Print

PREFACE This book was born over dinner one evening at the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference annual meeting. Raymond Waddington and I were chatting about our current research, and I made a side comment about no matter where one turned in the Reformation in Germany, one ran right smack into Philipp of Hesse. I fl ippantly said, “He’s the Refor- mation’s Forrest Gump, he’s just everywhere.” Months went by and then I got an e-mail from Ray saying he thought the idea of a book about the Reformation that used Philipp’s life as a guide could be a really interest- ing way to approach the era. Thus was born the idea for this book. It is not, strictly speaking, a biography of Philipp of Hesse nor is it a con- densed history of the Reformation. Instead, Philipp serves as our guide through the Reformation. From Martin Luther’s famous encounter with Holy Roman Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms in 1521 through every other major Reformation event in the Holy Roman Empire for the next thirty years, Philipp was there. He became one of Luther’s staunchest defenders—and his own frailties eventually put Luther’s wider project at risk. Philipp’s life is a window into the world of the European Reforma- tion. Not every aspect of the Reformation is covered here, because he didn’t encounter all the different aspects of the Reformation, but he lived through enough to paint a fairly rich portrait of the era. Thus, this book is not for the specialist or those who have spent their lives reading and writing about the sixteenth century. It is meant for those who have heard of the Reformation, or Martin Luther, or John Calvin and would like to learn more. To that end, footnotes were kept to a very bare minimum. Almost all foreign language quotations have been trans- lated, though a few individual words have been left in the original and