Martin Luther in Rom : die Ewige Stadt als kosmopolitisches Zentrum und ihre Wahrnehmung

Abstract

This volume takes as its point of departure Martin Luther’s journey to Rome, a sparsely documented event known primarily through later sources, whose dating and course remain uncertain. It proposes a cultural-historical reassessment of Rome in the early Cinquecento. The evidentiary basis is limited: contemporary testimony is largely absent, while later accounts, above all the “Table Talk,” are shaped by processes of cultural memory and confessional interpretation. As a result, attempts to reconstruct the journey have been methodologically fraught and often reliant on conjecture. The volume advances two central claims. First, it argues for a revision of the traditional dating of the journey (1510/11), proposing—on the basis of new evidence—a later date, most plausibly 1511. This is not a minor chronological adjustment but one with significant implications for Luther’s biography and for the Roman context, particularly with regard to the presence of Pope Julius II. Second, it offers a critical reassessment of the confessional and memorial constructions that transformed Luther’s Roman experience into a pivotal moment, frequently cast in apocalyptic and allegorical terms (Rome as the “Whore of Babylon”). Rather than foregrounding the biographical dimension of Luther’s journey, the volume treats it as a heuristic point of entry for a source-critical and context-sensitive analysis of Rome’s political, social, and artistic realities. The contributions, originating from an international conference held in Rome in 2011, bring together perspectives from art history, literary studies, social history, and the history of mentalities. Collectively, they reconstruct a differentiated picture of Rome as the spiritual and administrative center of Latin Christendom, a major destination of European pilgrimage, and a site of intense artistic production. By moving beyond confessional and polarizing interpretive frameworks, the volume advances a historically grounded understanding of Rome as a distinct cultural and communicative space at the transition from the Middle Ages to the early modern period—one in which religious meaning, political authority, and artistic creativity intersected with particular density.