Thomas Kaufmann, the leading European scholar of the Reformation, argues that the main motivations behind the Reformation rest in religion itself. The Reformation began far from Europe's traditional political, economic, and cultural power centres, and yet it threw the whole continent into turmoil. There has been intense speculation over the last century focusing on the political and social causes that lay at the root of this revolution. Thomas Kaufmann, one of the world's leading experts on the Reformation, sees the most important drivers for what happened in religion itself. The reformers were principally concerned with the question of salvation. It could all have ended with the pope's condemnation of Luther and his teaching. But Luther believed the pope was condemned to eternal damnation, and this was the root cause of the great split to come. Hatred of the damned drove people to take up arms, while countless numbers left their homes far behind and carried the Reformation message to the furthest corners of the earth in the hope of salvation. In The Saved and the Damned, Thomas Kaufmann presents a dramatic overview of how Europe was transformed by the seismic shock of the Reformation—and of how its aftershocks reverberate right down to the present day.

Martin Luther, the Augustinian friar who set the Protestant Reformation in motion with his famous Ninety-Five Theses, was a man of extremes on many fronts. He was both hated and honoured, both reviled as a heretic and lauded as a kind of second Christ. He was both a quiet, solitary reader and interpreter of the Bible and the first media-star of history, using the printing press to reach many of his contemporaries and become the most-read theologian of the sixteenth century. Thomas Kaufmann's concise biography highlights the two conflicting "natures" of Martin Luther, depicting Luther's earthiness as well as his soaring theological contributions, his flaws as well as his greatness. Exploring the close correlation between Luther's Reformation theology and his historical context, A Short Life of Martin Luther serves as an ideal introduction to the life and thought of the most important figure in the Protestant Reformation.

This volume combines a number of approaches to the history of the conflict between religions and cultures. Contributions from history, art and legal history, as well as Judaistic studies deal with new conceptual considerations on the history of perceptions in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern period; above all interpretations of non-European religions, of paganism in their own European tradition, and how ecclesiastic law treated a oenon-believersa in relation to the heretics. The second volume is in preparation.

Ulrich Bubenheimer rekonstruiert die dramatischen Vorgänge der frühen Wittenberger Reformation auf breiter Quellenbasis und unter Nutzung z.T. bisher unbekannter Quellen. Dabei arbeitet er heraus, dass die vielfältigen Interaktionsprozesse zwischen den führenden Wittenberger Theologen, den Institutionen der Stadt, des Allerheiligenstiftes und der Universität in der Kernphase 1521/22 keineswegs chaotisch vonstattengingen, wie es eine an den Urteilen Luthers orientierte Historiographie, die von "Aufruhr", "Unruhe" und "Chaos" sprach, voraussetzte. Bubenheimer kann plausibel machen, dass es berechtigt ist, die sogenannte "Wittenberger Bewegung" als "Wittenberger Stadtreformation" zu rekonstruieren. Dabei zeigt sich, dass die in den Personen Luthers, Karlstadts und Müntzers repräsentierten Reformationstypen - der landesherrliche, der gemeindereformatorisch-pazifistische und der kommunalistisch-militante - in nuce bereits in den Diskussionen und Aktionen der Jahre 1521/22 angelegt waren.