Turning Point #3: Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation s A.D. NAME: DATE DUE: PERIOD: SCORE: /10. Essential Question for TP #3

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1 Turning Point #3: Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation s D. NAME: DATE DUE: PERIOD: SCORE: /10 Essential Question for TP #3 Explain the causes of the Protestant Reformation that were brought on by Martin Luther and those that the Catholic Church brought upon themselves.

2 Directions: Grading: TP #3 Vocab and Ideas Homework Please follow the directions given in each section. Much of this homework should be done in the first 5 minutes of each class period as an entry task. If you are not finished with the homework by Thursday night you must have it finished before Friday. SCORE: /2 Vocabulary: Define each word using the text and notes contained in this packet. Please write the definition exactly as you find it contained here. 1. Indulgences 2. Reformation 3. Simony 4. Excommunication The Protestant Reformation Score: /2 A against abuses by the Catholic Church and a movement intended to guide the Church back to its purpose. I. Europeans Before the 1400s Religion DOMINATES the mind of people in the middle ages B. Most people are illiterate (3-5% can read) C. Uneducated, believing in superstition and uninformed about the world D. Fear of Hell and damnation is a MAJOR concern of the people of Europe

3 II. Foundations for Reform - Increased literacy over time B. - C. Humanist thinkers emphasize a focus on this present life rather than the afterlife III. Causes of the Reformation Examples: The Spanish Inquisition Attempt to stamp out incorrect belief systems by trial and torture 3. B. Catholic Church interested in income ($) Selling of indulgences - IV. Martin Luther vs. the Catholic Church B Luther posts a list of 95 theses (criticisms of the church) on the Wittenburg Church door 2.

4 3. C. 1. Through means of mass printing, Luther s 95 theses AND his criticism of Leo X spreads rapidly 2. a. b V. Effects of Reformation B. - Lutherans - Church of England - Puritans - Baptists - Presbyterians - Quakers VI. Conclusion 1. Church interested in 2. Church interested in 3. B. Citation: VanDerPuy, Abraham. "The Protestant Reformation." Auburn High School. 1 Oct Lecture.

5 Martin Luther: Part I Score: /2 1. Going to Rome was a very special privilege for Luther because it was the capitol of the Roman Church. 2. The Church may have taught that was at the root of all evil, but in reality the Church dealt in millions of ducats (dollars). 3. The chance to buy time off from purgatory was an extremely attractive offer for the faithful and very for the Church. 4. Luther threw himself into his work at Wittenburg, studying the standard Latin texts of the Church, but also reading them in the new and Hebrew editions. 5. What Luther is saying is that you don t need the institution of the. You don t need the intercession (prayer) of priests. You don t need these great Papal ceremonies to get to heaven. This whole thing is not about you and the Church, it s about you and. 6. To refill his treasuries, Leo X turned to one of the Church s most proven methods for raising money, the selling of, charging the faithful for entry into heaven. 7. Luther s outspoken work was copied down and set for printing. The 95 theses would spread like wildfire across. 8. Luther had never intended for his theses to create the tumult that they did. 9. People who were cut off from the church and handed over to death were often killed without the shedding of blood, which usually meant or drowning.

6 Martin Luther: Part II Score: /2 10. The papal excommunication should have sealed Luther s fate because it could place him open to by any secular or church authority. 11. Luther is now arguing that the powers of Germany should stand up to Rome and the. 12. Printed along with Luther s texts, for those who could not, were visual parallels, graphic woodcuts showing the Pope luxuriating in corruption. 13. According to the Catholic Church, it was only through these special rituals that a man could hope to achieve salvation and get to. 14. When Luther arrived in Worms, one of the papal representatives reported that 9 out of 10 people were yelling Long Live! The tenth was yelling Death to the Pope! 15. Luther s statement (at the Diet of Worms) really marks the dawn of a new era. The era of the ordinary person standing up against. 16. Luther s translation of the Bible into German would make the word of God accessible to the common. 17. A series of peasant uprisings flared up across the country. These were inspired by Luther s calls for freedom of, but were now seeking social freedom for Germany s peasants. Citation: Martin Luther. Dir. Cassian Harrison. PBS Home Video, DVD.

7 Social Media in the 16 th Century: How Luther Went Viral Citation: Standage, Tom. "Social Media in the 16th Century: How Luther Went Viral." The Economist. Dec It is a familiar-sounding tale: after years of anger and discontent a new form of media gives opponents of a government a new way to express their views, register their support for one another and coordinate their actions. The protesters message spreads virally through social networks like Facebook and Twitter, making it impossible to suppress and highlighting the extent of public support for revolution. The combination of improved technology and social networks is a catalyst for social change where previous efforts had failed. That s what happened recently in Arab countries who most recently overthrew the dictatorships of Quaddafi in Libya and Mubarak in Egypt, among others. It s also what happened during the Reformation, nearly 500 years ago, when Martin Luther and his allies took the new media of their day pamphlets, ballads and woodcuts and circulated them through social networks to promote their message of religious reform. Scholars have long debated the importance of printed media, spoken word, and images in rallying popular support for the Reformation. Some have championed the central role of the printing press, a relatively new technology at the time invented by Johann Gutenberg in 1450 in Mainz, Germany. Opponents of this view emphasize the importance of preaching and other forms of spoken transmission. More recently historians have highlighted the role of media as a means of social signaling and co-coordinating public opinion in the Reformation. Now the internet offers a new perspective on this long-running debate, namely that the important factor was not the printing press itself (which had been around since the 1450s), but the wider system of media sharing along social networks what is called social media today. Luther, like the Arab revolutionaries, grasped the dynamics of this new media environment very quickly, and saw how it could spread his message. Status Update from Martin Luther The start of the Reformation is usually dated to Luther s nailing of his 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg in October of The 95 Theses were propositions written in Latin that he wished to discuss, in the academic custom of the day, in an open debate at the university. Luther was outraged by the behavior of Johann Tetzel who was selling indulgences to raise money to fund the pet project of his boss, Pope Leo X: the reconstruction of St Peter s Basilica in Rome. Hand over your money and you can ensure that your dead relatives are not stuck in purgatory, went Tetzel s sales pitch. This gross commercialization of religion, encapsulated in Tetzel s slogan As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, so the soul from purgatory springs was, to Luther, a glaring symptom of the need for broad reform. Pinning a list of propositions to the church door, which doubled as the university notice board, was a standard way to announce a public debate. Although they were written in Latin, the 95 Theses caused an immediate stir, first within academic circles in Wittenberg and then farther afield. In December 1517 printed editions of the theses, in the form of pamphlets and broadsheets, appeared simultaneously in other large German cities, paid for by Luther s friends to whom he had sent copies. German translations, which could be read by a wider public, soon followed and quickly spread throughout the German-speaking lands. Luther s friend Friedrich Myconius later wrote that hardly 14 days had passed when these theses were known throughout Germany and within four weeks almost all of Christendom was familiar with them. The unintentional but rapid spread of the 95 Theses alerted Luther to the way in which media passed from one person to another could quickly reach a wide audience. They are printed and circulated far beyond my expectation, he wrote in March 1518 to a publisher in Nuremberg who had published a German translation of the theses. But writing in scholarly Latin and then translating it into German was not the best way to address the wider public. Luther wrote that he should have spoken far differently and more distinctly had I known what was going to happen. For the publication later that month of his Sermon on Indulgences and Grace, he switched to German, avoiding regional vocabulary to ensure that his words were intelligible in all areas of Germany. The pamphlet, an instant hit, is regarded by many as the true starting point of the Reformation. The media environment that Luther had shown himself so adept at managing had much in common with today s online atmosphere of blogs, social networks and discussion threads. It was a decentralized system whose participants took care of distribution, deciding collectively which messages to amplify through sharing and recommendation. Modern media theorists refer to participants in such systems as a networked public, rather than an audience, since they do

8 more than just consume information. Luther would pass the text of a new pamphlet to a friendly printer (no money changed hands) and then wait for it to ripple through the network of printing centers across Germany. Unlike larger books, which took weeks or months to produce, a pamphlet could be printed in a day or two. Copies of the initial edition, which cost about the same as a chicken, would first spread throughout the town where it was printed. Luther s sympathizers recommended it to their friends and booksellers promoted it. Travelling merchants, traders and preachers would then carry copies to other towns, and if they sparked sufficient interest, local printers would quickly produce their own editions, in batches of 1,000 or so, in the hope of cashing in on the buzz. A popular pamphlet would thus spread quickly without its author s involvement. As with Likes and retweets today, the number of reprints serves as an indicator of a given item s popularity. Luther s pamphlets were the most sought after; a contemporary remarked that they were not so much sold as seized. His first pamphlet written in German, the Sermon on Indulgences and Grace, was reprinted 14 times in 1518 alone, in print runs of at least 1,000 copies each time. Of the 6,000 different pamphlets that were published in German-speaking lands between 1520 and 1526, some 1,700 were editions of a few dozen works by Luther. In all, some 6-7 million pamphlets were printed in the first decade of the Reformation, more than a quarter of them Luther s. A Multimedia Campaign It was not just words that travelled along the social networks of the Reformation era, but music and images too. The news ballad, like the pamphlet, was a relatively new form of media. It set a poetic and often exaggerated description of contemporary events to a familiar tune so that it could be easily learned, sung and taught to others. News ballads often deliberately mashed up a pious melody with secular or even profane lyrics. They were distributed in the form of printed lyric sheets, with a note to indicate which tune they should be sung to. Once learned they could spread even among the illiterate through the practice of communal singing. Woodcuts were another form of propaganda. The combination of bold graphics with a smattering of text, printed as a broadsheet, could convey messages to the illiterate or semi-literate and serve as a visual aid for preachers. Luther remarked that without images we can neither think nor understand anything. Some religious woodcuts were elaborate, with complex allusions and layers of meaning that would only have been apparent to the well-educated. Some were astonishingly crude and graphic, such as The Origin of the Monks (see picture), showing three devils excreting a pile of monks. The best of them were produced by Luther s friend Lucas Cranach. Amid the barrage of pamphlets, ballads and woodcuts, public opinion was clearly moving in Luther s favor. Idle chatter and inappropriate books were corrupting the people, fretted one bishop. Daily there is a veritable downpour of Lutheran tracts in German and Latin nothing is sold here except the tracts of Luther, lamented Alexander, Leo X s envoy to Germany, in Most of the 60 or so clerics who rallied to the pope s defense did so in academic and impenetrable Latin, the traditional language of theology, rather than in German. Where Luther s works spread like wildfire, their pamphlets fizzled because average citizens could not read them. Attempts at censorship failed, too. Printers in Leipzig were banned from publishing or selling anything by Luther or his allies, but material printed elsewhere still flowed into the city. The city council complained to the Duke of Saxony that printers faced losing house, home, and all their livelihood because that which one would gladly sell, and for which there is demand, they are not allowed to have or sell. What they had was lots of Catholic pamphlets, but what they have in over-abundance is desired by no one and cannot even be given away. Luther s enemies likened the spread of his ideas to a sickness. The papal note threatening Luther with excommunication in 1520 said its aim was to cut off the advance of this plague and cancerous disease so it will not spread any further. The Edict of Worms in 1521 warned that the spread of Luther s message had to be prevented, otherwise the whole German nation, and later all other nations, will be infected by this same disorder. But it was too late the infection had taken hold in Germany and beyond. To use modern terms, Luther s message had gone viral.

9 Response to Social Media in the 16 th Century: How Luther Went Viral Score: /2 1. According to the author, what was the important factor in spreading Luther s Reformation ideas? 2. Describe Luther s argument/concern with the Catholic Church? 3. Describe why Luther s writings were so popular and why they gained a wide audience. 4. Besides pamphlets, what were other forms of media that Luther used to convey his message about the Church and Reformation? Why were they needed?