Editor's Preface

Since 1987 and the gift of forty-one early German Reformation imprints by Richard and Martha Kessler, the Pitts Theology Library has worked alongside the Kesslers and their friends and other supporters to build the current body of more than 3,500 books, pamphlets, and manuscripts that comprises the Richard C. Kessler Reformation Collection. While more than a thousand items in the collection were written by Martin Luther himself, hundreds of others were issued by his Catholic opponents. Such diversity in collecting was part of the plan from the beginning, carefully articulated by Pitts Librarian Channing R. Jeschke in collaboration with the Kesslers and the Standing Advisory Committee for the Kessler Collection. The aim was always to enable researchers to hear both sides of the sixteenth-century debates.

This acquisition of rare and important materials related to the German Reformation has been accompanied over the past quarter century by the lecture and musical programs of the annual Reformation Day at Emory University, the creation of the Digital Image Archive with its thousands of Reformation woodcuts and engravings, and by a series of print and electronic publications intended to make the riches of the Kessler Collection more widely known and accessible. The current publication of Prof. Kramer’s translation is the latest of such efforts.

Johann Tetzel’s Vorlegung or Rebuttal (Leipzig: Melchior Lotter, 1518) was purchased in 2001 at a German auction and was valued as a representative of the early Catholic opposition to Luther and his reforms. Printed only six months after the issue of Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses and written by one of the reformer’s most notable early opponents, it was indeed a signature piece. I am deeply grateful to Professor Dewey Weiss Kramer for her willingness to undertake the translation of this pamphlet, since it enables English readers for the first time to hear Tetzel for themselves, rather than relying on the reports of his critics. It has been a labor of love for her, extending over several years and involving considerable research and consultations with other scholars, and has now yielded an important contribution to the study of the German Reformation. Without the unselfish efforts of Professor Kramer and other such friends, the Kessler Collection could never achieve its aim of nourishing the efforts of all those engaged in Reformation studies.

In addition to the contributions of Professor Manfred Hoffmann and Professor Kurt Hendel, which Kramer notes in her introduction, I would express thanks to G. Gordon Boice and the staff of Emory Creative Group for taking the text provided and working their magic to transform it into a beautiful pamphlet, almost five hundred years after Melchior Lotter issued Tetzel’s original.

M. Patrick Graham
Margaret A. Pitts Associate Professor of Theological Bibliography
Candler School of Theology
Emory University