Lillian Hassan-Thomas, “Hopeful Revolutionary to Bitter Figurehead: A Study of Martin Luther’s Transformed Worldview”
Mentor: Lane Sunwall, Honors College
Oral Presentation Block 1

Martin Luther and his contemporaries were alive during a period of great social change. During their childhoods in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, they had experienced the joining of the Eastern and Western hemispheres which catalyzed the rise of imperialism and mercantilism. These reformers also were alive to experience the rise of humanism and classical values in conjunction with a decline in faith in the total authority of the feudal system. There is evidence to suggest that experiencing just one massive social in one’s lifetime has an impact on one’s psychology, so the impacts of all this progress on Luther must have been significant. Additionally, Luther’s life was riddled with a variety of psychologically impactful phenomena. For example, Luther had a stern father that he was often aiming to please, he had a traumatic, near-death experience in a thunderstorm that led him to life in a monastery, and he was a self-admitted “tortured soul” who would spend hours a day confessing. By contrasting Luther’s early works like “to the Christian Nobility” where he seems hopeful and has purpose, with his later works like “On the Jews and Their Lies” where Luther appears bitter and regretful, it is possible to retroactively construct an understanding of Luther’s change in outlook over the course of his time as a reformer.