Written in the 1840’s, this book was long recognized as the finest biography of Martin Luther available. As well as containing remarkable insights into the man, Martin Luther, this volume also presents a survey of the ecclesiastical, political, and social events leading up to the Reformation, the atmosphere in which it took place, and the part played by men like Luther. The Life and Times of Martin Luther is a masterly portrayal of the motives, beliefs, and actions of one of the men God used to break the chains of Rome in the sixteenth century. His words and life still speak to us today.

Few figures in history have defined their time as dramatically as Martin Luther. And few books have captured the spirit of such a figure as truly as this robust and eloquent life of Luther. A highly regarded historian and biographer and a gifted novelist and playwright, Richard Marius gives us a dazzling portrait of the German reformer--his inner compulsions, his struggle with himself and his God, the gestation of his theology, his relations with contemporaries, and his responses to opponents. Focusing in particular on the productive years 1516-1525, Marius' detailed account of Luther's writings yields a rich picture of the development of Luther's thought on the great questions that came to define the Reformation. Marius follows Luther from his birth in Saxony in 1483, during the reign of Frederick III, through his schooling in Erfurt, his flight to an Augustinian monastery and ordination to the outbreak of his revolt against Rome in 1517, the Wittenberg years, his progress to Worms, his exile in the Wartburg, and his triumphant return to Wittenberg. Throughout, Marius pauses to acquaint us with pertinent issues: the question of authority in the church, the theology of penance, the timing of Luther's Reformation breakthrough, the German peasantry in 1525, Muntzer's revolutionaries, the whys and hows of Luther's attack on Erasmus. In this personal, occasionally irreverent, always humane reconstruction, Luther emerges as a skeptic who hated skepticism and whose titanic wrestling with the dilemma of the desire for faith and the omnipresence of doubt and fear became an augury for the development of the modern religious consciousness of the West. In all of this, he also represents tragedy, with the goodness of his works overmatched by their calamitous effects on religion and society.

A man of unswerving faith, rooted in his own Lutheran tradition yet deeply committed to helping enrich a pluralist society, Martin Marty brings to powerful life the devout Reformation figure whose despair for a perilous world, felt anew in our own times, drove him to a ceaseless search for assurance of God's love.

From Luther's conversion to his nailing of the 95 theses to the Wittenberg chapel door, history jumps off the page through the vibrant illustrations of renowned paper artist Agostino Traini.

Famous for setting in motion the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther is often lifted high as a hero or condemned as a rebel. But underneath it all, he was a man of flesh and blood, with a deep longing to live for God. This biography by respected Reformation scholar Herman Selderhuis captures Luther in his original context and follows him on his spiritual journey, from childhood through the Reformation to his influential later years. Combining Luther's own words with engaging narrative designed to draw the reader into Luther's world, this spiritual biography brings to life the complex and dynamic personality that forever changed the history of the church.