The events of early sixteenth-century Europe included the first explorations and conquests by Europeans of the Americas, the spreading conquests of the Ottoman Turks in the Mediterranean and southeast Europe, the invasions of Italy by the major monarchies of western Europe and the wars between them. To these military and territorial incursions may be added the subversion of political idealism in the writings of Francesco Guicciardini and Niccolò Machiavelli, the vision of a more just human society among the Utopians of Thomas Moreʹs imagination, and the reaffirmation of political idealism in the educational writings of Desiderius Erasmus. It was in...

In 1526 Nikolaus Herman of Altdorf, the first translator ofDe libero arbitrio, very modestly wrote that, since he could neither judge nor contribute to the controversy between Luther and Erasmus, he had confined himself to producing the ʹclosest and bestʹ German version he could manage, in order that the world might reach its own conclusion.¹

Four and a half centuries later this aim is considerably harder to realize. The Latin ofDe libero arbitrio, basically classical but with patristic and medieval features, is in many respects opaque to us. The treatise stalks scholastic terrain but largely avoids scholastic vocabulary,...

The Latin text here translated was a typescript generously provided by Cornelis Augustijn, who prepared it for the AmsterdamOpera omnia. He also provided photocopies of the two early editions (both Froben 1526) on which the text is based. The text has been compared with that in the 1703 Leiden edition, the readings of which are occasionally given and discussed in the commentary. The German translation by Hieronymus Emser has also been carefully read and is referred to in the commentary when it throws any interesting light on the text. The modern German translation by Oskar Johannes Mehl with a...

Leo xʹs bullExsurge Domineof 15 June 1520 contains forty-one articles listing forty-one theological and ecclesiological errors or heresies of Martin Luther. Although widely circulated, it was not shown officially to Luther until 10 October 1520. Luther had begun to reply to the bull article by article about i December 1520. By 29 December 1520 a German version ofAssertiowas said by Luther to have been printed, and the Latin seems to have appeared by the end of December 1520 or the beginning of January 1521. Article 36 contains Lutherʹs rejection of free will and declaration of the...