The fundamental biography of Luther edited by Heinz Schilling combines the rigorous approach of the historian, based on documents and on the latest research in archeology, economics and sociology, to a divulgative cut, making accessible to a wider audience the first phase of the Reformation in the life and the work of its initiator.

"The birth of the modern world would be interpreted incorrectly if it is considered that, for his fight against the authorities, Luther was a revolutionary and was judged as an anti-modern trend the centrality that religion had for him. Strengthening religion as the original, independent force, and handing it the world as a place of action, Luther freed a dynamism that contributed in an essential way to the transformation in a secular sense of the early modern age Europe and to the birth of the true modernity".