther believed to be the indissoluble links between an emphasis on the spirit, denying the Real Presence of Christ in the sacrament, destroying images, and engaging in sedition. He was determined to put as much clear water as he could between his views and any form of rebellion or violence. For the rest of his life, Luther’s rhetoric about Karlstadt and Miintzer would become a fixed formula. They were Schwérmer, literally ‘the 258 MARTIN LUTHER swarmers’, as if they were a swarm of madly buzzing bees, “enthusi- asts’ who claimed to be led by the spirit. ‘He wants to be thought the highest spirit, who has swallowed the Holy Spirit, feathers and all’, Luther famously satirised Miintzer’s spiritualistic theology.” Time and again, Luther punctured the heightened emotionality of the Schwdarmer by translating their high-flown claims into crude physical terms, using earthy reality to deride abstraction. For his part, Karlstadt became more and more adamant about the distinction between flesh and spirit. In early 1525 he wrote of how we must ‘choke lusts and desires through affliction and persecution which befall us and by living daily according to the will of God’. Martyrdom, achieved through Gelassenheit and spiritual humility, remained a key component of his thought. Where Luther talked of spiting the Devil by getting married, Karlstadt wrote that “We, too, must overcome the Devil through suffering and through the truth which we have come to know.