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The frenetic cultural output marking the Lutherjahr of 2017 betrayed the extent to which this commemoration of Martin Luther's 95 Theses was of central, even existential, significance to German national identity. Lyndal Roper's 2016 biography of the reformer, though hardly a hagiography, was nonetheless a part of this cultural moment. Four years later, Living I Was Your Plague considers its predecessor's place in the memorial cult, and is motivated in part by Roper's conviction that her previous work on Luther did not sufficiently confront the central place in Luther's thought of antisemitism and male chauvinism (pp. 2–3). The result is a sensitive and wide-ranging account of Luther's personality and attitudes, as well as the cultural industry that has made his image instantly recognizable throughout the last five centuries.
As with much of Roper's scholarship, psychoanalytic theory plays a significant and effective role in the work, though in some respects Living I Was Your Plague employs a somewhat lighter touch. Luther has long figured as a choice candidate for psychological (and often confessionally motivated) analysis, on account of his considerable historical significance, his emotive style of discourse, and the information that exists concerning his parental relations (Spitz, 1973, pp. 185–90). Several lines of thought have thus already been pursued at length, most famously in Erik Erikson's Young Man Luther (1958), as well as in Roper's 2016 biography. Both these works traced how Luther's difficult relationship with his father manifested in his formal theological output, his attitudes towards women, and his physical symptoms.
Living I Was Your Plague touches on these concerns, particularly in its chapter on Luther's talent for naming. Roper describes his rejection of the family name, Luder, as in part another rejection of his father, having already turned his back on the legal career Hans Luder intended for him (pp. 86–7). His difficulty in committing to marri