Introduction

The ten essays assembled here were all written over the last dozen years. They reflect my conviction that the early Reformation in Germany, far from being a worked-out seam of research, still contains new adits and shafts of exploration into unresolved questions. For most of the 1970s and 1980s interest centred on the impact of Luther’s (or Zwingli’s) message: its socially mediated and conditioned reception in town and country; the dissemination of that message through pamphlets and broadsheets, as well as printed books; and the wave of iconoclasm which swept over the German-speaking lands, as churches were desecrated, images destroyed or stolen, and, symbolically, much of the Catholic liturgy was rejected or scorned.