The Rise of the Reformation Movement

Reflecting on Events a Few Years after the rise of the Reformation, the Dominican monk Johann Lindner held Elector Friedrich the Wise (1463–1525) to blame for developments in Germany, for in his opinion it was the University of Wittenberg, founded by Friedrich in 1502, that had served as the seedbed for the growth of the new faith. In suggesting this Lindner drew attention to an important fact about the origins of the Reformation in Germany: it was a creation of the university. It was the university — its teachers, its forums, its networks, its institutions, its cultural matrix, and its ideas — that provided the context for the rise of the movement. And it was the unique conditions of the University of Wittenberg in particular, this small and seemingly insignificant institution on the banks of the Elbe, that made possible a type of laboratory, or Experimentierfeld, for the evolution of a new faith. For those caught up in the early stages of the Reformation, Friedrich the Wise among them, it was not just the figure of Martin Luther that dominated the movement but the entire like-minded community of scholars and clergymen in Wittenberg. In his preface to St. Augustine’s De spiritu et litera, for instance, Andreas Rudolph Bodenstein von Karlstadt (ca. 1477–1541), Luther’s faculty colleague, congratulated Wittenberg students that years of collaborative preaching and reading had led to the rediscovery of the “true faith” at their university. Johann Lang (1488–1548) thought in similar terms, as did Johannes Dölsch (1485–1523) and Nikolaus von Amsdorf (1483–1565), all university colleagues and all devoted supporters of Luther. Indeed, even Luther himself spoke of “theologia nostra” (our theology) after his emergence as the leader of the movement, and he continued to think of the university as the birthplace of the faith. As he reminded the Franciscans of Jüterbog on 15 May 1519, his teachings had already been the subject of debates, lectures, readings, sermons, and disputations for over three years, and in that time they had not yet been revealed as mistaken or erroneous. In its origins the Reformation was the creation of university culture in Wittenberg.