The ten essays in this volume, derived from a series of public lectures held in Mainz, Worms, and Speyer in 2015 as part of the Luther Decade celebrations in Germany, investigate events associated with the Reformation in the Rhineland-Palatinate. Together, they challenge or qualify several widely accepted assumptions about Reformation history. For example, Gerold Bönnen's chapter on Worms argues that despite its prominence in the events of the early sixteenth century, the city had a complicated, even ambiguous, relationship to the Reformation. As in many imperial cities, religious reform arrived there in the context of late medieval tensions between city authorities and the local bishop and clergy, which he suggests continued to influence interactions with the reforming movements through the 1560s. The result was a policy of adopting Lutheranism without the establishment of significant confession building, thereby laying the basis for a truly multiconfessional city.

Studies of the two most famous knights to support the Reformation, Ulrich von Hutten and Franz von Sickingen, figure prominently. Silvana Seidel Menchi's investigation of Hutten's relationship to Erasmus highlights the complexity of connections between Renaissance humanism and the Reformation, while Sickingen's association with the Reformation is scrutinized, and at times problematized, from a variety of perspectives. Wolfgang Breul concludes that Sickingen was committed to the Reformation, but he questions the extent to which he understood the heart of the religious change it espoused. Reinhard Scholzen examines Sickingen's feud against the archbishop of Trier against the backdrop of a tradition of feuds and feuding by the lower nobility in the empire. He argues that this was not only a legal but also a commercial undertaking, as the lower nobility faced diminishing prospects. In Sickingen's case, Trier was not only the latest in a series of feuds but also a continuation of a successful family strategy. Matthias Müller investigates another important strategy in Sickingen's rise to prominence: his exploitation of visual media, in particular printed portraits and medallions. Here, too, Sickingen comes across as enterprising, exploiting new media and consciously adopting traditions associated with the depictions of princes to elevate his own status. Sickingen's legacy inspires the final two papers in this section of the volume. Kurt Andermann uses the question of why Goethe chose Götz von Berlichingen rather than Sickingen as the title character for a play as a means to further understand the context from which he came, and Volker Gallé, by asking what drew Ferdinand Lasalle to Sickingen as a potential hero, investigates the reasons for his popularity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The last three essays in the volume focus on broader economic, social, and cultural changes associated with the Reformation. Andreas Tacke looks at winners and losers in an art world turned upside down by significant social change. As iconoclastic movements and changing media upset traditional methods and commercial and social relations, he argues that adaptability to new media and the willingness to work across confessional lines were crucial strategies adopted by the winners. Christoph Reske adopts as his starting point Bernd Moeller's claim that without the printing press there would have been no Reformation. He qualifies a number of assumptions in earlier approaches to this topic and concludes that the era of the Reformation witnessed less a printing revolution than a printing evolution. As a result, one must exercise restraint when attributing the success of the Reformation to the invention of the press. Finally, Rudolf Steffens returns to the perennial question about the extent to which Luther is responsible for the form of the modern German language. Although he notes that measuring the extent of Luther's impact is an ongoing project, he provides extensive evidence of the Reformer's influence on modern German, particularly in the realm of neologisms.

In his introduction to the volume, Michael Matheus highlights the importance of providing perspectives on the Reformation from outside its places of origin. In the range of topics covered and disciplinary perspectives from which they are approached, this collection adds to our understanding of the complexity of the phenomena we designate collectively as the Reformation.