‘The German Reformation was an urban event.’—so A. G. Dickens wrote in his valuable and instructive book The German nation and Martin Luther (1974). In some directions this judgment may need qualification; nevertheless, it contains an essential element of truth. On any reckoning, put in a negative form, its truth is undeniable: the occurrence and the success of the reformation in Germany are inconceivable except in terms of the importance, and of the specific form, which urban life had attained in Germany at the end of the middle ages. No towns, no reformation; of this assertion we may be certain.