This book presents an edition and translation of two letters written to each other by Martin Luther and Henry VIII in the middle of the 1520s, and published by Henry at the close of 1526. Alongside these it adds a group of further texts related to that brief exchange. Henry's second public encounter with Luther is not as widely known today as his first, in which he wrote the Assertion of the Seven Sacraments, the book which earned him the papal accolade ‘Defender of the Faith’ in 1521. But this later effort, in effect a second book against Luther, was also a sensation in its day. The correspondence became public property when Henry ordered the two letters to be printed, in December 1526. For the next few months, the texts were reprinted across Europe, and some of the leading Catholic polemicists of the time made capital out of this royal intervention.

The episode came at a delicate moment for what we now call ‘the Reformation’, when its future was in the balance. On the one hand, the ‘Recess of Speyer’, a measure enacted by the Reichstag that met at the imperial city of Speyer in summer 1526, had given vital political breathing space to the Reformation cause by suspending the implementation of the Edict of Worms, which had officially condemned Luther and his doctrines in 1521. Yet the movement was in other respects losing some of its momentum as Luther faced a series of setbacks. The first of these was the decision of Europe's most famous intellectual, Desiderius Erasmus, to make a public break with Luther in 1524, by protesting against Luther's categorical denial of human free will. Then came the catastrophe of the Peasants’ War in Germany, an uprising involving hundreds of thousands of people. Agrarian discontent and the hope of liberation from serfdom were the driving forces of this rebellion, and it gained impetus from Luther's heady rhetoric of ‘Christian liberty’. Although hardly a Lutheran rebellion, aspects of the movement were certainly inflected by Lutheran or ‘evangelical’ ideas.