The public Reformation began in 1517, but Luther’s private Reformation had been underway for nearly a decade by that time.
The 95 Theses, unveiled at the end of October 1517, struggled at first to gain attention. They were composed in Latin, and by the end of the year, had been printed, and enjoyed at least a limited distribution within Germany.
News about Luther spread quickly by the standards of his time, but slowly by the standards of the twenty-first century.
There were two audiences for the 95 Theses. On the one hand, there were academics: scholars who studied and analyzed theology. On the other hand, there were church officials, who would be concerned about the practical impact which the 95 Theses might have on the organizational operation of the institution.
Significant response to the 95 Theses didn’t start until more than six months after their appearance. By the second half of 1518, Luther was getting some attention.
When one considers that mass communication in Luther’s era consisted of printing a document, and giving copies of it to someone who’d take them to other towns by means of a horse-drawn wagon, then the speed, or lack thereof, becomes apparent. A trip from the university in Wittenberg, to which Luther had moved in 1508, to Rome would take three to four weeks. The shorter trip to Mainz from Wittenberg would take a little over a week.
Jonathan Kay suggests that the slower communication not only allowed Luther’s thought to reach maturity before it captured the attention of all Europe, but it may also have spared Luther’s life and protected the fledgling Reformation movement:
News still traveled by horse and cart in the 16th century, and this fact was critical for Luther. Indeed, it probably saved his life and his ideas — because it meant that he could win over the town before the district, his fellow monks before strangers, Germans before Italians.
As the Reformation movement developed over the following years, Luther was simultaneously addressing many different audiences — well beyond the two sets of readers who were the initial targets of his 1517 set of theses. Luther was both the most prolific and the most popular author of his time. His books were printed in greater quantities than other authors. He wrote more books than other authors. Even his enemies were eager to read his publications as soon as they appeared.
Among the various audiences for his books were different factions within the church, different academic and scholarly movements, and various political and economic groups. The fact that communication proceeded more slowly in Luther’s era allowed him to respond to each of these audiences, and tailor his messages to their concerns.
Jonathan Kay writes:
Even within the Roman Catholic Church, the faith was then divided between feuding orders: Carthusians, Augustinians, Dominicans, Franciscans. Luther had no hope of taking on all of these at once. What sympathy he attracted in his early days was owed, in part, to the intellectual and social capital he’d earned from those who knew him personally and had heard him preach. Many of these friends and admirers took extraordinary risks to defend him, which in turn gave others courage to do the same — a cycle that gradually expanded his sphere of support outward from Wittenberg.
The slow-motion communication of the era was matched by slow-motion responses and slow-motion decision-making. Roman Catholic opposition to Luther, which would eventually become fierce, took a while to go into motion.
This was another factor which allowed Luther more time, not only to refine his views, but to gain support for the movement.
By the time the church took serious action against Luther — when it handed the matter off to the secular government of the emperor at the Diet of Worms in 1521 — Luther already had a group of supporters and a reputation among the people. His opponents had waited too long, and his movement had gained momentum.
It wasn’t until early 1518 that Pope Leo X looked at the 95 theses. Having limited access to timely German news, he seriously underestimated their significance and passed off the matter to the Augustinians for resolution at their next annual meeting. Even after Luther finally received a summons from the pope, it took months for anything to come of it. Following a complex series of long-distance negotiations involving Prince Frederick III and the pontiff, papal legate Cardinal Cajetan formally examined Luther at Augsburg. But that was not done until mid-October, more than a year after Luther published his theses.
The long pauses, of months or weeks, between Luther’s publications and the responses of his opponents, gave Luther time to think, strategize, gain allies, and formulate reasoned responses to written attacks.
Many historians rightly point to the printing press, and Luther’s use of it, as the mass communication tool that allowed the Reformation to succeed. It is also true that Luther benefited from the not-too-fast pace of communication in his era. In the end, as Jonathan Kay proposes, “Nobody listened to Luther at first. That’s why he succeeded.”
