1. WA 1:239-246; Benzing, nos. 90-114. This little sermon went through twenty-five editions in three years and was published all over Germany, from Wittenberg and Leipzig to Augsburg and Basel.

2. There were at least thirty-three reprints of the speech itself [Benzing, nos. 905-937].

3. Uf das fürhalte * , ij(v).

4. Uf das fürhalte * , ij(v). Interestingly, although the manuscript speaks of "their most wicked teaching and example," the Strasbourg first edition dropped "and teaching." See WA 7:870, notes to line 11. Whether this was an oversight or a deliberate omission is hard to say.

5. Uf das fürhalte * , iij.

6. Uf das fürhalte * , iij.

7. Uf das fürhalte * , iiij(v)—iiiij.

8. From the translation in the English version of Peter Blickle, The Revolution of 1525: The German Peasants' War from a New Perspective , trans. Thomas A. Brady, Jr., and H. C. Erik Midelfort (Baltimore, 1981), 197-198.

9. Bernd Moeller, "Was wurde in der Frühzeit der Reformation in den deutschen Städten gepredigt?" ARG 75 (1984):176-193.

10. Bernd Moeller, "Stadt und Buch: Bemerkungen zur Struktur der Reformatorischen Bewegung in Deutschland," in Wolfgang J. Mommsen, ed., Stadtbürgertum und Adel in der Reformation: Studien zur Socialgeschichte der Reformation in England und Deutschland (Stuttgart, 1979), 25-39. The thesis is on page 30.

11. This statistic does not take into account the likelihood that the size of print runs also increased in this period, a fact that makes this upsurge even more dramatic.

12. It may be that more Germans were able to read than were able to write and that literacy figures need to uncouple the two skills.