‘There is So Much to See in Rome’: The Cinematic Materialities of Martin Luther’s Reformation

Abstract

In 1760, the German town of Wittenberg lost a particularly notorious casualty to the fires of international war. With the territory embroiled in Europe’s Seven Years’ War, the town was set alight by a French bombardment which seriously damaged the Schlosskirche (or Castle Church) and permanently destroyed the wooden doors that adorned its entrance. Not long after their erection in the formative years of the sixteenth century, these doors became historically nominated as the location of Martin Luther’s posting of his ‘Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences’, the Ninety-Five Theses, which, so the legend goes, sparked the European Reformation and the various profound historical changes that it entailed.¹ Although the wooden originals have long since been replaced by bronze replicas, the Church Doors, and the scroll that adorned them, remain at the imaginative centre of the early modern Reformation, as reconstituted in the mediations of historical memory and generic representation.²