14
I have this peculiar desire to write, even though I cannot decide on subject or recipient. This unceasing desire is for pen, paper and ink, which give me greater pleasure than either rest or sleep. In brief, I ache and decline when I am not writing.
Francesco Petrarch
Luther and King Henry VIII of England had already written on each other’s views and it had not been a friendly exchange. A decade earlier, in 1520, Luther had written a critique of the Church’s use of its seven sacraments in On The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, in which he argued that the priesthood could not be the means of salvation. Henry VIII had replied to Luther’s argument with a tract of his own. Helped by his adviser Sir Thomas More, Henry pennedAssertio Septem Sacramentorum, a defence of all seven of the sacraments. For his loyalty, the Pope rewarded Henry with the title ‘Defender of the Faith’. Luther had replied to Henry’s defence acerbically:
Martin Luther, minister at Wittenberg, by the grace of God…
Henry, King of England, by the disgrace of God…
Nevertheless, Henry would later turn to Luther in his quest for a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, his first wife. He was probably less troubled by the doctrine of the Mass than he claimed: the book he took to Mass still carries the flirtatious messages he would write to Anne Boleyn during the ceremony. The Bible, on the other hand, might just offer Henry a means to divorce Catherine and marry Anne. The Book of Leviticus in the Old Testament said a man should notmarry his brother’s wife, and Catherine had previously been married to Henry’s older brother. Henry now hoped to use this in order to have his first marriage annulled.
In 1528 the king gathered almost a hundred books relevant to his case and marked out thirty-seven for them for the royal library. He began to transform his library from a gallery of beautiful manuscripts into a working research library where lawyers and theologians could help him make the case for annulment.
This kind of library was growing more common in England; there were at least 244 significant libraries in the country in the first half of the sixteenth century, almost half of them private. Although the royal palace library at Richmond had only 150 books in 1535, the upper library in Westminster, seat of politics and the Church, had a recorded 1,450 books a decade later. (The universities in both Oxford and Cambridge established small libraries, Oxford in the fourteenth and Cambridge in the fifteenth century, which then began to expand, although in the case of Cambridge significant growth only began in the sixteenth century.) Still, England remained limited in terms of library stocks in the mid-sixteenth century – the royal library at Fontainebleau outside Paris, on the other hand, held 3,000 volumes.
When Henry could not sway Rome, he turned to seek Luther’s support for his annulment instead. The cleric turned, as Henry had hoped, to the Bible. But Luther delivered the wrong answer – in fact, he viewed Henry as an irreverent and inconstant self-promoter. Having failed to obtain the warrant he was looking for from either the Pope or Luther, Henry chose, in 1533, to deny the Pope’s right to contradict scripture and the following year the Act of Supremacy announced England’s break with Rome. And yet print, as much as politics, gave the move real momentum across English society.
Through the 1520s and 1530s, Europe’s greatest spur to printing was religion. All the leading English reformers – William Tyndale, Robert Barnes, Thomas Cranmer – were Lutherans, and several were in contact with Luther himself. At the end of the fifteenth century, a number of English scholars had travelled to the continent, especially to Florence, and returned home with much improved Greek, a few recent titles and translations to add to their bookshelves and a new approach to reading texts. Some of the earliest religious humanists, men like John Colet, were in favour of returning to original biblical texts but remained very much established. The reformers of the 1520s and 1530s, however, saw in the established Church not so much a series of scholastic study tools and forms of corruption that needed clearing out as fundamental errors in doctrine that denied the claims of scripture. This conviction set them on a much more dangerous collision course with Rome.
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William Tyndale was raised in a prosperous family in the Cotswolds, a region which had an evangelical heritage in Wycliffe’s Lollards and strong ties to Europe through the wool trade. Tyndale began his Bachelor of Arts at Oxford University in 1515 but was a rarity in a university with few continental students – he knew seven languages as if they were his own. In Oxford he became known as a preacher, perhaps because he was training for the clergy, or perhaps because he used the original Greek New Testament text when preparing his sermons instead of the Latin Vulgate. It was also here that he came face to face with the subjection of scripture to the interpretive lens of Rome. In 1531 he wrote sourly that:
…our holy father proveth the authority of scripture by his decrees, for the scripture is not authentic but as his decrees admit it.
It was in Cambridge, where Tyndale moved in 1517, that he met future reformers like Thomas Cranmer, Miles Coverdale and Hugh Latimer. Here Lutheran ideas were talked about more openly than by theologians than in Oxford, yet some viewed Tyndale’s learning as a threat. The local Protestant historian Richard Webb recounted that in the Gloucestershire diocese where Tyndale worked as a private tutor after his university studies, in the years 1551–3, 9 clergy were found not to know how many of Moses’ commandments there were and 33 did not know where in the Bible they could be found (some suggested Matthew’s gospel); 168 of the clergy could not repeat them, just as 10 could not even repeat the Creed and 216 could not prove it, many of them arguing that they trusted Rome and the king for its validity. Moreover, 39 of them could not locate the Lord’s Prayer in the Bible, 34 did not even know its author and 10 failed to recite it.
For the laity, the situation was far worse as they could not even understand Latin, let alone read a Bible. Latin had been the only accepted language of Church life in Western Europe for centuries. If parents taught their children the Lord’s Prayer in English, there was always the risk that they might be burnt at the stake for choosing their own tongue. Tyndale saw the problem more keenly than most, once telling a priest that his ambition was to ensure that ‘a boy that driveth the plough’ would know the scriptures better than the priest himself. As things stood, all that was available to ordinary churchgoers were gospel harmonies, a spliced selection of gospel stories where gospel content itself was minimal, stories were stretched and fresh narrative colour was added. Wycliffe’s fourteenth-century translation of the Bible was in inaccessible Middle English and there had been little interest among senior clergy in bringing the Bible itself to the laity – Tyndale failed to find an official sponsor in London for his translation project or even, as he wrote in the Prologue to his English Bible, ‘in all England’.
One reason for this reluctance was the Church hierarchy’s fear of Luther’s influence. By 1520 there was a flood of Lutheran books and tracts arriving in London from abroad and Tyndale, when he moved to the city in 1523, could hardly have missed them. There were even Lutheran booksellers. The bishop of London, Cuthbert Tunstall, wrote to Sir Thomas More warning of ‘Lutheran heresy, foster-daughter of Wycliffe’s’. Public bans and government raids followed, but old Lollard networks aided in the distribution of Lutheran works. Weavers, tailors and a whole range of tradesmen were increasingly part of the reading classes, and eager to read Luther’s works. Many tradesmen were charged with owning, reading and listening to the vernacular scriptures. A few men were even burnt at the stake for it.
Tyndale left for Germany in 1524 and spent a year in Hamburg before travelling on to Cologne. Here he found a printer, Peter Quentell, and his English New Testament began to come off the press. But he was twenty-two chapters into Matthew when a drunken boast by one of the print-shop workers alerted the authorities to the printing, and a warrant was put out for Tyndale’s arrest. He and a companion fled up the Rhine to Worms, carrying their work with them. The beginning of Tyndale’s New Testament, printed in quarto format, carried an image of St Matthew dipping his pen in an inkwell; Tyndale must have felt as though he had got little further with his long-awaited printing. But the Prologue, much of it lifted from Luther, began to circulate in England anyway, the first tract of England’s Protestant Reformation.
It was in 1526 in Worms, where just five years earlier Martin Luther had made his infamous defence, that a full Tyndale New Testament, in English, was first lifted, page by page, from the press. It was produced in the diminutive octavo format, set in the plainest type and ran to between 3,000 and 6,000 copies. In 1534 a revised edition appeared, with more than 5,000 changes. This time it was also accompanied by a panoply of woodcut-printed images. The 1534 edition was the first time Tyndale used his own name, although he had to write in his Prologue warning readers of several inexpert (and partisan) edits in the edition anonymously made by his colleague, George Joye. Tyndale later compared what Joye had done to a fox pissing in a badger’s hole. There were several pirate printings in Antwerp too.
The beauty of Tyndale’s written English lay in its limpidity. He gave new words, word-orders and phrases to the written language that have since become second nature to English-speaking peoples around the world. His choice of words was so striking, clear and stirring that they remain lodged in the Anglophone consciousness five centuries later: scapegoat; am I my brother’s keeper; a law unto themselves; man shall not live by bread alone; no man can serve two masters; ask and it shall be given you; as sheep having no shepherd; God forbid; signs of the times; the spirit is willing; fight the good fight. Often he could be direct and colloquial too, as when the serpent tells Eve she should eat the fruit in the Garden of Eden:
Then the serpent said unto the woman: ‘Tush, ye shall not die.’
Tyndale’s priority was clarity: the teachings of the apostle Paul, the lynchpin of the European Reformation, and the gospels must be understood by the common reader. As a result, he delivered popular English to his readers.
But he had not delivered it yet, of course. He was still in Worms and so too were his New Testaments. Appropriately enough, it was in the pocket-sized octavo format. Thus it carried only the briefest of Prologues, yet it was long enough for Tyndale to make his Pauline point: the path to salvation is repentance and belief, not works. Justification by faith alone was headed for England and so too was the English Bible, composed in simple, striking prose, printed on paper and bound in an edition small enough to fit in your pocket.
By March 1526 English New Testaments were streaming into England despite the bans quickly placed on them and the public burnings of Luther’s books in London. They were smuggled in oil and wine barrels, in sacks of grain, flour or wheat and in the hidden compartments of pieces of furniture. The historian Diarmaid MacCulloch estimates that, during Tyndale’s lifetime, 16,000 copies of his translation reached England, then a population of 2½ million with a primitive book market.89 Some were burnt, others were read and, judging by the well-thumbed copies that survive, probably shared and passed on until many of them began to fall apart. Tyndale had wanted to reach the common ploughboy too and, as early as 1537, Edward Foxe, bishop of Hereford, warned his fellow English bishops:
Make not yourself the laughing-stock of the world; light is sprung up, and is scattering all the clouds. The lay people know the scriptures better than many of us.
In 1529 the persecutions began under the eye of Sir Thomas More, in the form of spying on and investigating suspected Protestants. Publishers and their distributors were particular targets, if their stock was Protestant titles or English Bibles. The persecutions sparked a war of printed words between Tyndale and More. To Tyndale, however, it was the bookburnings, begun in 1527, which were most damaging. Cuthbert Tunstall, the bishop of London, was burning his New Testaments, claiming they contained 3,000 errors. The Church had come to a pretty pass; it was even burning the Word of God.
Wanted by the Church authorities in England, Tyndale travelled back to the continent, where he learnt Hebrew and worked on his translation of the Old Testament, referring all the while to Luther’s German translation too. He might have been living in Hamburg, Antwerp, Cologne or Frankfurt. He may even have been in Wittenberg, where he could easily have encountered Luther. Wittenberg, after all, was not only the engine room of Europe’s Reformation but of much free thinking. William Shakespeare’s Hamlet attended the University of Wittenberg (founded in 1502), as did his friends Horatio, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus is a resident of the city. Wherever Tyndale was, it was surely in the Lutheran heartlands, a crucible for new thinking in 1520s Europe.
In 1532, Thomas More wrote criticisms of seventeen heretical books; seven were by Tyndale, including his New Testament and his introduction to Paul’s letter to the Romans, the most significant biblical book of the Reformation. By 1530 there were reportedly 3,000 copies of Tyndale’s Practice of Prelates (which contained plenty of criticism of the clergy and the established Church) in circulation in England.90 A commentary and treatise followed in the next two years. Tyndale was a celebrity in his homeland.
In 1530 England received a delivery of fresh and pocket-sized paper-made arrivals; printed in Roman type, these were copies of Tyndale’s translation of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. Unlike the version produced by Wycliffe, who had translated from the Latin Vulgate, Tyndale’s prose was taken directly from the Hebrew. Where Wycliffe had given the medieval ‘Be made light, and made is light’, Tyndale gave his readers:
Let there be light, and there was light.
David Daniell, director of Shakespeare Studies at University College London and Tyndale’s biographer, has pointed to the impact Tyndale’s direct translations from Hebrew had on the English language, from words like ‘Passover’ to phrases like ‘let there be light’ to patterns of word order to storytelling techniques. Tyndale himself wrote that he had found Hebrew translated into English ‘a thousand times’ better than Latin, and that often he had only to translate it word by word for it to read well in his target language.91
He continued through the Old Testament to translate the books of Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Kings, Chronicles and Jonah. His feel for English coupled with his understanding of Hebrew made his translations exceptional. Tyndale’s Psalms might have been the pinnacle of them all, had he not been betrayed by a hired hand, Henry Phillips, who lured him out of his Antwerp safe house in 1535 and handed him over to the authorities. Nobody knows who Phillips was working for but Tyndale was found guilty of heresy, tied to a stake in the town of Vilvoorde outside Brussels and strangled to death before being set alight. His dying words were ‘Lord, open the king of England’s eyes.’
He could never have guessed how quickly that prayer would be answered. In 1537 Henry VIII stated that all doctrine should be argued only from scripture. The lord chancellor, Thomas Cromwell, and the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, both saw that Henry’s comment provided ample justification for authorizing an English Bible across the land for the first time. They moved quickly in their mission. That same year a new English translation had been printed in Antwerp, ascribed to Henry Matthew and called ‘Matthew’s Bible’. Cranmer wrote to Cromwell, commending the translation as the best yet. Cromwell quickly persuaded Henry to authorize it and in 1539 the ‘Great Bible’, as it was named, was peeled from the evangelical press of Richard Grafton and Edward Whitchurch in Grey Friars in London. In the 1540 edition (misnamed ‘Cranmer’s Bible’), the frontispiece showed Henry handing the Bible to Cromwell on his right and Cranmer on his left, symbols of the secular and religious estates respectively. It also carried a new Preface by Cranmer, which not only argued that scripture should be neither wildly interpreted nor withheld from the people but which also recognized the contribution of the Lollards to England’s religious life. A copy of the Great Bible was chained to the pulpit of every church in the country and in each parish a reader was ordered to read it out to illiterate parishioners.
The impact of this decision was seismic and irreversible. In 1530 English religion was delivered to the laity by the priesthood. The Mass and its power was passed to those in the pews by priests (and then only in the form of the bread). So too were the other sacraments of the Church. With the exceptions of sermons and scattered examples of congregational vernacular singing, the service was performed and delivered in Latin: from the Mass to readings from the Bible. Laymen generally could not speak or understand Latin (save perhaps for a very few common religious terms) and the priests therefore offered the only route to God and to salvation. A priest would interpret the scriptures and his congregation had little recourse to check what he said. Access to Bibles people could read would knock down the largest barrier between the laity and the book they were meant to follow.
The very existence of printed English Bibles in churches already undermined Papal claims to supreme authority, and a conservative estimate of the number of Bibles and New Testaments printed for the English market between 1520 and 1649 puts the total at 1.34 million, more than there were households across the country.92 But they also began to erode the supremacy of the priestly elite and to involve the laity in religious beliefs and life far more directly. That change had enormous consequences that were, inevitably, felt in politics too. For if scripture was above the clergy, then it was also above the king.
That was not all. In 1611 the Authorized Version (or ‘King James Version’) of the Bible became England’s officially sanctioned scriptures; it maintained this supremacy for three centuries. Nine-tenths of its English New Testament, and the first half of its English Old Testament, were simply transplanted from Matthew’s Bible. As a result, the words, phrases, constructions and style of that earlier translation became a unifying force for the English, a shared word-quiver of spoken and written unity that was so deeply grafted into English consciousness as to become indivisible from English identity. It has been the most influential book in the English language and its chief translator, who probably used the unknown name Thomas Matthew because his own was too provocative, was William Tyndale.
The enormous importance of the Authorized Version is well known, and the reach of its influence is well documented, on English parliamentarianism, the slave trade, and on both the blossoming of seventeenth-century English literature and the ideas of liberty contained in some of those texts, such as Milton’s Paradise Lost and his Areopagitica, which argued for the freedom to print views openly. The principles of exegesis and independent inquiry that popular and personal Bible reading encouraged were also linked to the growth of English empiricism, with all that would mean for the flourishing of scientific inquiry – the study of nature, ‘God’s other book’.
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As had been the case in China many centuries before, the emergence of papermaking in Europe did not automatically translate into popular reading. Even the invention of movable-type printing, a development very much part of paper’s own story, could not simply create a wider reading public. Instead, paper and printing provided the opportunity for reading to spread rapidly, should the need or desire arrive. It is for this reason that papermaking’s initial arrival in Europe (whether in Islamic Spain in the eleventh century or Catholic Italy in the thirteenth) is very far from being the highlight, or even the turning point, in paper’s European journey. It was, rather, the scholarship and rise in lay reading which characterized the period of the Renaissance and Reformation that provided the impetus for scholars and theologians to go back to original texts and the decision to deliver those texts to the reading public in their own tongue, which acted as an opening of the floodgates for paper to swamp the continent.
For three centuries prior to the Reformation there had already been a number of Bible translations into vernacular languages produced. The fifteenth century in particular had seen not only the Catholic use of printing for everyday purposes – service books, devotional literature and sermon manuals – but also a spate of Bible translations printed across Europe: in German (1466), Italian (1471), Dutch (1477), Czech (1478), Catalan (1492), abridged versions in French (1474) and in Spanish and Portuguese (both before 1500). Moreover, in 1517 Spanish Catholics had completed an enormous project to publish the Bible in its original languages; it is known as the Complutensian Polyglot (produced at Alcalá de Henares, ‘Complutum’ in Latin).
Numerous as these translations were, however, they were unable to galvanize the continent as their sixteenth-century successors did. First of all, they were in largely inaccessible language, translated from Jerome’s amateur Latin, the Vulgate version. A linked problem was that they were produced only for the eyes of the clergy, royal courtiers and university professors and students; they were certainly not part of a project to equip the laity with scriptures. Their obfuscatory style only confirmed this; in short, they lacked clarity. The sixteenth-century translations, moreover, had the advantage of fresh biblical scholarship.
Erasmus’s Greek New Testament of 1516 was the foundation text of the Reformation since it enabled evangelical scholars to return to the original language of the text. (The Reformers relied heavily on Catholic scholarship to achieve their aims – Erasmus himself remained a Catholic throughout his life.) Luther did draw on the writings of other evangelical breakaways – indeed, it was when reading the works of the early Czech Reformer Jan Hus that Luther exclaimed ‘we’ve been heretics all along’. But it was the appearance of Erasmus’s publication of the Greek New Testament that allowed Luther and other translators like him to achieve their goal: Bibles for the ordinary man, Bibles free of the awkward and inaccessible Latinisms of the past.
These new translations appeared quickly. The Baltic rapidly turned Lutheran: a Danish version of Luther’s New Testament was published in 1524 and a Swedish Bible translated from the original languages was published in 1540–41. (By that time both countries had adopted Lutheranism as their national religion.) Bible translations appeared across Europe in the 1520s (Dutch), 1530s (French, German, Italian and English) and 1540s (Finnish, Icelandic). A second wave arrived between 1560 and 1590 (in Polish, Czech, Welsh, Lithuanian, Slovene and Hungarian), with an Irish version appearing in 1602. Europe’s book of books was courting local audiences.
Moreover, as Geneva became the nerve-centre of the Reformation a few years after Luther’s death (under the leadership of the French Reformer John Calvin) evangelical works began to pour into France too, and fresh Greek and English New Testaments were produced and printed in Geneva itself, which had a significant Protestant English expatriate community in the 1550s. (The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare calls the ‘Geneva Bible’, as it was known, Shakespeare’s ‘primary text’ of the Bible, based on a reading of biblical references in his plays.)
Calvin himself could produce an octavo work of a hundred pages (or 17,000 words) in just a few days, although as a preacher he continually used the spoken word to spread his message, preaching more than 2,000 sermons in Geneva alone, and he often found printers to be unreliable. (There were other risks in the publishing process too: his commentary on the apostle Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians was lost on its way to be delivered to the Strasbourg printer Wendelin Rihel in 1546 but he had made no copies, largely because of the cost in time and money it would have required.) We know of 1,247 letters which Calvin wrote and received. Like other reformers, Calvin saw letters as meant for private purposes. Luther’s friend and ally Philipp Melanchthon wrote and received more than 9,000 letters in his lifetime and Luther’s own tally was more than 3,600. But if Calvin’s paper correspondence paled beside his fellow leading reformers, his written output in general was almost fabulous.
The Institutes of the Christian Religion, his greatest work, ran to 450,000 words in its definitive 1560 edition and his commentary on Paul’s letter to the Romans was 107,000 words. In his exegetical works alone, he averaged 65,000 words per year. Add up each physical copy of each of his works that was printed and the total is approaching four million.93 Yet that number does not even include his sermons, lectures and correspondence.
Calvin’s impact through paper was enormous, not least in France, which he had left in 1536. He reshaped the French language, often proving himself original in his writings where his peers were prolix. Moreover, his ideas became such a threat that in 1551 the French authorities banned French citizens from contact with the city of Geneva and declared that possession of any books published in Geneva would henceforth be taken as conclusive evidence of heretical beliefs. (Calvin’s Geneva, of course, was equally ruthless in its attitude to opposing doctrines.)
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Europe had printed and preached its way into a continent-wide division, encouraged by political fault lines that ran very deep. By 1545 almost a third of Europe followed an evangelical form of Christianity. At one point even France looked as though it would turn to a more evangelical Christianity too. Lutheranism had offered Bibles and religious tracts to the laity, and Rome’s long-standing supremacy was no longer merely precarious – it had been cut back and openly questioned in the strongest terms.
Moreover, later in life Luther wrote more directly on the Papal institution itself, turning even to the documents on which Papal supremacy was based. In 1440, the Renaissance scholar Lorenzo Valla had demonstrated that Rome’s claim to historical superiority over Europe’s Church had been founded on a deceit. The claim had been made in the 830s in the Donation of Constantine. According to the document produced by Gregory, Rome’s supremacy had been asserted by Emperor Constantine himself. Constantine, after a vision before a crucial battle in 312 from which he emerged the victor, had converted to Christianity and lifted the ban on the religion that had been in effect throughout the Roman empire. Later, around 326, he moved the capital of the Roman empire east, to the newly founded city of Constantinople, and by then, the document indicated, he had bestowed spiritual authority over Italy and Western Europe on the bishop of Rome.
Valla, though certainly not the first to question its validity, demonstrated that the document was a ninth-century forgery; it was part of the Pseudo-Isidorean Decretals, understood to be letters and decrees of the early popes which added weight to Rome’s claim to leadership, but these were forgeries too, and also began to be more widely questioned at this time. In short, Rome’s badges of historical support for its supreme position in the Western Church were being more openly questioned; the gradual centralization of institutional and political Church power, which had received its first great boost under Gregory the Great (bishop of Rome from 590 to 604) now had its public detractor. Rome’s claims had peaked in 1302 when Pope Boniface VIII issued a Papal Bull entitled Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus, ‘Outside the Church there is no salvation’. Boniface, of course, meant not just any church, but the Church of Rome.
In 1537 Luther attacked the Donation of Constantine too, not because it needed attacking – it had been discredited for decades – but because he wanted the Papacy to take the next logical step and decide on its appropriate position within the Church. The ambition of Luther’s challenge was extraordinary but it was also proof of how far and how quickly Europe had changed.
In the story of paper Luther’s own life illustrates, perhaps better than any other, the personality traits of the medium itself, its strengths and flaws. Paper provided an extraordinary opportunity to reach larger audiences, to use words less sparingly and to write more voluminously, while movable type printing only increased the capacity of all of these. The democratic, productive and vernacular tendencies of paper culture can all be found in the life and work of the German monk.
Yet the weaknesses of paper culture also overlap with some of Luther’s great weaknesses. Paper offers the promise of enormous audiences, but this inevitably encourages sensationalism, iconoclasm and even crudeness. (Some of Luther’s writings used scatological language.) It also offers the promise of celebrity as a marker of value, as well as encouraging at least some degree of individualism. More dangerously, it can publicise the most craven and damaging views; Luther’s growing anti-semitism (one publication was called ‘On the Jews and their Lies’) was surely the ugliest element in his printed output.
Nevertheless, Lutheranism had forged a print space for dissension and opposition which was unprecedented. There had been criticisms of Rome before, but they had almost always remained within the establishment rather than finding a pulpit outside it. When Rome excommunicated Luther and failed to reclaim each of the German states under its spiritual headship, a new intellectual space appeared and Luther became its pioneer polemicist, rebel and propagandist.
Luther himself had used this space to attack one after another of what he saw as Rome’s additions to early Christianity: Papal supremacy, transubstantiation, monasticism, indulgences, Purgatory. Fundamentally, however, he had used the space to protest against the belief that a man’s own works or his participation in the Church could win him forgiveness and salvation. According to Luther’s logic, the laity no longer needed an institution to mediate their salvation; furthermore, they no longer needed an institution to mediate truth.