Living I Was Your Plague

Roper's book proves that a rigorously scholarly work can also be a pleasure to read. ---Dan Hitchens, The Times Through its thematic approach this collection says much that could not be said in the inevitably heroic format of the biography. It provides insights that will shape the reader's experience of every future encounter with Luther. It integrates visual and material culture brilliantly throughout, arguing that from Cranach's early portraits to Playmobil's bestselling Luther figurine, images must be central to our interpretation of the Reformation. And it offers a critical reflection - wonderfully personal in places - on the experience of writing biography and living as a historian through a period of intense public interest. At a moment at which tensions over race and heritage have coalesced around public representations of historical men this collection provides a moral compass for those seeking to write the histories of heroes with dark sides. ---Bridget Heal, History Today After an outpouring of books about Luther at the time of the quicentenary, one could have been forgiven for thinking. . . that there wasn't much of interest left to be said. In her ambition to tackle together the life and the legend, and her avowed determination to appraise Luther in a thorougly Lutheran spirit of anti-authoritarianism, Lyndal Roper has triumphantly demonstrated the contrary. ---Peter Marshall, The Tablet [Living I Was Your Plague] may unsettle in ways that open diligent readers to new vision. The book accomplishes something that few of the books about Luther occasioned by the 2017 anniversary accomplished: it sees Luther with fresh eyes and shows us why we need to wrestle with his legacy. ---Vincent Evener, Christian Century Roper questions Luther's character and legacy with the same anti-authoritarianism that animated her subject, combining acuity with wit and levity, just as Luther did - though with fewer obscenities. But it is those obscenities that Roper, Regius Professor of History at the University of Oxford, has in mind, as she grapples with how to understand an intellectual in the context of their whole self, conscious and unconscious, warts and all. ---Suzannah Lipscomb, Financial Times Intelligent and absorbing ---Sean Sheehan, The Prisma