LUTHER, MARTIN (1483-1546), the great German reli gious reformer, was born on Nov. 1483, at Eisleben, in the county of Mansfeld, whither his parents, Hans Luther and Mar garet Ziegler, who belonged to the free peasant class, had migrated from Miihra in Thuringia. Six months later they removed to the town of Mansfeld, the centre of the iron ore mining and smelting industry, in which his father found employment as a miner. Within the next decade Hans Luther became the lessee of several smelting furnaces and one of the four elected members of the town council. For some years he had a hard struggle to maintain his growing family, and Luther in later years speaks of the poverty of his childhood. The atmosphere of the home was a pious one, and there is no ground for the tale that his father was a Hussite and was disaffected to the traditional Church. Luther was reared in the current religious beliefs and popular superstitions, which the parents taught their children. Both were strict disciplinarians, and Luther later complained of the harshness of his upbringing, whilst recognizing that his parents meant well by it and cherishing a deep affection and gratitude towards them. The harsh discipline prevailed in the local Latin school, to which he was sent in his seventh year and in which he passed through a graduated course in Latin grammar and syntax, as set forth in the text-books of Donatus and Alexander de Ville Dieu, in select passages from some of the classical authors, and in religious instruction and singing. According to Mathesius he was a diligent and apt pupil, and he evidently profited from this early training, in spite of his later drastic criticism of the schools and schoolmasters of the pre-Reformation period. In his i4th year he was sent to Magdeburg to continue his education, and in accordance with the practice of the time earned his bread by singing in the streets. His teachers at Magdeburg were members of the Brotherhood of the Common Life, which devoted itself specially to education and was distinguished by its practical reforming spirit. On the con clusion of the school year he removed to Eisenach, where he attracted the interest of an opulent burgher, Kuntz Cotta, and his wife, who received him into their home and relieved him from the necessity of singing for his bread in the streets. He was
fortunate, too, in finding in the Rector Trebonius and his assistant Wigand efficient teachers of the higher courses in Latin grammar, composition, rhetoric, and poetry, in which he easily out-dis tanced his fellow pupils. At the close of this training, which extended over three years, he entered the University of Erfurt in the spring of 1501. At this period the fame of Erfurt exceeded that of all the German universities. The curriculum for the bache lor of arts degree, which he took in the autumn of 1502, included grammar, logic, rhetoric, physics, and philosophy. Two years further study were required for the master's degree, the course including, besides higher instruction in the subjects already studied, mathematics, metaphysics, and ethics. At the age of 2 2 his ability and proficiency secured him the second place in a list of 17 candidates who passed the master's examination in the winter of 1505.
As the result of these four years of intensive study he had acquired a firm grasp of the current scholastic philosophy, and had developed a marked dialectic skill. He was the ornament of a circle of fellow-students, who met 1.o discuss philosophy, and to whose intercourse his musical gifts contributed an additional charm. Among his teachers were Trutvetter and Ulsingen who professed the Nominalist philosophy as expounded by William of Occam, the great English Franciscan of the i4th century. Under their influence Luther became an enthusiastic adherent of the Occamist or "modern" school of thought as against the various forms of Realism represented by Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. He speaks of Occam as "my master," and refers to his school as "my sect," and he retained his predilection for the philosophic teaching of the great schoolman even after he came to differ from his distinctive theology. He owed allegiance, too, to the authority of Aristotle, whose logic and philosophy domi nated all the schools, including that of Occam. Whilst thus ab sorbed in the conventional scholastic study, he does not seem to have been influenced at this period to any appreciable extent by the humanist movement, which only later took a firm hold of the university, though he found both pleasure and benefit in reading some of the Latin authors, including Cicero, Virgil, and Livy.