There is probably no other sixteenth-century figure who has left such a wealth of ego-documents as Martin Luther: no fewer than eighteen volumes of letters and six volumes of the so-called ‘table talk’, the notebooks of dinner conversation recorded by his student visitors and lodgers. There are even several brief autobiographical fragments. No wonder he has proved such an attractive figure for those interested in individual character, from the very first biographies of the mid-sixteenth century through to the famous psychoanalytically influenced study by Erickson, the play by John Osborne, or even cinema versions of Luther’s life.2 Yet in this flood of words by (and about) Luther there are also vast areas of silence: he tells us, for instance, next to nothing about his childhood, his schooldays, his most dear childhood friend, Hans Reinicke, or even his mother (her exact identity was unclear for centuries):3 in short, many of the things one might want to know to construct a full account of the character of an individual. And in Luther’s case such absences matter, because his particular psychological constitution played a decisive role in history: it took an individual of quite remarkable stubbornness to take on the Papacy and launch what became the Reformation.
