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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

Amazon.com Price:  $12.23 (as of 01/05/2019 13:24 PST- Details)

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Description

A revolutionary have a look at Martin Luther, the Reformation, and the birth of publishing, on the eve of the Reformation’s 500th anniversary
 
When Martin Luther posted his “theses” on the door of the Wittenberg church in 1517, protesting corrupt practices, he was once virtually unknown. Within months, his ideas spread across Germany, then all of Europe; within years, their writer was once not just famous, but infamous, answerable for catalyzing the violent wave of religious reform that would come to be referred to as the Protestant Reformation and engulfing Europe in decades of bloody war.
 
Luther came of age with the printing press, and the path to glory of neither one was once obvious to the casual observer of the time. Printing was once, and is, a risky business—the questions were how to understand how much to print and how to get there before the competition. Pettegree illustrates Luther’s great gifts not simply as a theologian, but as a communicator, indeed, as the world’s first mass-media figure, its first brand. He recognized in printing the power of pamphlets, written in the colloquial German of on a regular basis people, to win the battle of ideas.
 
But that wasn’t enough—not just words, but the medium itself was once the message. Fatefully, Luther had a partner in the form of artist and businessman Lucas Cranach, who along side Wittenberg’s printers created the distinctive look of Luther’s pamphlets. Together, Luther and Cranach created a product that spread like wildfire—it was once both incredibly successful and widely imitated. Soon Germany was once overwhelmed by a blizzard of pamphlets, with Wittenberg at its heart; the Reformation itself would blaze on for more than a hundred years.
 
Publishing upfront of the Reformation’s 500th anniversary, Brand Luther fuses the history of religion, of printing, and of capitalism—the literal marketplace of ideas—into one enthralling story, revolutionizing our understanding of probably the most pivotal figures and eras in human history.

From the Hardcover edition.

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