Martin Luther was a theologian of remarkable rhetorical gifts who developed and displayed his theology in the give-and-take of ferocious, published debate; he was one of Christianity's great polemicists. In this chapter, we explore the role of printing, the world view that grounded Luther's polemical approach, the developments in the larger Reformation movement that shaped the approach and style of polemical contests, and the interpretive challenges posed by the polemics of the older Luther.

During Luther’s lifetime the Reformation went through two phases thatshaped the character of Luther’s controversial writings and their audience.In the first phase Luther defined a movement. He addressed most of hispolemics to an empire-wide audience of readers and auditors. He pointedout the failings within the papally controlled Catholic Church and advocatedreforms based on his understanding of the gospel. He attacked, but he alsosought to persuade, to educate, and to inform. His main authority wasScripture.

In the second phase Luther was engaged in building and defendingan institution. He addressed most of his polemics to readers and auditorswho were already Evangelicals or more narrowly Lutherans. He continuedto explain and educate but spent proportionately more effort exhorting hisco-religionists. He continued to appeal to Scripture but supplemented theseappeals with claims to personal authority based on his unique role withinan Augustinian view of history.

Wittenberg is Luther's Wittenberg in three distinct ways: The Wittenberg of the late Middle Ages provides the conditions for Luther's work, theWittenberg of the Reformation era is shaped by Luther himself, and the Wittenberg of the post-Reformation period is formed by Luther's followers.

WITTENBERG IN THE LATE MIDDLE AGES

A fortress of Wittenberg is mentioned for the first time in 1180. Itbelongs to the Ascanians, who call people from the Rhineland and theNetherlands to settle there around 1159/60. Situated next to the fortress,this settlement grows into a town, receiving its charter in 1293. The charteralso includes permission for fortifications. Soon a town wall is erected.

The townspeople continue to gain in strength and about 1280 theybegin the construction of a town church, the so-called St. Mary’s Church.Well before 1300 the Gothic choir with its two aisles is completed.Akeystonein the nave shows Christ giving a blessing. In the middle of the fourteenthcentury a mighty construction is begun on the west side, including twotowers.

There are at least two respects in which this subject can easily conceal more than it elucidates. The more obvious of these is the all-too-tempting impetus to ascribe to Luther everything in contemporary Christianity of which the author approves. This tendency is most obvious in the pictures of Luther that derive from German Protestants and Lutherans in particular. Thus, Luther was depicted in his own time as the one who, by the grace of God, recovered the gospel from centuries of neglect and abuse. In the seventeenth century Lutheran Orthodox theologians valued him as the one who taught the true collection of doctrines with which they associated true Christianity. Later Pietists found in him the Christian man of great interior faith, the Rationalists of the eighteenth century hailed him for freeing the human intellect from medieval superstition, and more Romantic thinkers of the nineteenth century saw him as the stalwart German who freed Germany from papist, that is Italian, cultural tyranny. More recent times have celebrated Lutherthe existentialist, enlisted his support for the National Socialist regime ofAdolf Hitler and its anti-Semitic atrocities, and even singled him out, alongwith Albert Einstein, as one of the great raw intellects in the history ofthe Western world. The other pattern, which goes almost without repeating,is that by contrast both former and latter-day opponents of Luther havefound in him all the characteristics of whatever they have identified as mostloathsome in their own time.

From Luther's own day to the present, critics have raised questions about the distinctively personal stamp given by the reformer to his theology. Despite its claims to biblical fidelity and universal validity, they suspected that Luther's legacy was the projection of one man's neurosis on to the whole of human history and at the expense of the relative tolerance and unity of the Western church. There is no denying that Luther was himself a prime example of the desperately bound sinner whose terrified conscience, hungry for the assurance of God's grace and the experience of its transforming power, became the test case for Lutheran proclamation.

Without lionizing Luther as some spiritual “Everyman” for all generations,one can conclude that in the course of his spiritual journey he spokepersuasively to and for many of his contemporaries. Luther boldly articulatedand responded to the acute anxieties of the age through his campaignfor the liberation of the church from its latter-day Babylonian captivity, hisdemand for the freedom of the individual believer’s conscience and the freerei¨gn of the Scriptures among the people, and his rejection of the ecclesiasticalhierarchy in his appeal to the judgment of the common believer, that is,the baptized person who emerged from the waters of baptism the spiritualequal of priest, bishop, and pope.

Africa has nurtured a surprising array of modern and neo-traditional guitar styles. Portable, rugged, versatile, and relatively easy to construct, the guitar has thrived in African settings to the point where today it is among the most pervasive instruments continent-wide, second only to the drum. In places like Mali and Madagascar, ancient instrumental traditions have inspired distinctive acoustic guitar finger-picking techniques. Elsewhere – in Zimbabwe, Guinea, and Cameroon, for example – pre-guitar traditions have evolved into guitar-based, electric “afropop,” once again engendering techniques and sounds unique in world music. In Congo in the 1950s, bands trying to play Cuban dance music substituted the handy guitar for the more rare piano, and within a few years, they developed a highly influential method of layering multiple electric guitar lines. Looking at the range and diversity of guitar innovations in Africa, one could argue that only rock and roll has so revolutionized the instrument over the course of the twentieth century. African guitarists are now beginning to earn widespread recognition, and their work is sure to have further impact around the world in years to come.

Consider these recent developments. Paul Simon drew upon guitarists Ray Phiri of South Africa and Vincent Nguini of Cameroon while creating the music for his Grammy Award-winning Graceland project. Ry Cooder also won a Grammy Award in 1994 for his collaboration with northern Malian guitarist Ali Farka Touré,TalkingTimbuktu (WorldCircuit/Rykodisc 1994). That release focused attention on the connections between blues and Malian music and opened the door for other “Malian bluesmen,” such as guitarist and singer Lobi Traoré.

Flamenco guitar constitutes an instrumental idiom of remarkable richness and contemporary vitality. As a musical tradition, its status is unique in that while its origins lie in folk music and its practitioners articulate little in the way of a standardized theory, it embodies a degree of technical virtuosity and sophistication comparable to that of a classical art form. Flamenco can be seen as comprising song (cante), dance (baile), and guitar playing (toque). The status of guitar music within this framework is ambiguous and contradictory. Flamenco, in its origins, basic structure, and traditional aesthetic orientation, is primarily vocal music, to which guitar accompaniment is a secondary (and occasionally even dispensable) addition. Nevertheless, the guitar has come to play an increasingly prominent role in accompaniment, and flamenco solo guitar has emerged as an independent idiom that has achieved greater international renown than vocal flamenco. This essay provides a brief historical and stylistic overview of flamenco guitar, outlining its distinctive features and its unique status within flamenco and world music as a whole.

The evolution of flamenco

The early history of flamenco, like the origin of the word “flamenco” itself, is ultimately obscure. In the past, various Spanish flamencólogos (“flamencologists”) argued that flamenco derived from an ancient and private tradition which the Gypsies brought with them when they migrated from India some six or more centuries ago. Nevertheless, it now seems clear that the genre emerged in the late eighteenth century, primarily from the corpus of Andalusian folk music, especially as stylized and refined by Gypsy professional musicians. Andalusian musical culture was itself an eclectic entity, syncretizing the legacy of the region's diverse ethnic groups (see Plate 3).

The guitar has always played a primary role in the composition, performance, and image of country music. The steel-string acoustic guitar, or “flat-top,” provided the rhythmic and harmonic foundation in the original string bands and has since been included in all country music recordings and performances without exception. In North America, the acoustic guitar has become a symbol not only of country music, but of traditionalism, rural values, “down-homeness,” and a folk-based ideology.

The authenticity of a country music performance depends upon stylistic variables that combine to create a personal musical experience both for the audience and for the performer. Musical elements such as vocal sound, subject, performance practice, and instrumentation merge with iconographic ones such as boots, cowboy hats, pedal steel guitar, and acoustic guitar in order to maintain this authenticity and produce the genre recognized by audiences as country music.

The traditionalism associated with the acoustic guitar lives on in the repertory of folk songs, ballads, dances, and instrumental pieces brought to North America by Anglo-Celtic immigrants during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. British folk culture came to all regions of English-speaking North America, and pockets of tradition still exist in such places as rural New England, Appalachia, and the Maritime provinces of Canada. By the same token, country music is deeply rooted in the folklore of British broadside ballads, which were transported to the New World and gained life as “Americana.” It speaks to its audience from a rural perspective and serves as a vehicle for tapping into and assessing public opinion, relating personal experience, and commenting on situations or events.

THE PERSON AND THE SYMBOL

Martin Luther the historical figure assigned to teach biblical studies at an obscure university in the eastern part of what is now Germany and Martin Luther, cultural symbol, parted company on or about October 31, 1517, and have had an unpredictable relationship ever since. Assessing the differences is the critical task in approaching this compellingly attractive and equally repugnant man.

The historical dimensions of Luther's life follow a familiar pattern. The son of an upwardly mobile miner, Hans Luder or Ludder, and of the daughter of a fairly prominent family, Margarethe Lindemann, he was set aside for a career in law. In the course of his studies, Luther believed himself to have been redirected toward a religious vocation – a crossover well known to law and theological faculties. When he took orders as an Augustinian monk, Luther attracted a mentor, Johan von Staupitz, who promoted his career, moving him forward in the order.

Luther’s academic career was also fairly routine, at least in its outline.Upon completion of the doctorate, while taking his share of pastoral duties,the young monk was assigned to teach courses in Old and New Testamentat the University of Wittenberg, a town of 2,000 that was the capital ofElectoral Saxony. As a teacher, he was caught up in an occupational hazardof academic life: academic, churchly, and political polemics. Thoughhis personal circumstances changed – most dramatically in being excommunicated,outlawed, and for all of this, marrying – Luther continued hisvocation until his death, in February of 1546. If events had not combinedto put him in a symbolic spotlight, the story would have ended right there.

Jazz is distinct from certain other art forms – notably Western art music – in its emphasis on performance as the primary medium of creative achievement, and many of the greatest jazz composers, such as Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk, are also among its greatest players. For this reason, the following discussion of jazz guitar styles appropriately centers on the individual musicians who have pioneered those styles, and, from time to time, on individual recordings that epitomize them.

The history of jazz begins in obscurity around the beginning of the twentieth century at a time when much popular and folk music of oral tradition was not yet widely written about or captured on recordings. The guitar was already well entrenched as a versatile instrument for popular music: a “poor man's piano,” maybe, but also a rich resource in its own right. It was one of many stringed instruments, and combinations of one kind or another – including banjo orchestras, mandolin orchestras, Hawaiian groups, Mexican mariachi groups, minstrel groups, and “Gypsy” bands, to name a few – were ubiquitous. Their sound is echoed today in the legacy of folk, bluegrass, and other string-band music, but the range and stand-alone capability of the guitar made it particularly useful for ragtime and blues, the two greatest influences in the formation of jazz.

Like many important philosophers around the turn of the last century, Russell came to philosophy from mathematics. From 1890 to 1893 he studied for Part I of the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos, as the Cambridge examination was called. That he started with mathematics was inevitable: all Cambridge students had to take either classics or mathematics for Part I of their degree, and Russell was neither good at, nor interested in, classics. Nonetheless, mathematics recommended itself to Russell for other reasons than necessity.

He went up to Cambridge with the hope of discovering what, if anything, could be known with certainty and with the conviction that, if anything could, it would be found in mathematics. These high hopes were rapidly dashed by the realities of the Tripos. The fact that so many students with differing interests had to take mathematics at Cambridge meant that the mathematics taught was relatively elementary and strongly oriented to physical application and geometrical intuition. Not that the Mathematical Tripos was easy; study for it was a relentless grind of practice in the solution of mathematically trivial, but fiendishly complicated, applications problems. The great developments of nineteenth-century mathematics, for example, in analysis and non-Euclidean geometry, and all the developments mentioned by Grattan-Guinness in his paper in this volume, were entirely ignored as unsuitable to the needs of most students. In particular, the nineteenth-century drive towards rigour and unification in mathematics was absent from Cambridge, which, despite its continuing high reputation in the subject, had become a mathematical backwater by the end of the century.

There are many familiar themes in Russell's repertoire, but his later discussions of knowledge include many insights which have received little notice. Indeed, it is often supposed that in the years after 1914, after the heroic foundational phase of analytical philosophy celebrated in countless anthologies, Russell ceased to engage in creative philosophy and turned instead to popular tracts on marriage and morals, idleness and happiness. One thing I want to show here is that during these years Russell was in fact developing a new conception of epistemology, linked to a new philosophy of mind, which was so far ahead of his time that it passed by largely unappreciated. It is only now that our own philosophy of mind has caught up with the 'naturalisation' of the mind that Russell was teaching from 1921 onwards that we can recognise in his later writings the central themes of our current debates - concerning the significance of the causation of belief, the tension between 'externalist' and 'internalist' perspectives concerning knowledge, and the limits of empiricism.

To discuss these later themes properly, however, we have to start from a discussion of the tensions inherent in his earlier epistemology, and the text from which to start is his famous ‘shilling-shocker’ The Problems of Philosophy (1912), in which Russell presents a general survey of the subject grounded in a theory of knowledge.