What did sixteenth-century Christians disagree about before they disagreed about Luther? We turn to pre-Reformation controversies expecting to find a theological vocabulary very different from what was soon to come, but at the same time a statement of some of the problems within Christianity which the Reformation set out to solve.
Is it important to know whether the Saint Mary Magdalen whom the liturgy celebrates was really one person or a composite of several women, mentioned at different places in the gospels? The question would raise little debate today, but in 1518 and 1519 it inspired more than a dozen tracts, most of them by competent scholars, and in the early 1520s another four.