To begin the story of the Lutheran Reformation at the traditional starting-point is to begin in the middle. Luther's famous act of nailing up the Ninety-Five Theses on the door of the Castle Church at Wittenberg on the Eve of All Saints in 1517 (which may not even have happened) merely marks the culmination of a long spiritual journey on which he had been travelling at least since his appointment over six years before to the chair of Theology in the University of Wittenberg. One of the main achievements of Lutheran scholarship in the past generation has been to trace the course of Luther's intellectual development during this formative time. The basis for this reinterpretation has been provided by the rediscovery of the materials he used in giving his lectures on the Psalms in 1513–14, on the Epistle to the Romans in 1515–16, and on the Epistle to the Galatians in 1516–17. The outcome has been the suggestion that it would only be a ‘slight exaggeration’, as Rupp puts it, to claim that ‘the whole of the later Luther’ can already be discerned in the pages of these early lecture-notes (Rupp, 1951, p. 39). The implication is that it may be best to begin the story where Luther himself began: with the development of his new theology, which provided him with the framework for his subsequent attack not just on the Papacy's traffic in indulgences, but on the whole set of attitudes, social and political as well as religious, which had come to be associated with the teachings of the Catholic Church.