Luther as Heretic

M. Patrick Graham is the Margaret A. Pitts Professor Emeritus of Theological Bibliography at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University, and coeditor of The Hebrew Bible Today (1998) and Philipp Melanchthon (1497-1560) and the Commentary (1997).> David Bagchi is the Senior Lecturer in Early Modern & Ecclesiastical History and Co-Director of the Andrew Marvell Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Hull. He is coeditor of The Cambridge Companion to Reformation Theology (2004) and author of Luther's Earliest Opponents (1991).

The publication of Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses in 1517 immediately elicited responses from dozens of Roman Catholics in Germany and beyond. While Luther's works and those of his leading supporters have been available in English translation for many years, those of most of his Catholic opponents have not. In order to address this imbalance, win a fairer hearing for the Catholic opposition, and make it possible for students to understand both sides of the sixteenth-century religious debates, translators have drawn on the rich resources of the Kessler Reformation Collection at the Pitts Theology Library to present here introductions to and translations of ten Catholic pamphlets. The volume begins with an essay sketching the larger background for these publications. The editors' hope is that this book will prove useful for teaching and research and will foster a deeper understanding of the sixteenth-century theological discussions by allowing today's readers to hear voices that have been mostly silent in the English-speaking world for centuries.