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elled social distinctions, not so much eliminating the priesthood, as exalting
the laity to the level of priestly ministry. This was a conclusion certainly drawn
by the peasants who began to demand social transformation in nearly 1520s, in
the name of Luther’s teaching. Luther of course was not so keen – he rejected
such calls for social revolution, drawing back from some of the more radical
implications of his earlier calls for lay-led reform, but the underlying trajectory
of his Reformation program was unmistakable, and appealed particularly to
those who felt left out, left behind and abandoned by social can economic
trends of the time.
In the early days of his Reformation, Luther harnessed this popular
sense of disenfranchisement and dissatisfaction to gain strength for his move
for independence from papal authority. While he did resist the Peasants’ Re-
volt, at the same time he expressed his genius for popular communication in
his use of the new technology of printing, and his new German Bible. Printing
had democratised knowledge. Beforehand, the dissemination of information
was in the hands of the state, of the church or the monasteries. Now anyone
could open a printing shop and publish whatever they felt public demand
would buy. Luther’s Reformation in Wittenberg is unthinkable without the
printing shops of Johann Grünenberg & Melchior Lotther.
Luther harnessed all this as a genius at popular communication. The
seminal year of 1520 marked a shift in his writing from the predominant use of
Latin, the rarefied language of academic debate and ecclesiastical pronounce-
ment, to German, so much so that from that point onwards, 88% of his work
was published in the German language. It is estimated that between 1510 and
1530, 20% of all German publications during those years were written by Mar-
tin Luther. The public could not get their hands quickly enough on anything
that flowed from the pen or mouth of Luther, whether or not he had author-
ised its publication.
In particular, his approach to Bible translation appealed over the heads
of academics, clerics and the educated elites to ‘ordinary’ Germans. After his
appearance at the Diet of Worms in 1521, he was hustled away for safekeeping
by his sovereign Fredrick the Wise, into the Wartburg, a castle in the hills near
one of his childhood homes in Eisenach. Bored, frustrated and troubled by
stomach problems, he decided to translate the Bible into German. This was
not the first German Bible – there were several which had appeared in the pre-
vious 50 years, but it took a radically new approach to translation. Not only
was it directly translated from the original Hebrew and Greek rather than the
Latin Vulgate, but it also aimed to speak idiomatic and popular German. As

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