Martin Luther: renegade and prophet
LYNDAL ROPER

More has been written about Martin Luther than anyone else in history except Jesus Christ. More is forthcoming as we approach the quin­centenary of the year Luther’s 95 Theses took Germany by storm, the start of an improbable sequence of events that catapulted an obscure Augustinian friar and university professor into the spotlight as Europe’s first-ever celebrity author and the unlikely originator of the movement we call the Protestant Reformation.  

One might not have expected a book on Luther from Lyndal Roper, the Australian-born Regius Professor of modern history at Oxford, despite her expertise in early modern German history: most Luther biographers have been church historians or historical theo­logians, not experts in social, cultural and gender history.  But Roper’s scholarly strengths plus 10 years of careful research have yielded a richly contextualised biography of a man whose influence has been and remains enormous, for good or ill or both.