Luther's Lives: Two Contemporary Accounts of Martin Luther (review)

Given the number of works on Luther that are churned out yearly, it may seem courageous to claim that one of them will remain a major resource for English-speaking scholars for some time to come. This book, however, comprises a new English translation of Melanchthon's memoir on Luther and for the first time an English version of John Cochlaeus's commentary on Luther's acts and writings. While Melanchthon's memoir is comparatively well-known since Bennet's contemporary translation into English was incorporated into Foxe's work, a new translation clarifies some of the older text. The three classical scholars who collaborated to produce the annotated translations have thus provided for the first time, even for those with passable Latin, a convenient and fully annotated means of reading them. All the works cited are identified in the footnotes and there is a useful alphabetical list which provides a bibliography of Cochlaeus's publications. The translation of the texts is careful, elegant and consistent.

In the original these texts have for a long time provided stumbling blocks in the form of rhetorical flourishes, esoteric words and ambiguous interpretations, not always easily elucidated with dictionaries and grammars, which have impeded a clear understanding of their full implications. It seems undeniable that they do not in themselves and without other sources enable us to understand what they are telling us but scholars should now be more easily able to analyse the use of arguments and terms, identify what matters sixteenth century scholars took to be critical issues, and even look at the use of language itself and the ways in which controversialists sought to distort the literal sense of their opponents' words.

In many ways, what Cochlaeus provides is his own biography, an account of his single-minded pursuit of a man whom he sees as a tool of the devil. Nothing Luther did, not even the sermons he preached on the occasion of John, duke of Saxony's demise, was exempt from Cochlaeus's ire. The way in which Cochlaeus twisted the simple and literal sense of Luther's encomium into a definition that would have been heretical to any contemporary Christian provides a convenient illustration of the way in which both sides distorted the sense of words in the interest of labelling them heretical or diabolic.

Cochlaeus's vituperative rhetoric, which exceeds that of all other opponents of Luther and is matched only by Luther's own scatalogical and scabrous language, is focused on a single theme. All the other reformers are subsidiary to Luther and all the evils in the world of politics and international relations can be traced back to Luther's pernicious and ever varying influence. Initially, Cochlaeus clearly expected the heretic to be rapidly eliminated. When it became evident that eradication of the increasingly varying protestant beliefs would be a difficult and lengthy process Cochlaeus remained committed to his conviction that discord would only be eradicated when the Reformers were eliminated.

Cochlaeus's increasingly isolated stance provides a useful benchmark for the progress of adaptation that the religious world underwent as it adjusted to a changed reality. What he provides in this survey of Luther's acts and writings is in many ways a historiographical account of an academic scholarly debate, unrestrained by later convention of restraint and courtesy, in which each side attempts to smite his opponent hip and thigh. Cochlaeus makes no attempt to conceal his bias, criticising the Lutheran works and praising those like Erasmus whom he presents as rebutting their case. He is undoubtedly somewhat selective in this, praising Henry VIII's defence of the church at length but passing over his later defection over the divorce with a reference to the instigation of evil men.

As the 1530s progressed, however, Cochlaeus's account provides less scholarly disputation and more political oppression and bloody...