Where Was the Pope?
One of the few things we know about Luther’s pilgrimage to Rome is that he didn’t meet the Pope. There’s no reason that he would have even tried. His business was an internal matter within the Order of Augustinian Hermits, … Continue reading
Elsewhere in 1510
It’s easy to overlook, when diving into the details of the Reformation, that a lot of other very important things were happening at the same time. There’s the Renaissance, of course, whose capital—Florence—we’ve just visited. Boticelli died the same year … Continue reading
The Via Francigena
The Via Francigena Nearly everyone who has been struck by the travel bug or is menaced with wanderlust has heard of the Camino de Santiago, or St. James Way. And the fact that the Camino has such an ancient pedigree … Continue reading
Navigating a Pilgrimage
Toward the end of our preparations, we were lucky to have some help in identifying Luther’s route to Rome–one that changed our original prospective route along the Santiago de Compostela for the first few days to go through Ilmenau and … Continue reading
Crossing the Alps with Nothing but a Cloak, Staff, and Sandals
The people of the Middle Ages were not fond of mountains. It takes a leisured class with energy to waste and life to spend to appreciate inaccessible rocks where nothing grows, places where it is always cold and snowy and … Continue reading
Rustic Brown
It’s hard to imagine, assaulted as we are by bright colors and flashing screens, the dullness of life in Luther’s era. No, there was plenty of character. But there were also lots of browns, grays, and greens. Flowers lightened up … Continue reading
Pilgrimages and Santiago de Compostela
Today we leave the path we have followed for much of our trip through Germany, the Camino. That is, the Camino de Santiago, or Jakobsweg, as it’s called here. The map of sixteenth-century Europe is criss-crossed with routes to Compostela, … Continue reading
Inventing German
We’re now deep in the heart of Bavaria. The language here is not like that of where we started in Thuringia, where High German is spoken. Here the “r”s are trilled with the tongue, not the throat, and the vocabulary … Continue reading
Rats, Walls, and Needlemakers: Welcome to Late Medieval Cities
Thomas Hobbes’s famously depressing description of life in a “state of nature” as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” has often been applied to describe life in the Middle Ages. From our vantage point, sitting on sofas in climate-controlled homes … Continue reading
The Liturgical Calendar and Fasting
Luther was not only used to being cold and uncomfortable, he was used to being hungry. Fasting has a long tradition in Christianity, going back to Jesus’s temptation in the desert. Hermits of the Eastern church in particular were impressive … Continue reading
Designing Bibles
Today we’re in Coburg, where Luther lived for six months in 1530 during the Diet of Augsburg—his friends wouldn’t let him attend, worried for his safety—and worked on his translation of the Old Testament while hanging around the castle. (If … Continue reading
Luther Was Not a Monk
The decidedly urban character of Erfurt meant another important thing for our story: the presence of friars. Luther was not a monk, properly speaking, but a friar or better a hermit of Saint Augustine. He’s responsible for this error, as … Continue reading
Erfurt and the World
Used as we are to the modern megalopolis, we might at first think that Luther’s Erfurt, home to some 20,000 people at the time, was a country backwater. This was not the case. Precise population figures about the era are hard … Continue reading
Why Luther Went to Rome
Motivation is one of the most difficult things to determine, even for people who are alive, as any therapist will tell you. The shelves of Luther biographies have accumulated more than their fair share of psychoanalysts. And not without reason. … Continue reading
Scenic Trails and Pilgrims’ Routes
I grew up hiking in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Roads and buildings are relatively new in my home state of Washington. A few date back a hundred years. Most were constructed in the last fifty. And so when you go to the woods, you get away from civilization. There really isn’t much of a choice, and we generally don’t mind it that way. Continue reading
