Summit of everything is the individual, his conscience and faith. This is Luther’s revolution. And if the world discovered in the West will inherit the name from Amerigo Vespucci, he is credited with «the discovery of freedom as the true horizon of European Christianity.»

How, and for what reasons, did a young German monk, bent on following the traditional path of repentance and religious perfection, come into conflict with the ecclesiastical authorities to which he had sworn obedience? This is a question that has already been answered so many times that there might seem to be nothing new to say about it.

Adriano Prosperi reconstructs Luther’s thought and works, from his birth until his final break with Rome and his foundation of a new church, providing a new answer to that question. It is new because of a geographical factor: there is no existing historiography on the subject in the Latin tradition. The reason is clear: in the culture of predominantly Catholic countries the focus has been on the Catholic aspect of the first modern age, both in the component that, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, carried forward proposals of moral and disciplinary reform (the “Catholic Reformation”), and in that of the reaction to Protestantism (the Counter-Reformation). Humanism and the Renaissance have been studied and interpreted as the genesis of the modern world. But the contrast between two origins of the modern age has remained.

The only way out of this division and this conflict is through historical research: the century of Luther was also the century of Leo X; the German Reformation ran parallel to the Italian Renaissance. These two great movements which both turned their backs on medieval Christianity developed method of religious research which had certain elements in common.

The true historical value of Luther’s work lies in the fact that his rebellion laid the basis for the revolutions of the modern age.