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BOOK REVIEWS
Pettegree, Andrew. Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe--and Started the Protestant Reformation. New York: Penguin Books, 2016.
The beat poet Allen Ginsberg once wrote that "Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture." Well, maybe in secular society, but surely this can’t include our life of faith – or can it? Ever wonder how an obscure monk working in a backwater university in rural German became the most famous man in all of Europe and changed the history of Christianity forever?
For those of us on the Protestant side of the Tiber, Luther’s narrative has been colored with hagiography. In Sunday school, we learned that this intrepid man, through the power of his convictions and his dogged adherence to the Word of God, bravely stood up to the injustices of the Church and prevailed. But is this story really that simple? Could Luther have ever prevailed in the Reformation battle of ideas had he not controlled the media? This is the topic of Andrew Pettegree’s important work, Brand Luther. Pettegree once again narrates the Luther saga, but this time he views the Reformation through the lens of the 16th Century contemporary print culture—the major media of the day.
At the time of Luther’s earliest works, the only local Wittenberg printer was Johann Rhau-Grunenberg, a publisher of limited skills and even more limited typefaces. His work was unimpressive, and he was unwilling to grow in his craft. When Luther’s 95 Theses were printed by various printers around Europe, the contrast between Rhau-Grunenberg’s edition and, for instance, Adam Petri’s of Basel, was stark. Petri indented each individual thesis, and he used larger woodcut initials to start each one. The result was a beautiful eight-page pamphlet, attractively laid out and enticing to the eye. Luther soon became convinced that he must find other, more talented printers, to promote his ideas – and he sets his sights on Leipzig, the center of book production in Germany. He convinces the Leipzig printer, Melchior Lotter, to send his son, Melchior Jr., (armed with a wider array of typefaces) to set up shop in Wittenberg. Soon the younger Lotter was printing large quantities of Flugschriften, or fliers, one or two sheets of paper folded into pamphlets. Pettegree has also included numerous images of these publications throughout his book, giving us a window into the beautiful and innovative Reformation art included in these works. One can imagine the average German buying a flugschrift for a few pennies, taking it home, having a few friends over for dinner, and reading it for the entertainment of his guests as they gazed upon the glorious woodcut art which illustrated its contents.
Undoubtedly the most important figure in Reformation publishing was Lucas Cranach. Hailing from a family of artists, Cranach became Elector Frederick’s court painter in 1505. In the 1510s he moved his printing workshop from the Elector’s castle to two larger locations in the city, one of which tourists can still visit today near the town market. Cranach also purchased a paper mill so he could control every component of the printing process. His mastery of the woodcut would prove crucial for Wittenberg’s growing print industry, since the wooden engraving could be placed alongside the metal type and then printed on paper in the same impression. Cranach also created a title page made up of a single woodcut which then framed a panel where the title and author text could be inserted – a significant enhancement over previous offerings, vastly improving the attractiveness of contemporary publications. These creative title pages were even used for the cheapest flugschriften. As an example, one of these title page woodcuts, The Law and the Gospel, juxtaposed Moses’s Ten Commandments with Christ’s new covenant of grace, creating a visual image of Luther’s distinction between the two.
Perhaps the most lucrative selling point was the marketing of Luther himself, what Pettegree calls “Brand Luther.” Before this time, an author’s name was often left off the title page of his works. But as Luther’s fame grew, printers soon discovered that placing the reformer’s name in bold type on a book’s cover was a surefire way to move the merchandise. And as innovations by Cranach and others made the city’s publishing houses the envy of Germany, the city name “Wittenberg” also was added as an indicator of the highest quality in printing. Pettegree explains that the Wittenberg brand was so lucrative that another publisher in Augsburg fraudulently marked its books with “Wittenberg” on the title page hoping to improve sales.
But perhaps the most interesting reveal in this book was Luther’s control of the local printing industry his close interactions with all of its printers, and his desire to keep each printer afloat by carefully allocating jobs among them all. Pettegree reveals how hands-on Luther was in this process, closely supervising each publication as it was being produced, offering his advice and sometimes harsh criticism on the quality of the final product. Pettegree retells the story of the publication of Luther’s Sermon on Keeping Children in School, which he had assigned to the publisher Nickel Shirlentz, only to discover that the printer had delayed the planned publication of the sermon until the next spring to coincide with the Frankfurt book fair, the biggest bookselling event in Germany. On travel and enraged upon hearing that his sermon would not be published forthwith, he sent his wife Katharina to the bookshop, where she abruptly retrieved the manuscript, sending it to another publisher.
For me personally, Pettegree supplied the missing puzzle piece in the Luther story: how an obscure professor could become the best-selling author in Europe, igniting a movement which would change the face of Christianity forever. The answer? The media. Luther’s reforming movement was fueled by the 16th century media revolution of the printing press— catapulting his theologies into the popular consciousness. But this media blitz wasn’t an accident. Luther recognized the power of the press, a media revolution as groundbreaking as the mass communications of our digital age. And “Brand Luther” was the key to it all—selling the Luther name, a name which encapsulated the message effectively alerting the populace to the corruptions of indulgence selling and simony and revealing the biblical truth of salvation by grace for all who believe.
