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Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet. By Lyndal Roper. New York: Random, 2018. xxiii + 592 pp. $20.00 paper.
In her former books, Lyndal Roper focused her attention on women and the body in early modern history. The body, in different expressions, plays a central role in Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet, where Roper attempts to show how the complex elements of physical and emotional disorders had a major effect on Luther's teachings.
Questions about the body lay at the heart of Christian worship. Andreas Karlstadt (1486–1541), a theologian at the University of Wittenberg, claimed, among other things, that eating the sacramental bread was no more than an act of commemoration and that Christ's presence in the Eucharist was spiritual and not physical. Luther could not tolerate Karlstadt's denial that Christ's body was literally and physically present in the Eucharist, just as he condemned the concepts of Ulrich Zwingli and others who attributed to the sacrament only a symbolic significance. Luther fought all of them zealously and, in the process, not only lost associates and partners but also accumulated enemies.
Roper argues that the dispute was rooted in the traditional distinction between flesh and spirit to which Luther's opponents adhered while Luther failed to perceive a complete separation between the two. Roper explains: “Whatever else he was, he was no killjoy. He saw sexuality as sinful but only in the way that all our actions are sinful, and this perspective freed him to be remarkably positive about the body and physical experience” (410). Thus, Luther believed that having sex was positive and right in the eyes of God within the framework of marriage and family. On several occasions “he had advised women who could not have children with their husbands to have children with the husbands’ brother secretly,...