Martin Luther – Fundamentalist Reactionary or Enlightened Creator of the Modern World? [Audio]

Speaker(s): Diarmaid MacCulloch, Ulinka Rublack and Peter Stanford | 500 years ago Martin Luther launched the Protestant Reformation when he nailed a sheet of paper to the door of a church in a small university town in Germany. That sheet and the incendiary ideas it contained flared up into religious persecution and war, eventually burning a huge hole through 16th century Christendom. And yet the man who sparked this revolution has somehow been lost in the glare of events. Who was Luther? What made him a brilliant writer as well as a foul mouthed polemicist? And what drove him to challenge the authority of the Church? In an event hosted by BBC Radio Three’s arts and ideas programme, Free Thinking (@BBCFreeThinking) , Anne McElvoy explores the man and his passionate theology with Peter Stanford, the author of a new Luther biography, Martin Luther: Catholic Dissident and the historians, Ulinka Rublack, author of Reformation Europe and Diarmaid MacCulloch, whose most recent book is All Th