Post-structuralist theory argues that archetypal plot structures are used subconsciously as well as deliberately by historians and by authors of purely ‘literary’ texts to construct an image of the past as well as in figurative writing;259
the historian, just as the writer of fiction, draws on latent narrative models to represent a chain of initially disparate and unrelated historical events to create an episode and
historical practice; see, for example, Hans Jochen Genthe,Martin Luther: Sein Leben und Denken
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996), pp. 46-90.
258 Et multi boni et sapientes viri adhuc vivunt, quibus cum sciret seriem harum rerum notam esse,
fuisset ridiculum, aliam historiam, ut fit interdum in poematis, comminisci. Sed quia editionem talis historiae fatalis ipsius dies antevertit, nos iisdem de rebus ea, quae partim ex ipso audivimus, partim ipse vidimus, bona fide recitaturi sumus. (Avv).
259 Hayden White explores the relationship between historical writings and mythic structures, largely
building on the work of Northrop Frye, in ‘Historical Text as Literary Artefact’, in Tropics of
Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. P., 1985), pp. 81-100,
and Hayden White, ‘Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth in Historical Emplotment’, in
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endow it with meaning. Frye provides a definition of the basic mythoi, or pre-generic plot structures, as romance, comedy, tragedy and irony;260 in turn, Frye’s definitions enable the mythos of a text to be identified, which provides an additional level of analysis which may indicate whether the plot structure complements the
interpretative principle. Theorists such as White argue that while a particular narrative structure may lend itself more easily or obviously to an encoding of the various historical facts of a subject’s life, different encodings of the basic ‘facts’ are possible that would produce an alternative, and theoretically acceptable, plot
structure. While such theories have been generated on a large scale, no practical analysis has been carried out to assess the validity of this theory. It is to be expected that historians and biographers working from different ideological backgrounds may encode the data differently, and that confessional historians writing Luther’s story may well draw on different narrative models to write up the same historical data with different ideological intentions in mind, while drawing on common narrative models of writing history.
The first Protestant accounts of Luther’s life sought not only to represent Luther’s life but also to justify his actions and the course of the Reformation; with scant historical data to hand, the first favourable representations of Luther emplotted his life in a similar way, drawing on a mixture of narrative structures but one
principal mythos, that of the romance. While the choice of this plot structure might have been subconscious, the effects of such a choice reinforce the positive
valorization and interpretation of Luther’s life offered. Given that few documented historical data on Luther’s life exist, particularly regarding his early life, much biographical information has simply been ‘inherited’ from the earliest accounts;261
a vertical comparison of various accounts of Luther’s life from the sixteenth century until the present day reveals significant conceptual and narratological similarities,
260 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton Univ. P., 1957; 2000). pp. 186-206.
261 The most obvious example of this is the date of Luther’s birthday which has canonically been
accepted as 10 November 1483; a closer reading of source materials indicates, however, that this date originated with Melanchthon who had in fact provided an alternative date at another time and subsequently ‘rectified’ his choice in light of his own astronomical thinking. Despite such
inauspicious beginnings, however, this date for Luther’s birth has been accepted until recently almost universally as accurate by both Protestant and Catholic historians. See the description of the debate surrounding the date of Luther’s birth in Reinhard Staats, ‘Noch einmal: Luthers Geburtsjahr 1484’, in Melanchthons Astrologie: Der Weg der Sternwissenschaft von Humanismus und Reformation, ed. by Jürgen G. H. Hoppmann (Wittenberg: Drei Kastanien Verlag, 1997), pp. 51-53. See, also, ‘Childhood’ in this thesis, pp. 71-104.
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and the choice of plot structure present in the first Protestant writings has determined the subsequent confessional understanding of Luther. Furthermore, the choice of
mythos does not appear to have undergone significant reassessment, even in more
recent writings, thereby allowing a purely literary aspect of historical writing to dictate the historical understanding of the subject. In this context, the Historia as the first major biography has particular significance in establishing the genre of
subsequent narratives that have shaped the Protestant understanding of Luther in particular.
By comparing the representation of Luther’s life in terms of its narrative structures with that of the other major sixteenth-century reformers, Backus shows that there are similarities not only in various accounts of Luther’s life seen
developmentally or vertically, that is to say the construction of the Lutherbild, but also between accounts of Luther’s life as well as those of the Calvin, Zwingli, and other early reformers;262 as such, the Reformation movement drew on established structures, both horizontally as well as vertically, to narrate the various movements’ leaders while simultaneously establishing narrative models that determined future representations as well as accounts of those lives. In this way, Melanchthon’s
account acquires a wider influence beyond the narrower confines of Lutheran history into wider Protestant life-writing on figures in ecclesiastical history.