Fortress Press

"Anyone ever frustrated by overhearing only half a telephone conversation will immediately appreciate the contribution David Bagchi has made to Luther studies with this book. For the most part the scholarly world has made do with analyses of Luther's side of the conversation in the earliest phase of the Reformation. Now, in a painstaking study of fifty-seven authors and the host of pamphlets and books they produced, Bagchi provides us with a look at Luther's opponents... This is a worthwhile addition to the library of any serious student of Luther."
Timothy J. Wengert
Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia

"David Bagchi's book is the first work comprehensively to describe and analyze the writings of Luther's Catholic opponents during the crucial early years of the Lutheran Reformation. He has taken on a significant topic and done a superb job explicating it. With great clarity and acumen, he manages to lay out the controversialists' concerns on a variety of topics and shows how all these topics converge on the issue of authority. His judgments, I think, are sound and persuasive. This is an extraordinarily accomplished piece of work."
Mark U. Edwards Jr.
Harvard Divinity School

"Bagchi's ongoing analysis of the controversialists' self-understanding-their motives, intents, methods, and most significantly their limits-provides a new perspective on both the content and the style of their works that reveals them to be more theologically astute and strategically shrewd than commonly credited... Bagchi's elegantly written study is judicious and challenging. It illuminates this era of Catholic thought and will become a guiding light in the study of the Reformation age."
Mary T. Stimming
The Journal of Religion