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Meilensteine der Reformation. Schlüsseldokumente der frühen Wirksamkeit Martin Luthers. Edited by Irene Dingel and Henning P. Jürgens . Pp. 296 + 34 colour plates. Gütersloh: Gütersloher, 2014. €19,99. 978 3 579 08170 0

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2016

David M. Whitford*
Affiliation:
Baylor University, Texas
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

With the five-hundredth anniversary of the posting (however one wishes to conceive of that) of the Ninety-Five Theses fast approaching in 2017, there are a vast number of works sliding off printing presses on the dawn of the Reformation and Martin Luther. Many good, some certainly not so good. This is one of the good ones. Dingel and Jürgens (director and her associate, respectively, of the religious history section of the Leibniz Institute at Mainz) have brought us a number of excellent volumes recently and this is no exception. This is a thoughtful collection of essays by serious scholars helping to contextualise and explain some of the most important early works of Martin Luther. Most of these ‘milestone’ or ‘key’ documents get two essays. They examine, in chronological order: Luther's lectures on the Psalms, the emergence of the Reformation's essential kernel or core message in the lectures on Romans, the copy of the Old Testament that he used in his study, the Ninety-Five Theses, his sermon on Indulgences and Grace written soon after the Theses, 1520's ‘On the Freedom of a Christian’, Luther's appearance at the Diet of Worms, Luther's 1522 German Bible. I truly appreciate that they have also included his 1524 treatise on education among his ‘milestone’ treatises. The book ends with essays on Luther's early hymnody and his revision of the mass in German. These are thoughtful essays that experts as well as more general readers will find interesting and profitable.