James Anthony Froude

James Anthony Froude built a varied career as a historian, biographer, novelist, and longtime editor of Fraser’s Magazine. Educated at Oxford, his reputation grew through his multivolume history of Tudor England and for studies of figures including Thomas Carlyle, Julius Caesar, John Bunyan, and Erasmus. Luther is a concise biography of the German reformer, published in the early 1880s and later issued by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Froude follows Martin Luther from his youth and monastic vocation through the disputes over indulgences, the Diet of Worms, and the later conflicts of the Reformation. The book belongs to a sequence of compact biographical works in which Froude shaped large historical controversies around an individual career. His interpretation is forceful and personal rather than detached. Luther therefore offers both a narrative of the reformer’s life and a clear example of Froude’s characteristic method as a Victorian historian.