Brand Luther & Vatican Website
New communication technology can have a significant, long term effect. This is well illustrated in Andrew Pettegree’s book ‘Brand Luther: 1517, Printing, and the Making of the Reformation.’ That book’s cover has the summary, “HOW AN UNHERALDED MONK Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe—and Started the Protestant Reformation.”
Pettegree’s way of looking at Luther and his times is also interesting to me because I think folks are underestimating the significance of the Vatican website (for an example page: https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/homilies/2025.index.html) where homilies, speeches, and other documents are regularly posted with translations into Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish. There are also occasionally translations into other languages, for example Croatian, Latin, and Chinese. These translations also include a Multimedia link which has video and photos and, for masses for example, a libretto bulletin of the Mass in Latin, English, and another language (for example, here is the Portuguese multimedia page for the June 29th Feast of Saints Peter and Paul: https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/pt/events/event.dir.html/content/vaticanevents/pt/2025/6/29/pietro-e-paolo.html).
No one else has anything approaching this level of communication. Granted, the communications can be ignored; however, for any of the Eastern Orthodox churches or Protestant ecclesial bodies there is next to nothing out there to be ignored! Browse around the Vatican website and you will see what I mean. We are still in the early days of internet technology; however Pettegree’s book and in particular chapter 6 which is also titled ‘Brand Luther’ suggests that the Vatican’s website will, over time, be more influential than is currently recognized.
Chapter six of Pettegree’s book has a section on Luther’s significant alliance with publisher Lucas Cranach who ‘played an instrumental role in the Wittenberg publishing industry…Cranach’s exquisite work now adorned pamphlets that might sell for no more than a few pence. And what frames these are. Cranach brought to this new engagement with book design the accumulated experience of one of Germany’s most capable and imaginative artistic entrepreneurs (page 158).’
Andrew Pettegree’s book ‘Brand Luther’ is about much more than publishing technology, of course. However, the focus on technology makes it especially interesting to me. Dr Pettegree is Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews (the oldest university in Scotland and, following the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the third-oldest university in the English-speaking world [Wikipedia]).
The back cover of the paperback edition summarizes:
Luther came of age with the printing press, an invention with world-changing power that had not yet been fully exploited. Noted historian Andrew Pettegree shows us a new side of Luther, not just as a great theologian, but as the world’s first master of mass communication. His pamphlets, written in colloquial German and enlivened by the distinctive imagery of artist Lucas Cranach, spread like wildfire, attracting countless imitators and winning the battle of ideas. Published on the eve of the Reformation’s 500th anniversery, Brand Luther fuses the history of religion, of printing, and of capitalism into one enthralling story.