From one of our most distinguished historians comes a sweeping, original, and provocative history of Germany, from antiquity to the present, shedding a fresh, empathetic light on the nation and its people. A Mighty Fortress is a work of penetrating, virtuoso scholarship that holds a mirror to an entire civilization - - one that has been alternately Western Europe's most successful and most perilous. It boldly examines Germany's tumultuous twentieth century in light of its earliest achievements as a prosperous, civil, and moral society, tracing a line of continuity that began in ancient times and has endured through the ages, despite its enemies and itself. The book tells the story of the well-known men -- Luther, Kant, and Beethoven, Marx, Bismarck, and Hitler -- to the masses of ordinary Germans. The Germans are a people who desire national unity, yet have always kept themselves from it by aligning with autocratic territorial governments and regional cultures.Indeed, Germans living centuries apart have shared in different ways a common defining experience that is unique to their culture: a convergence of external provocation, wounded pride, and an unusual ability to exercise great power in response to both. Ozment captures the soul of a nation that is at once ordered and chaotic, disciplined and obsessive, proud and uncertain. Epic in scope, refreshing in its insights, and written with nuance, acumen, and verve, it presents the history of the German people as the story of humanity writ large.

Celebrating the fortieth anniversary of this seminal book, this new edition includes an illuminating foreword by Carlos Eire and Ronald K. Rittges The seeds of the swift and sweeping religious movement that reshaped European thought in the 1500s were sown in the late Middle Ages. In this book, Steven Ozment traces the growth and dissemination of dissenting intellectual trends through three centuries to their explosive burgeoning in the Reformations-both Protestant and Catholic-of the sixteenth century. He elucidates with great clarity the complex philosophical and theological issues that inspired antagonistic schools, traditions, and movements from Aquinas to Calvin. This masterly synthesis of the intellectual and religious history of the period illuminates the impact of late medieval ideas on early modern society. With a new foreword by Carlos Eire and Ronald K. Rittgers, this modern classic is ripe for rediscovery by a new generation of students and scholars.

Who were the first men and women who abandoned the Church of Rome and became the world's first Protestants? Harvard historian Steven Ozment does not present us with the remote, dusty figures of history, but rather with the shoemakers and housewives, students and politicians who were among the first followers of Martin Luther. Using pamphlets, diaries, letters, and other primary soruces, Ozment examines the origins of the Reformation and the nature of Protestantism. Rather than seeing the Reformation as the progenitor of German absolutism, as do many scholars of the period, Ozment sees in Protestantism the historic assertion of key Western values--social reform, individual religious conviction, hard work, and the rejection of corruption, hypocrisy, and empty ritual.

Together, Cranach's paintings and Luther's powerful oratory created a force field that transformed Germany, Europe, and ultimately the Western world This compelling book retells and revises the story of the German Renaissance and Reformation through the lives of two controversial men of the sixteenth century: the Saxon court painter Lucas Cranach (the Serpent) and the Wittenberg monk-turned-reformer Martin Luther (the Lamb). Contemporaries and friends (each was godfather to the other's children), Cranach and Luther were very different Germans, yet their collaborative successes merged art and religion into a revolutionary force that became the Protestant Reformation. Steven Ozment, an internationally recognized historian of the Reformation era, reprises the lives and works of Cranach (1472-1553) and Luther (1483-1546) in this generously illustrated book. He contends that Cranach's new art and Luther's oratory released a barrage of criticism upon the Vatican, the force of which secured a new freedom of faith and pluralism of religion in the Western world. Between Luther's pulpit praise of the sex drive within the divine estate of marriage and Cranach's parade of strong, lithe women, a new romantic, familial consciousness was born. The "Cranach woman" and the "Lutheran household"-both products of the merged Renaissance and Reformation worlds-evoked a new organization of society and foretold a new direction for Germany.

“A bold synthesis of intellectual and social history which explains the appeal of Protestantism to the German and Swiss cities, the media of its communication, and the means of its establishment.�—Religious Studies Review  “This book is a stimulating addition to the recent work in urban history, and it offers a new and thought-provoking perspective on the teachings and appeal of early Protestantism.�—History “Ozment very masterfully combines the history of ideas and social history in a work of exacting scholarship and persuasive argumentation.  It will no doubt become a seminal work in its field.�—The Annals “This fine study is a pleasure to read, shows an excellent understanding of the late medieval scene, and presents convincing evidence that magistrates and city council leaders were not the ‘motors of reform’ in the cities of Germany and Switzerland…. There is nothing in print in English that is comparable.�—Choice “A work of unusual interest and value. . . . Essential reading for all students of the Reformation.�—New Review of Books and Religion

Here is a lively study of marriage and the family during the Reformation, primarily in Gemany and Switzerland, that dispels the commonly held notion of fathers as tyrannical and families as loveless.

Did husbands and wives love one another in Reformation Europe? Did the home and family life matter to most people? In this wide-ranging work, Steven Ozment has gathered the answers of contemporaries to these questions. His subject is the patriarchal family in Germany and Switzerland, primarily among Protestants. But unlike modern scholars from Philippe Arics to Lawrence Stone, Ozment finds the fathers of early modern Europe sympathetic and even admirable. They were not domineering or loveless men, nor were their homes the training ground for passive citizenry in an age of political absolutism. From prenatal care to graveside grief, they expressed deep love for their wives and children. Rather than a place where women and children were bullied by male chauvinists, the Protestant home was the center of a domestic reform movement against Renaissance antifeminism and was an attempt to resolve the crises of family life. Demanding proper marriages for all women, Martin Luther and his followers suppressed convents and cloisters as the chief institutions of womankind's sexual repression, cultural deprivation, and male clerical domination. Consent, companionship, and mutual respect became the watchwords of marriage. And because they did, genuine divorce and remarriage became possible among Christians for the first time.

This graceful book restores humanity to the Reformation family and to family history.

Rescuing the premodern family from the grim picture many historians have given us of life in early Europe, "Ancestors" offers a major reassessment of a crucial aspect of European history--and tells a story of age-old domesticity inextricably linked, and surprisingly similar, to our own.

An elegant summa on family life in Europe past, this compact and powerful book extends and completes a project begun with Steven Ozment's "When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe" (Harvard). Here Ozment, the leading historian of the family in the middle centuries, replaces the often miserable depiction of premodern family relations with a delicately nuanced portrait of a vibrant and loving social group. Mining the records of families' private lives--from diaries and letters to fiction and woodcuts--Ozment shows us a preindustrial family not very different from the later family of high industry that is generally viewed as the precursor to the sentimental nuclear family of today.

In "Ancestors," we see the familiar pattern of a domestic wife and working father in a home in which spousal and parental love were amply present: parents cherished their children, wives were helpmeets in providing for the family, and the genders were nearly equal. Contrary to the abstractions of history, parents then--as now--were sensitive to the emotional and psychological needs of their children, treated them with affection, and gave them a secure early life and caring preparation for adulthood.

As it recasts familial history, "Ancestors" resonates beyond its time, revealing how much the story of the premodern family has to say to a modern society that finds itself in the throes of a family crisis.