Biography & Autobiography. History. Religion & Spirituality. Nonfiction. HTML:From �??one of the best of the new [Martin Luther] biographers�?� (The New Yorker), a portrait of the complicated founding father of the Protestant Reformation, whose intellectual assault on Catholicism transformed Christianity and changed the course of world history.
 
�??Magnificent.�?��??The Wall Street Journal
�??Penetrating.�?��??The New York Times Book Review
�??Smart, accessible, authoritative.�?��??Hilary Mantel
On October 31, 1517, so the story goes, a shy monk named Martin Luther nailed a piece of paper to the door of the Castle Church in the university town of Wittenberg. The ideas contained in these Ninety-five Theses, which boldly challenged the Catholic Church, spread like wildfire. Within two months, they were known all over Germany. So powerful were Martin Luther�??s broadsides against papal authority that they polarized a continent and tore apart the very foundation of Western Christendom. Luther�??s ideas inspired upheavals whose consequences we live with today.
But who was the man behind the Ninety-five Theses? Lyndal Roper�??s magisterial new biography goes beyond Luther�??s theology to investigate the inner life of the religious reformer who has been called �??the last medieval man and the first modern one.�?� Here is a full-blooded portrait of a revolutionary thinker who was, at his core, deeply flawed and full of contradictions. Luther was a brilliant writer whose biblical translations had a lasting impact on the German language. Yet he was also a strident fundamentalist whose scathing rhetorical attacks threatened to alienate those he might persuade. He had a colorful, even impish personality, and when he left the monastery to get married (�??to spite the Devil,�?� he explained), he wooed and wed an ex-nun. But he had an ugly side too. When German peasants rose up against the nobility, Luther urged the aristocracy to slaughter them. He was a ferocious anti-Semite and a virulent misogynist, even as he argued for liberated human sexuality within marriage.
A distinguished historian of early modern Europe, Lyndal Roper looks deep inside the heart of this singularly complex figure. The force of Luther�??s personality, she argues, had enormous historical effects�??both good and ill. By bringing us closer than ever to the man himself, she opens up a new vision of the Reformation and the world it creat