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THINKING CRITICALLY
IN A DATA-DRIVEN
SOCIETY
Yanni Alexander Loukissas
Foreword by
Geoffrey C. Bowker
THE MIT PRESS
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
LONDON, ENGLAND
ARE
ALL
DATA
LOCAL

© 2019 Yanni Alexander Loukissas
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by
any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording,
or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from
the publisher.
This book was set in PF DIN Pro and DejaVu Sans Mono by The MIT Press.
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Loukissas, Yanni A. (Yanni Alexander), author.
Title: All data are local : thinking critically in a data-driven society /
Yanni Alexander Loukissas; foreword by Geoffrey C. Bowker
Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018030570 | ISBN 9780262039666 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Electronic information resource literacy. | Media literacy.
Classification: LCC ZA4065 .L68 2019 | DDC 025.042--dc23 LC record available at
https://lccn.loc.gov/2018030570
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Foreword ix
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xvii
INTRODUCTION 1
1 LOCAL ORIGINS 13
2 A PLACE FOR PLANT DATA 27
3 COLLECTING INFRASTRUCTURES 55
4 NEWSWORTHY ALGORITHMS 95
5 MARKET, PLACE, INTERFACE 123
6 MODELS OF LOCAL PRACTICE 161
7 LOCAL ENDS 189
Notes 197
Bibliography 219
Index 239
CONTENTS

We’ve been building our world in both the notional West and global North for about the
past two hundred years around the collection and analysis of data—from the natural
history and population censuses of yore, to the vast proliferation of data acquisition and
analysis practices today. In general, the West isn’t just the west and the global North
is not just the north, but historical generalizations have a way of collapsing locals into
empires; it’s a convenient way of organizing knowledge. In this marvelous volume, Yanni
Alexander Loukissas demonstrates that it’s turtles all the way down: at whatever level
you take an ordered set of givens about the world, you find local practice and exception.
The invocation at the end of the book is a clarion cry for our times: “Do not mis-
take the availability of data as permission to remain at a distance.” It does get messy
when you tie data to a place; there were, as Loukissas tellingly shows, over a thousand
designations of data in the New York Public Library. You can’t simply ingest such data
and assume that you can produce scientific facts. All you have access to is data that are
machine recognizable as data, and there is a huge amount of work in making it recog-
nizable. One might think of an example from the census: if I fit easily into machine-read-
able categories, I am easy to count (and therefore my presence counts for something),
whereas if I am mixed race and gender nonspecific, I just won’t be counted without a lot
of extra work. I have served time (yes, it is a sort of prison sentence) looking at biodi-
versity data. Here Loukissas’s insistence on the locality and heterogeneity of data ring
true. Most biodiversity data are data from within a hundred miles of an arterial road (it’s
easier to get to). Global maps of biodiversity work best for areas where most collect-
ing is done by appropriately trained taxonomists, and they are indexed by the specific
schools that the taxonomists came out of (a map of fossil specimens in Europe in the
nineteenth century was a good map of the Austro-Hungarian empire—folks trained out
of Vienna—and British one—folks trained out of Kew Gardens).
Loukissas suggests what for me is precisely the appropriate response: we must
create counterdata to challenge normative algorithms. This raises the question of
where the site of politics is today. It’s hard to think, in the era of Donald Trump, that poli-
tics are contained in a Habermasian sphere of rational discourse. In an arena conjured
by our data doubles exploiting our every weakness (why does Amazon keep suggesting
light stuff that will not ever fulfill me but that will gain my attention?) and magnifying our
fears (why does populism become the natural response to induced tribalism?), we are
just not collectively performing as rational actors. The central issue is that data about
us and the world are circulating much faster than we can have control over. How many
of us manage our cookies or read our end-user license agreements carefully? Data are
where it’s at, and this book provides the best propaedeutic to a reasoned, effective plan
of action.
Geoffrey C. Bowker
University of California at Irvine
July 2018
FOREWORD

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<OBJECTDATA> <TITLE>WASHINGTON CROSSING THE DELAWARE</TITLE>
<ARTIST> <ARTISTNAME>EMANUEL LEUTZ</ARTISTNAME> <ARTISTDATE>
AMERICAN, SCHWÄBISCH GMÜND 1816–1868 WASHINGTON, D.C.</ARTIST-
DATE> <ARTISTROLE>ARTIST</ARTISTROLE> </ARTIST> <LOCATIONSTRING
/> <DATED>1851</DATED> <MEDIUM>OIL ON CANVAS</MEDIUM>
<OBJECTNUMBER>97.34</OBJECTNUMBER> <OBJECTID>11777</OBJECTID>
<CREDITLINE>GIFT OF JOHN STEWART KENNEDY, 1897</CREDITLINE>
<CHAT>THIS DEPICTION OF GEORGE WASHINGTON (1732–1799) CROSSING
THE DELAWARE RIVER INTO NEW JERSEY TO LAUNCH AN ATTACK ON THE
HESSIANS, GERMAN SOLDIERS HIRED BY GREAT BRITAIN ON DECEMBER 25,
1776—A TURNING POINT IN THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR—WAS A GREAT SUCCESS
IN BOTH GERMANY, WHERE LEUTZE PAINTED IT, AND AMERICA. ITS
POPULARITY LAY CHIEFLY IN THE CHOICE OF SUBJECT, APPEALING AS IT
DID TO FLOURISHING NATIONALISM AT MIDCENTURY NOT ONLY IN THOSE
TWO COUNTRIES BUT AROUND THE WORLD. THE WORK’S MONUMENTAL SCALE
ADDED TO ITS EFFECTIVENESS. DESPITE SOME HISTORICAL INACCURACIES,
THE PAINTING REMAINS AN OBJECT OF VENERATION AND IS ONE OF
THE BEST-KNOWN AND MOST EXTENSIVELY PUBLISHED IMAGES IN AMERICAN
ART.</CHAT> <ROOMCHAT /> </OBJECTDATA> <GALLERYLOCATION>
<CASESECTION DATATYPE="VARCHAR" FIELDTYPE="SYSTEM.STRING" />
<SHELF DATATYPE="VARCHAR" FIELDTYPE="SYSTEM.STRING" /> </GALLERY-
LOCATION> …
Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art (excerpt, not full record)
The ideas in this book began to take shape in 2006, many years before I started writing
it. At the time, I was a graduate student at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but I
traveled to New York City on a regular basis to work on an information technology mas-
ter plan for the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The largest institu-
tional collector in New York, “the Met” sits at the eastern edge of Central Park. It might
seem monolithic at the base of its imposing Fifth Avenue entry stairs. But the institu-
tion is actually a composite of independently curated collections. Under the umbrella
of a major architectural renovation of the spaces that house the American collection, I
was contracted by the Met as part of Small Design Firm, an information and interaction
PREFACE

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design outfit also based in Cambridge.1
Our scope of work included the design of way-
finding aids, such as label graphics for the artwork and maps to help visitors explore the
collection firsthand as well as a series of digital media installations meant to offer a new
kind of museum experience. The challenges that I now address, thirteen years later, in
All Data Are Local, first presented themselves as I considered how visitors might use
data to navigate the Met’s vast holdings of American art.
The American Wing’s “collections data” have been a work in progress since the mid-
nineteenth century when the branch was still a separate building in the park. Since that
time, almost twenty-five thousand individual objects, ranging in scale from colonial-era
teaspoons to an entire room designed by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, have been
cataloged by the staff as data. Those data have served as a resource for generations of
curators seeking to either register or uncover answers to everyday questions about the
provenance, authorship, taxonomy, label text, or other assorted details of the myriad
objects in the collection.
A reader unfamiliar with collections data might think of them as the contents of
a spreadsheet: rows for each object in the collection, and columns for various attri-
butes of those objects. But the attribute fields do not simply register commonplace
facts about the artwork. Rather, they contain the kinds of locally relevant details that
professional curators rely on for their daily work. The attribute column titled “gallery
location,” for instance, helps curators track where a piece of the collection is being held,
even if only for a moment to clean it or snap a new publicity photograph for an upcom-
ing special exhibition. This list of locations is manually updated in real time to reflect the
mundane passage of objects from one room to another. Such records are considered
vital, for theft is an ongoing concern of the museum staff.
In following with their original purpose as curators’ tools, the American Wing’s
collections data were long held in what the sociologist Erving Goffman would call the
“back stage.”2
Indeed, these data were never intended for outsiders’ eyes. So when our
team first encountered them, the collections data appeared justifiably strange. They had
confounding gaps and curiously dated details, such as label text from other eras. Most
peculiar of all, many of the visually striking objects in the collection were represented
by tiny black-and-white photographs, only of use as identifiers for in-house staff who
already knew the objects intimately.
Our master plan established a strategy for translating and, in a few cases, re-
creating these data for the “front stage,” where visitors could see and interact with
them.3
Parts of the existing data set were inadequate. For example, our digital media
designs required the use of recognizable color images for each object in the collection;
the existing black-and-white likenesses would not do. The Met agreed to update their
photographs, but not without some hesitation, for this was a serious undertaking, both
expensive and time consuming.
While in some ways the American Wing data needed more detail before they
appeared in front of visitors, in other ways they contained too much. Visitors, for

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instance, didn’t need to know the history of every time an object was removed from
its case for a routine dusting; they only needed to know whether or not the object was
on display. In other words, the local specificities of the Met’s collections data had to
be understood and reframed to make those data more broadly accessible as well as
meaningful to visitors.
Even as I worked on the museum master plan, I was also completing a doctorate
in which my research focused on the social implications of information technologies for
professional life. This research spanned domains as varied as architecture, space explo-
ration, nuclear weapons design, and the life sciences. I was in training to study subjects
from a “sociotechnical” perspective: an approach in which the technical operation of a
system is examined in tandem with the social relations that it creates or preserves.4
I was fortunate to train under a group of eminent scholars of science, technology,
and society—a field that might be defined by its focus on locality. This field has illus-
trated how materially based, everyday patterns of work—locally defined within labora-
tories, field sites, conference rooms, and even living rooms—can explain the success of
science and technology and their expansion throughout the world.5
My early work with
these colleagues has since been documented in two books: Simulation and its Discon-
tents, a crosscutting collaborative project on information technologies and professional
identities, and Co-designers: Cultures of Computer Simulation in Architecture, a more
focused exploration of related changes in the building professions, based on my own
doctoral dissertation.6
Despite my skills as a social researcher, I was hired to work on the museum mas-
ter plan primarily because of my technical abilities. Educated in both computation and
design (I also hold a professional degree in architecture), I was well positioned to think
about how emerging information technologies could expand the space of the museum
into a new virtual dimension. Yet I could not help but see the museum as a social space
too—composed of everyday patterns of work that resembled the sites I was studying
in grad school—in addition to a space for design. Before long, I decided to confront the
social and cultural contexts for data at the museum, believing that it might help our
team develop a master plan that worked locally rather than in the abstract for the sake
of the curators and their visitors.
My training in sociotechnical research taught me to delve into contexts like the
museum through ethnography: an “interpretative science” in search of meaning, prac-
ticed through a combination of close observation and interviews.7
Ethnography requires
an immersive venture into the local. On the museum project, these skills helped me
develop an intimate understanding of the museum’s data as well as rapport with its
staff: those who created and maintained the data. The curators were, by necessity, an
integral part of our project. My experiences learning about how they organize their work
through data, as well as how those practices have changed over time, rank among the
most formative of my professional career. But that was only one part of the story of
the museum’s data.

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Another part—how the data might come into use by visitors—was one that the
curators could not easily tell. For that, I had to turn to the visitors themselves and
other intermediary informants. I eventually brought my questions about data use to the
museum guards, hired to mind the galleries and watch over the art. Notwithstanding
their characterization by the museum as “security,” I could see that these were impor-
tant members of the American Wing staff who spent considerable time answering ques-
tions from visitors and helping them navigate the building’s circuitous plan. Moreover,
the guards knew better than anyone what visitors do: how they move, where they go,
and even why they get lost. The guards proved to be among the best sources of insight
about the potential contexts of data use within the American Wing galleries. It also
became apparent that they would be mediating visitor interactions with whatever infor-
mation technologies we put into place.
Unfortunately, the American Wing’s curators didn’t initially understand my attempts
to include the guards in the design process. From the curators’ perspective, the guards
were not part of the museum’s information infrastructure, or at least they were not
intended to be. Nevertheless, an unofficial series of interviews with the guards prompted
a turning point in my thinking for the project and more broadly. The insights that I
gleaned from speaking with these overlooked experts on visitor activity were revelatory
and a long time in the making; the guards were happy to be asked about what they knew.
Their conceptions of the museum layout and knowledge about visitor practices proved
indispensable for the work of putting together our master plan, including the way that
we numbered the floors. Because the American Wing was once a separate building, its
floors do not line up with the rest of the Met complex. I learned that the layout of the
American Wing and its odd relationship to the rest of the museum meant that visitors
had trouble orienting themselves using the museum’s own maps.
Building on our work with the American Wing’s curators as well as its cadre of
insightful guards, our team from Small Design proposed and later implemented a vari-
ety of public uses for the collections data. One of the most memorable designs involved
the presentation of data inside the American Wing’s main elevators. The architects of
the renovation, Kevin Roche, John Dinkeloo, and Associates LLP, had already designed
beautifully detailed glass cabs and elevator shafts to replace the existing ones. In each
cab, all but one of the walls was to be transparent, allowing views directly out of the
elevator and into the galleries. But this design had an unfortunate limitation: the spaces
visible from the cabs would have few objects on display. Our team had the idea to use
large data displays in order to make the single opaque wall of each elevator cab into a
virtually transparent surface.8
Today, more than ten years after we completed the installation, the elevator dis-
plays are still in operation. From within the cabs, visitors can see three-dimensional
digital representations of each floor, annotated by details from the museum’s collec-
tions data. But getting the displays right took some tinkering. Our early designs included

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everything in the collection. Only after many iterations and feedback from the staff did
we converge on a more modest design, with carefully chosen elements to represent
each floor. This approach resulted in simpler images that don’t replace the experience
of the collection but rather invite visitors to step off the elevator and see the objects
themselves. We made use of the reconstituted collections data as well as the guards’
advice on how to orient visitors. The resulting displays show first-person perspective
views of the museum layout, not just the data, and highlight a small number of objects
that can be used as landmarks for navigation.
Participating in the American Wing project was one of my earliest experiences
helping general audiences to see through data. Today, the notion that data might con-
vey transparency, the appearance of looking beyond the boundaries of our material sur-
roundings, is increasingly common. Yet as I learned at the Met, the view through data
is always curated. In ways that are often invisible, data and their experience must be
carefully composed, if they are to be comprehensible by a broad audience.
Although we may acknowledge that data and their interpretations are the products
of narrowly prescribed practices, we still sometimes expect data to reveal everything or
simply the truth of the matter. Whether searching through the extensive records of an
institution like the Met, comparing items for sale online, or trying to unpack a complex
political event, such as the 2016 US election, we imagine data on their own will grant
us insight. Data that are encountered in a museum, created for consumer settings, or
collected using political polling, however, are not simply facts. They are cultural artifacts,
manufactured and presented within contexts that matter. When data do seem to confer
transparency, it is because we are shielded from important details about the context of
their creation or display.
As of this writing, the displays that we made for the American Wing elevator are
still visible. Yet sadly they are no longer being updated with real-time data. Visitors who
step into the elevator today are watching a video on a loop, distantly based on our origi-
nal interactive visualizations. It was painful and disappointing to learn about this change.
Nonetheless, it reinforces my current sensibility about data-driven systems: they are
locally contingent and even fragile. Designs dependent on data must be maintained and
repaired on a regular basis to ensure that they are in sync with changes in the data
themselves or the encompassing infrastructure of the place.
Working on projects intended to produce transparency has taught me much about
what—beyond the data—goes into creating that illusion. I have learned to confront the
locality of data: the ways in which they are shaped by the context of both their creation
(think of the black-and-white photographs useful only for curators) and use (think of the
conflicting conceptions of the museum revealed by the guards).
I wrote this book to explain what I have gleaned from years of experience working
with unruly data sets in a range of settings. My message to the reader can be summed
up as follows: you must learn to look at data, to investigate how they are made and

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embedded in the world, before you can look through data. Do not take the apparent
transparency of data for granted. When confronted with the task of understanding a
new data set, thinking locally is thinking critically.
Lessons from my years of practice and many more as an academic researcher have
informed the title claim of this book: all data are local. The book sets out not merely to
defend this claim but also to demonstrate its implications for how to engage locally with
a range of data sources that the reader might encounter in the public realm: a scientific
collection, platform for cultural history, archive of the news, and online marketplace
for housing.
Many years after signing on to the Met project, I am both a designer and scholar
of information. I wrote All Data Are Local from the position of this dual allegiance, and
my hope is that the book will resonate with colleagues in both fields. For designers, it
is a primer on the social lives of data. For scholars, it demonstrates how design can
extend and embody the work of sociotechnical studies.9
But the book is also intended
for a more general audience, for whom both data and design might be equally opaque.
I believe it can help uninitiated readers begin to think critically about data as well as
the design of systems that are data driven.10
Across scales, from software applications
to social media communities to smart cities, critical thinking about data is poised to
become the new basis for identifying effective and ethical design.
Yanni Loukissas
Atlanta, Georgia
August 2018

This book was made possible by the support of many people, communities, and
institutions. As the final manuscript came together, remembering all those who
deserve thanks held an outsize space in my mind. Now, I am eager to externalize those
acknowledgements, for there are many.
Let me start with my students. Long before this book went to print, the ideas and
examples within were tested by designers, planners, journalists, artists, activists, sci-
entists, and engineers who took my courses at Cornell, Harvard, and Georgia Tech. The
members of the Local Data Design Lab at Georgia Tech, however, have been my most
consistent interlocutors during the final phases of the writing. They helped me sepa-
rate the salient insights from my own preoccupations. Some of my students—Krystelle
Denis (Harvard) as well as Michelle Partogi, Benjamin Sugar, Christopher Polack, and
Peter Polack (all from Georgia Tech)—helped me prepare the visualizations and other
presentations of data that appear throughout the book. Further acknowledgments for
the specific efforts of each are listed in the image credits and endnotes. I wish to single
out Peter Polack for his dedicated work on three different chapters. As I hope the reader
will come to appreciate, his thoughtful contributions made the book better throughout.
In addition, Eric Corbett and Firaz Peer (also from Georgia Tech) both contributed to the
research for chapter 5.
Next, let me acknowledge those who created the settings for my earliest research
on the book. At MIT, I would like to thank William Porter and Sherry Turkle as well as
the late Edith Ackermann and William Mitchell. Their mentorship set me on a course
far from where I began, as an architect with an aptitude for computer modeling. David
Mindell, my postdoctoral supervisor, and other members of the MIT Program in Science,
Technology, and Society first helped me see how design might be useful for uncovering
traces of otherwise-invisible sociotechnical relationships. David Small and his team at
the eponymously named information design studio, Small Design Firm—which sadly
closed shop during the last few months of my writing—first introduced me to collec-
tions data and the collectors behind them.
Many of the ideas in this book were incubated at metaLAB(at)Harvard, where I
spent two years (2012–2014) working with some of the sharpest minds on collections:
Matthew Battles, Kyle Parry, Robert Pietrusko, Cristoforo Magliozzi, Jesse Shapins,
Jeffrey Schnapp, and Jessica Yurkofsky, among others. Matthew, specifically, stoked
the fires of my early interest in data as cultural artifacts and later worked with me on
the material that formed the basis of chapter 3. Throughout the project, he continued to
offer invaluable advice. In parallel, I learned a great deal from the variety of participants
in the many data and design workshops that I collaboratively led while researching this
book: Beautiful Data I and II, DigitalSTS and Design, Humanities Data Visualization, and
Data Walks.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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Thank you to my colleagues at Georgia Tech. The faculty and staff in the Program
in Digital Media, the School of Literature, Media, and Communication, and throughout
Tech encouraged, and in some cases directly supported, my work on a daily basis. My
sincere gratitude to the following people: Charles Bennett, Ian Bogost, Kenya Devalia,
Carl DiSalvo, Keith Edwards, Jennifer Hirsch, Nassim JafariNaimi, Chris LeDantac,
Janet Murray, Elizabeth Mynatt, Laine Nooney, Anne Pollock, Fred Rascoe, Melanie
Richard, Juan Carlos Rodriguez, Dean Jacqueline Royster, Michael Terrell, and Richard
Utz. Lauren Klein and Gregory Zinman deserve special acknowledgments for they did
the grim work of reading my earliest drafts. Their insights have become foundational to
the book. Beyond my home institution, I want to thank the members of the Society for
Social Studies of Science who provided a necessary academic context for my work on
the book, particularly the core members of “digitalSTS”: Laura Forlano, Steven Jackson,
David Ribes, Daniela Rosner, Hanna Rose Shell, and Janet Vertesi.
Thanks as well to the contributors from my many different field sites. The staff of
the Arnold Arboretum, William (Ned) Friedman, Peter Del Tredici, Michael Dosmann,
Lisa Pearson, Kyle Port, and Kathryn Richardson, among others, made my work on
chapter 2 possible. Thank you to the staff and contributing librarians of the Digital Public
Library of America, especially Nate Hill, who enabled my research for chapter 3. Thank
you to Johanna Drucker, Sergio Goldenberg, Jacob Eisenstein, and Francis Steen, all
of whom provided crucial guidance on the development of chapter 4. Thank you to Tim
Franzen, Dan Immergluck, Alison Johnson, Tony Romano, and Housing Justice League
and Research/Action members, who informed my work on chapter 5. Furthermore, my
sincere thanks to all of the anonymous interview subjects—the archivists, botanists,
computer scientists, data scientists, designers, curators, journalists, librarians, orga-
nizers, security guards, planners, and relators who I cannot mention by name.
On the production side, the book benefited enormously from editing support by
Ada Brunstein and Anna Lee-Popham. My editorial team at the MIT Press, Gita Devi
Manaktala, Virginia Crossman, Susan Clark, Cindy Milstein, and others on their staff
worked closely with me during the final few months. Marge Encomienda is responsible
for the inspired book design. Special thanks to Stefanie Posavec, who allowed us to
adapt her design for the cover. I could not have asked for more supportive, insightful,
and reliable guides on the last leg of this journey.
Parts of the book have appeared in print elsewhere. Chapter 2 appeared in an ear-
lier form in “A Place for Big Data: Close and Distant Readings of Accessions Data from
the Arnold Arboretum,” Big Data and Society 3, no. 2 (December 1, 2016), https://doi.
org/10.1177/2053951716661365. Selections from chapter 3 were included in “Taking
Big Data Apart: Local Readings of Composite Media Collections,” Information, Commu-
nication, and Society 20, no. 5 (May 4, 2017): 651–664, https://doi.org/10.1080/13691
18X.2016.1211722. A version of chapter 5 appeared in “All the Homes: Zillow and the
Operational Context of Data,” in Transforming Digital Worlds. iConference 2018. Lecture
Notes in Computer Science, Vol 10766, ed. Gobinda Chowhury, Julie McLeod, Val Gillet,

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and Peter Willett (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2018), 272–281. Thank you to all the
unnamed journal and conference reviewers as well as the editors who supported those
efforts to publish my early findings.
I am grateful to Anita Say Chan, Laura Kurgan, Catherine D’Ignazio, and Jer Thorp
as well as the anonymous book and proposal reviewers who read the full manuscript
at different phases in its development. Sincere thanks as well to Geoffrey Bowker, who
graciously agreed to write the foreword.
I would like to acknowledge the funders of this work: Arts and Humanities Research
Computing at Harvard University, as well as GVU/iPAT, the School of Literature, Media,
and Communication, and the Ivan Allen College at Georgia Tech.
Finally, my family deserves the deepest gratitude. In Atlanta, James Diedrick, Jef-
frey Diedrick, Leeanne Richardson, and Karen Sherrard all offered heartfelt advice, emo-
tional support, and childcare when I really needed it. Randy Loukissas in Philadelphia
and Jennifer Loukissas and her family in Washington, DC, have been continual champi-
ons for this work. Jennifer lent her keen editorial eye to the project. The resulting text
is much better because of it. At home, Felix and Sonja—both born during the writing
of this book—have been important companions with me on this journey, whether they
knew it or not. Their presence gave me the perspective that I needed to focus on the
high stakes implications of the book and to finish without too much fussing. Last of all,
this book would not have happened without Kate Diedrick, who I met around the time
that I first started the research. In the years since, she has had more influence on its
scope and sensibility than anyone else.

FROM DATA SETS TO DATA SETTINGS
While reading through the accessions data of Harvard University’s Arnold Arboretum,
one of the largest and most well-documented living collections of trees, vines, and
shrubs in the world, I came across the record for a cherry tree, Prunus sargentii,
named for its collector, the botanist Charles Sprague Sargent. The data suggest that
this specimen was retrieved by Sargent on an expedition to Japan in 1940. Yet
Sargent died thirteen years earlier, in 1927. How might we decipher the convoluted
origins of this tree: uprooted from Japan and planted in US soil on a timeline that
makes little sense to an outsider?
In the collections data of the New York Public Library, I discovered 1,719 differ-
ent conventions for writing the date (i.e., _ _-_ _-_ _ _ _ is just one). Some of these
date formats are strange, some are approximate, and some are in languages other
than English. Taken together, they reveal the unexpected diversity of cataloging prac-
tices that one institution can contain. Recently, the institution contributed its data to
a broad initiative called the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). Containing data
from libraries, museums, and archives across the country, this “mega meta col-
lection” manages a confounding number of conflicting formats.1
How can we expect
to make sense of such heterogeneous sources and draw connections among them?
Querying NewsScape, a real-time television news archive hosted by the Univer-
sity of California at Los Angeles, offers access to more than three hundred thousand
broadcasts dating back to the Watergate era—so much data that it cannot be seen
independent of the algorithms used to search it. How should we differentiate the
substance of news data from the computational procedures, such as natural lan-
guage processing, necessary to access and analyze them?
The website Zillow, an interface to real estate data, purportedly, on all the homes
in the United States, seems to facilitate a new level of transparency for the housing
market. I can use the site to track the fluctuating market value of my own house or
any one of the more than one hundred million properties listed, most of which are
not even for sale or rent. But from within the consumer-centered context that Zillow
has created, the effects of the inflated housing market on low-income communities
across the country remain invisible. How are we to learn about the hidden impacts
of our own uses of data?
These four examples introduce a number of challenges that can arise when trying to
make sense of unfamiliar data: contradictions, conflicts, and opacities as well as the
unintentional effects of both data collection and use. Yet they reinforce a single point,
expressed in the title of this book: all data are local. Indeed, data are cultural artifacts
INTRODUCTION

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created by people, and their dutiful machines, at a time, in a place, and with the instru-
ments at hand for audiences that are conditioned to receive them.2
When I made this observation in 2013 to a roomful of colleagues at the University
of California at Berkley in the course of an irreverently titled symposium, The Data Made
Me Do It, my words were met with a level of incredulity.3
But in the ensuing years, we
have all become more suspicious of the apparent biases and skewing effects in data.
Even major news outlets have begun to report on the dark side of the data revolu-
tion, including accusations that Google has inadvertently trained its search algorithms
on racist data, that strict measures of scholastic achievement can compel schools to
“teach to the tests” or even attempt to cheat them, and that manufactured evidence
in so-called fake news might have greatly influenced the 2016 US presidential elec-
tion.4
Even academics in the social sciences, who are expected to treat sources with
more nuance, are embroiled in debates about how their own data might be unethically
skewed by p-hacking: a technique by which researchers artfully manipulate the vari-
ables and scope of their analyses in order to produce results that might be considered
statistically significant.5
A broad range of data-driven professions, which have become accustomed to using
evidence collected in distant places and times, are publicly raising questions about how
to best handle their most valued sources of information. It is not sufficient to identify
and eliminate the most evident biases in data. We must learn to work differently, to
uncover the inherent limitations in all such sources, before they lead us further astray.
Today, it is too easy to acquire data sets online without knowing much about their
locality—where are they produced and used elsewhere—and how that may matter. We
have come to rely on the availability of data as generic resources for reasoning not only
in scholarship but in education, politics, industry, and even our personal lives. It is now
commonplace for researchers, government institutions, and businesses alike to make
their data available online, although often without enough accompanying guidance on
how to put those data to good use. The problem starts with our language: the widely
used term data set implies something discrete, complete, and readily portable. But this
is not the case. I contend that we must rethink our terms and habits around public data
by learning to analyze data settings rather than data sets.
This book is an exploration of nuances in data practice long debated in scientific
laboratories, libraries, newsrooms, and activist communities, but more recently set
aside in the contemporary rush to capitalize on the increasing availability of data.6
I have
found that experienced scientists, librarians, journalists, and activists implicitly know
that looking for the local conditions in data can help them to work more effectively, and
counter biases when necessary. We rarely need to discard data simply because they are
strange. After all, data are useful precisely because they provide unfamiliar perspec-
tives, from other times, places, or standpoints that we would not be able to access
otherwise. The strangeness of data is its strength.

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One ready example of how to use data locally is already at your fingertips. It is the
way you might use this book’s index. An index, like a data set, is a collection of related
yet discrete expressions (the key terms in the book) gathered into a condensed, acces-
sible reference. If the reader were to flip to the index now, they would find that it is most
useful in conjunction with the corresponding source (this text) to which each indepen-
dent entry refers. On its own, an index serves as little more than a teasingly abstract
trace of what could be learned by reading the entire book. Nevertheless, the index is
useful, provided the book is also at hand. Too often we attempt to use a given data set
as a complete work, such as a book, rather than an index to something greater.
Instead of treating data as independent sources, we should be asking, Where do
data direct us, and who might help us understand their origins as well as their sites of
potential impact? The implications of these questions are threefold. For practitioners
who want to work with data, understanding local conditions can dispel the dangerous
illusion that any data offer what science and technology studies scholar Donna Har-
away calls “the view from nowhere.”7
For students and scholars, attention to the local
offers an opportunity to compare diverse cultures through the data that they make or
use. Finally, local perspectives on data can awaken new forms of social advocacy. For
wherever data are used, local communities of producers, users, and even nonusers are
affected.
COLLECTIONS AS CASES
This book demonstrates how to understand data settings, not simply data sets, by tak-
ing the reader through six principles over an equal number of chapters. Chapter 1 takes
on the first principle and the title claim that all data are local. The next four principles
are illustrated by the concrete cases first introduced at the start of this chapter. They
exemplify areas of utmost importance for creating an informed public: science com-
munication, cultural history, journalism, and the housing market.
• The accessions data of the Arnold Arboretum can help us understand, first and
foremost, thatdata have complex attachments to place, which invisibly structure
their form and interpretation.
• The DPLA can help us see that data are collected from heterogeneous sources,
each with their own local attachments.
• NewsScape offers an opportunity to learnhow data and algorithms are entangled,
with far-reaching implications for what it may mean to be informed in the future.
• Finally, the case of Zillow showshow interfaces recontextualize data, with striking
consequences for the value that we place on our homes and those of others.
These cases reflect the challenges of working with publicly available data—chal-
lenges that are often overlooked in the abundant and pressing conversations on personal

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data and privacy.8
The first two cases explain the local contingencies of data, and how
discontinuities among data can lead to conflicts. The next two look at the implications
of data’s locality for how we might understand higher-level computational structures:
first algorithms, and then interfaces.
I use the term local, further explained in the next chapter, as a relative designation.
Over the course of this book, each case offers an opportunity to incrementally explore
and elaborate on what local can mean in relationship to data: from a form of place
attachment, exemplified by the accessions data of the Arnold Arboretum, to the traces
of such attachments found in the accumulated sources of data infrastructures, such as
the DPLA or NewsScape. In the final case, on Zillow, the local is primarily identifiable in
negative terms; local details are stripped away from data in order to create the “friction-
less” interfaces desired by today’s harried users. For their fickle audiences, companies
in today’s “interface economy” seek to make data accessible and actionable anywhere.9
In doing so, they both obscure and then supplant the traditional meaning-making power
of the local.
Toward its end, this book shifts from theoretical principles to strategies for practice.
Chapter 6 leaves the reader with a culminating principle only hinted at above—data are
indexes to local knowledge—and a set of practical guidelines that build on the preced-
ing cases:
• Look at the data setting, not just the data set
• Make place a part of data presentation
• Take a comparative approach to data analysis
• Challenge normative algorithms using counterdata
• Create interfaces that cause friction
• Use data to build relationships
The book concludes with a question: How can we rework open data initiatives to
make data settings versus data sets both accessible and actionable? Keeping this long-
term ambition in mind, the reader might approach each case in the book by considering
what it takes, beyond simply access, to make data usable effectively and ethically.
Let me now make a caveat: despite the provocatively broad claim on the cover of
this book, I do not address all types of data. Most of the examples that I use throughout
the text can be characterized as collections data. These are data that help people to
manage distributed work with large quantities of objects, organisms, texts, images,
and more. I focus on collections data for three reasons that I hope will make my argu-
ment more accessible to readers.
My choice, first of all, has to do with the concreteness of collections data. They
refer to actual subjects in the world: plants, books, broadcasts, homes, and even peo-
ple. Second, collections data are likely to be familiar to many readers. Social media
have turned our lives into vividly documented collections of “friends,” “favorites,” and

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“shares.” Likewise, e-commerce sites like Amazon are collections. This is partially
because, in recent years, standards for collections data have converged with object-ori-
ented approaches to programming—a strategy for defining computational systems in
terms of classes of objects and their attributes—in order to produce a powerful model
for a broad array of online interactions.10
Third, collections data have historically been
used to do the work of curation (from the Latin cura, meaning “care”)—a practice that
for reasons I will get into later in this chapter, necessitates a local perspective. But
when the data that describe large, complex collections are aggregated, without regard
to their localities, we can be blinded to important distinctions within data. If unacknowl-
edged, these distinctions can sometimes become structural fissures and even lead to
a collapse.
Consider, as a stark example readily available in US public consciousness, the
role of data in creating and, at first, obscuring the mortgage crisis of 2007. Several
years before the market collapsed, in 2004, an eccentric financial manager named Mike
Burry with a knack for identifying unique investment opportunities pored over reams of
documents describing home loans that comprised a financial product known as a mort-
gage bond. At the time, private home mortgages were deemed the most stable kind
of investment. Beyond ensuring the American dream of homeownership, the resulting
mortgage-backed bond market served as the bedrock of the US economy.
As Burry slowly uncovered, the dream would become a nightmare for many home-
owners. These bonds weren’t based on uniform home loans with fixed terms. Rather,
they were comprised of claims on returns from a heterogeneous reserve, including
thousands of independent mortgages with varying risks. Many of them turned out to be
“subprime”: loans made at alarmingly high, variable interest rates and with a high risk of
foreclosure. In order to tease apart the risks that each bond contained and understand
the chance that the entire bond could fail, Burry had to work through a lengthy legal and
financial prospectus. Back then, he might have been the only person to have done so,
apart from the attorneys responsible for its assembly.
Michael Lewis recounts this tale in The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine.
Lewis’s book, later adapted into the Oscar-winning film of the same name, tells of the
creation and collapse of the mortgage bond market. At the time, all subprime mortgage
bonds were considered equivalent, with their value set and secured by the unimpeach-
able ratings agencies, Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s.11
Each mortgage bond repre-
sented innumerable pieces of loans that remained largely unexamined by Wall Street.
Bonds based entirely on mortgages, explains Lewis, “extended Wall Street into a place
it had never before been: the debts of ordinary Americans.”12
Based on interviews with the few eccentric investors who saw it coming, Lewis’s
book introduces us to the backroom world of Wall Street where the housing crisis of
2007 began. “The people at Moody’s and S&P,” notes Lewis, “didn’t actually evaluate
the individual home loans, or so much as look at them. All they and their models saw,

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and evaluated, were the general characteristics of loan pools.”13
Meanwhile, the banks
presumed that they were passing off any potential liability by repackaging the risk. Also,
they strongly suspected that even if the liability did catch up to them, the federal govern-
ment would bail them out, which ultimately it did, but not before hundreds of thousands
of people lost their homes to foreclosure.
By reading between the lines of the mortgage bonds, Burry discovered the contin-
gent nature of each mortgage: its size, interest rate, payment structure, and inherent
risk. Moreover, he learned that the number of interest-only, riskier mortgages con-
tained within these bonds was increasing over time. This meant defaults were imma-
nent. Burry leveraged this insight to bet against the housing market so as to “short” the
mortgage bonds.
While others dealt blindly with the bonds as aggregates, Burry’s research allowed
him to see the housing crisis several years before it hit. Unfortunately, rather than using
this knowledge to help those most imperiled by these practices, he chose to profit from
their effects. The Big Short works as a cautionary tale about financial bubbles, but also
as a lesson about the locality of data: data have heterogeneous sources, and there are
severe implications for those who don’t know how to read them with a discerning eye.
Mortgage data, by the way, are collections data too: records on individual entities
used to identify and organize them as part of a larger composite. Nevertheless, the
principles espoused in All Data Are Local can be quite broadly applied, beyond data that
deal exclusively with collections. Other types of data, not addressed in this book, are
also local and dependent on knowledge about their settings for responsible use. My
own varied experiences with data have impressed this on me. In a study of human and
machine interactions from the first lunar landing, I learned how Apollo 11 astronauts
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, aboard the lunar module (nicknamed “Eagle”), were
distracted by unexpected and ultimately inconsequential feedback data from their guid-
ance computer.14
The astronauts could not decipher a series of outputs—the values
“1201” and “1202”—on their display/keyboard interface. Recognizing them as alarm sig-
nals, the astronauts wasted critical seconds reaching out to ground control for help in
deciphering these data. In the time that elapsed, the Eagle overshot its landing site and
nearly crashed into the surface of the moon. In another study of human-machine com-
munication, this time in a hospital operating room, I witnessed a surgeon, overly reliant
on sensor data from an electrocardiogram, overlook a pool of blood slowly forming
around his sneakers.15
Another observer in the room warned the surgeon in time to
save the patient from bleeding out. In both cases, astronauts and medical professionals
were focused on data, and not the broader setting or context.
Time and again, I have encountered such signs of the insistent locality of data
across data types. My discussion of collections data, however, is not meant to be com-
prehensive in scope. I have selected examples that illustrate the limits of universal-
izing ambitions for data and prompt us to think about how they might be used more

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conscientiously. The reader might notice that my focus is predominantly on US data.
In fact, the cases were chosen specifically because of their proximity and interrelation-
ships. Together, they characterize a particular data-driven society. Although this is a
significant limitation to my work, it also presents strategic opportunities. These cases
can be used to challenge the unwarranted dominance on the internet of data created in
the United States.16
Seeing how data are local, I argue, can help us put data in their place,
materially as well as politically.
LOCAL METHODS AND GOALS
All Data Are Local is assembled from a combination of qualitative findings on data cul-
tures and exploratory data visualizations. Both are informed by extended ethnographic
fieldwork, including interviews, workshops, and hands-on engagements with data,
conducted over the course of seven years. My use of the term ethnographic echoes
anthropologist Sherry Ortner’s explanation of the method as an “attempt to understand
another life world using the self—as much of it as possible—as the instrument of
knowing.”17
Indeed, this is a book based largely on my own experiences as an observer
and participant in data settings, guided by a desire to understand data through the per-
spectives and practices of both their keepers and subjects.
My approach is unconventional, but it builds on substantial research in data stud-
ies—an area of scholarship that has emerged recently in response to the increasing
importance of data in everyday life. Data studies, which seeks to make sense of data
from a social and humanistic perspective, has been a significant area of scholarship ever
since information scholars Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star published Sorting
Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences almost two decades ago. Their book
established the terminology and stakes for thinking about the social lives of data. But
the worlds of data look strikingly different today, in 2019, than they did at the end of
the twentieth century when Sorting Things Out was published.18
We need new ways of
thinking about and looking at the role of data in the public realm.
As explained above, my empirical focus is on four different collections of data. Each
chapter documents my efforts to understand one of those collections within its spatial
as well as social and technological contexts.19
These cases might have been a means
of reinforcing similar points by tracking one or more themes across many examples.
Instead, I take each collection as an opportunity to open up new territory, to ask what
each data setting can reveal that is distinct about the locality of data. Moreover, I try to
engage these collections reflexively, considering my own position and relationship
to the data and their subjects. Each collection is local for me, the investigator, in a dif-
ferent way.
In order to carry out this agenda, I employ a variety of methods for studying data,
which I collectively refer to as local readings.20
As the phrase implies, I treat data as
texts: cultural expressions subject to interpretative examination. All my readings of

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data rely on insights gleaned from their keepers, who use their own local knowledge
to explain the contingencies of their data, which are not apparent otherwise. Moreover,
local reading necessitates examining data comparatively. As cultural anthropologist
Clifford Geertz explains, one local condition is most productively understood not in rela-
tion to some imagined universal but instead relative to another locality.21
Sometimes
my local readings are made possible by looking at different collections juxtaposed with
one another. In other instances, these local readings involve looking at how data are
made differently over time, but within the same institution. More experimentally, read-
ing locally can mean imagining how data might be seen in new ways, using speculative
yet nevertheless locally imagined modes of visualization.22
From my perspective, visu-
alization is simply another way of reading data. Each chapter in the book contains one or
more visualizations that extend as well as enrich claims made in the text.23
My use of visualization is informed by a long history of design practices that pro-
duce informative and expressive experiences of data.24
Today, most writing in the area
of data visualization is pragmatic, offering techniques for hands-on work with data.
Edward Tufte’s book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information first introduced
many contemporary scholars and practitioners to the potentials, pitfalls, and pleasures
of looking at data graphically. Yet Tufte and more recent authors treat data as given.25
It
is time that we learned how to visualize critical thinking on the subject of data.
The visualizations in this book are meant to be exercises in first-person participa-
tion and inquiry within data cultures. As such, the visual results might at first appear
odd or atypical to the reader. For example, some are entirely textual as opposed to
graphical. These visualizations focus on showing the structure and texture of data,
rather than offering clear visual patterns, telling stories, or answering narrowly defined
questions, as more conventional instances of data visualization might do. In engaging
these visualizations, the reader should be ready (as they must with any evidence) to do
some of their own interpretative work. Visualizations are, after all, also texts.
One note about the critical sensibilities of this study: my methods are significantly
informed by though distinct from those employed by the cohort of scholars who practice
under the banner of critical data studies.26
Geographers Rob Kitchin and Tracy Lauriault
explain the purpose of this emergent area of investigation:
To unpack the complex assemblages that produce, circulate, share/sell and utilize
data in diverse ways; to chart the diverse work they do and their consequences for
how the world is known, governed and lived-in; and to survey the wider landscape
of data assemblages and how they interact to form intersecting data products, ser-
vices and markets and shape policy and regulation.27
The work of critical data studies—to unpack, chart, and survey—is typical of criti-
cal approaches to scholarship. Across various areas of information studies, the term
critical has been used to support projects that challenge the status quo: critical games,

Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content

himself, he replied, "Dear fathers, if the thing is not done in the
name of God it will fail, but if it is, let it proceed." The prior and sub-
prior said no more. "The thing proceeds even now," adds Luther,
after relating this anecdote, "and, please God, always will proceed
better and better, even to the end. Amen."[387]
Luther had many other attacks to sustain. At Erfurt he was accused
of violence and pride in his manner of condemning the opinions of
others—the charge usually brought against those who act under the
strong conviction which the word of God gives. He was also charged
with precipitation and fickleness.
"They call upon me for moderation," replied Luther, "and they
themselves, in the judgment which they pass upon me, trample it
under foot!... We see the mote in our brother's eye, and observe not
the beam in our own.... Truth will no more gain by my moderation
than it will lose by my presumption. I desire to know," continued he,
addressing Lange, "what errors you and your theologians have found
in my theses? Who knows not that a new idea is seldom advanced
without an appearance of arrogance, and an accusation of
disputatiousness? Were humility herself to undertake something
new, those of an opposite opinion would charge her with pride.[388]
Why were Christ and all the martyrs put to death? Because they
were deemed proud despisers of the wisdom of the time, and
advanced new truths without previously taking counsel of the organs
of ancient opinion."
"Let not the wise of the present day, then, expect of me humility, or
rather hypocrisy enough, to ask their opinion before publishing what
duty calls me to say. What I do will be done, not by the prudence of
men, but by the counsel of God. If the work is of God, who can
arrest it? If it is not of God, who can advance it?... Not my will, nor
theirs, nor ours, but Thy will be done, O Holy Father who art in
heaven!" In these words what courage, what noble enthusiasm,
what confidence in God, and, above all, what truth, truth fitted to all
times!

Still the reproaches and accusations which assailed Luther from all
quarters, failed not to make some impression on his mind. His hopes
were disappointed. He had expected to see the heads of the church,
and the most distinguished scholars of the nation, publicly uniting
with him; but it was otherwise. A word of approbation, allowed to
escape at the first moment of enthusiasm, was all that the best
disposed gave him, while several of those whom he had till then
most highly venerated were loud in censuring him. He felt himself
alone in the whole Church,[389] alone against Rome, alone at the
foot of that ancient and formidable edifice, whose foundations lay
deep in the bowels of the earth, whose battlements reached the
clouds, and at which he had just struck a daring blow. He was
troubled and depressed. Doubts which he thought he had
surmounted returned with new force. He trembled at the thought of
having the authority of the whole Church against him, of
withdrawing from that authority and resisting that voice which
nations and ages had humbly obeyed, of setting himself in
opposition to that church which he had from infancy been
accustomed to venerate as the mother of the faithful.... He a paltry
monk ... the effort was too great for man.[390] No step cost him
more than this, and, accordingly, it was the step which decided the
Reformation.
The struggle which took place in his soul cannot be better described
than in his own words. "I began this affair," says he, "with great fear
and trembling. Who was I, a poor, miserable, despicable friar, liker a
corpse than a living man;[391]—who was I, to oppose the majesty of
the pope, before whom not only the kings of the earth and the
whole world, but also, if I may so speak, heaven and hell trembled,
compelled to yield obedience to his nod? Nobody can imagine what
my heart suffered during those two first years, and into what
depression, I might say what despair, I was often plunged. No idea
of it can be formed by those proud spirits who afterwards attacked
the pope with great boldness, although with all their ability they
could not have done him the least harm, had not Jesus Christ, by me

his feeble and unworthy instrument, given him a wound which never
will be cured. But while they were contented to look on, and leave
me alone in danger, I was not so joyful, so tranquil, or so sure about
the business; for at that time I did not know many things which,
thank God, I know now. It is true, several pious Christians were
much pleased with my Propositions, and set a great value upon
them, but I could not own and regard them as the organs of the
Holy Spirit. I looked only to the pope, the cardinals, bishops,
theologians, jurisconsults, monks, and priests. That was the direction
from which I expected the Spirit to come. Still having, by means of
Scripture, come off victorious over all contrary arguments, I have at
length, by the grace of Christ, though after much pain, travail, and
anguish, surmounted the only argument which arrested me, viz.,
that it is necessary to listen to the Church;[392] for from the bottom
of my heart I honoured the church of the pope as the true church,
and did so with much more sincerity and veneration, than those
shameless and infamous corrupters who are now so very forward in
opposing me. Had I despised the pope as much as he is despised in
the hearts of those who praise him so loudly with their lips, I would
have dreaded that the earth would instantly open and swallow me
up as it did Corah and his company!"
How honourable these misgivings are to Luther! How well they
display the sincerity and uprightness of his soul! And how much
more worthy of respect do those painful assaults which he had to
sustain, both within and without, prove him to be, than mere
intrepidity without any such struggle, could have done! The travail of
his soul clearly displays the truth and divinity of his work. We see
that their origin and principle were in heaven. After all the facts
which we have stated, who will presume to say that the Reformation
was an affair of politics? No, assuredly; it was not the effect of
human policy, but of the power of God. Had Luther been urged by
human passions only, he would have yielded to his fears; his
miscalculations and scruples would have smothered the fire which
had been kindled in his soul, and he would only have thrown a
transient gleam upon the Church, in the same way as the many

zealous and pious men, whose names have come down to us. But
now God's time had arrived; the work was not to be arrested; the
emancipation of the Church was to be accomplished. Luther was
destined at least to prepare that complete emancipation and those
extensive developments which are promised to the kingdom of
Christ. Accordingly, he experienced the truth of the magnificent
promise, "The strong men shall faint and be weary, and the young
men utterly fail; but they who wait upon the Lord shall renew their
strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles." This Divine
power which filled the heart of the doctor of Wittemberg, and which
had engaged him in the combat, soon gave him back all his former
resolution.

CHAP. VII.
Tezel's Attack—Luther's Reply—Good Works—Luther and
Spalatin—Study of Scripture—Scheurl and Luther—Doubts
on the Theses—Luther for the People—A New Suit.
The reproaches, timidity, or silence, of Luther's friends had
discouraged him; the attacks of his enemies had the very opposite
effect. This frequently happens. The adversaries of the truth, while
thinking by their violence to do their own work, often do that of God
himself.[393] The gauntlet which had been thrown down was taken
up by Tezel with a feeble hand. Luther's sermon, which had been to
the people what his theses had been to the learned, was the subject
of his first reply. He refuted it point by point, in his own way, and
then announced that he was preparing to combat his adversary at
greater length in theses which he would maintain at the university of
Frankfort on the Oder. "Then," said he, adverting to the conclusion
of Luther's sermon; "then every one will be able to judge who is
heresiarch, heretic, schismatic, erroneous, rash, and calumnious.
Then will it be manifest to the eyes of all who has a dull brain, who
has never felt the Bible, read Christian doctrines, understood his own
teachers.... In maintaining the propositions which I advance, I am
ready to suffer all things, prison, cudgel, water, and fire."
One thing which strikes us in reading this production of Tezel is the
difference between his German and that of Luther. One would say
that an interval of several ages is between them. A foreigner,
especially, sometimes finds it difficult to comprehend Tezel, whereas
the language of Luther is almost the same as that of our day. A
comparison of the two is sufficient to show that Luther is the creator
of the German language. No doubt, this is one of his least merits,
but still it is one.

Luther replied without naming Tezel; Tezel had not named him. But
there was nobody in Germany who could not have placed at the
head of their publications the name which they had judged it
expedient to suppress. Tezel tried to confound the repentance which
God demands with the penance which the Church imposes, in order
to give a higher value to his indulgences. Luther made it his business
to clear up this point.
"To avoid many words," said he, in his graphic style, "I give to the
wind (which, besides, has more leisure than I have) his other words,
which are only sheets of paper and withered leaves; and I content
myself with examining the foundations of his house of bur-thistle.
"The penitence which the holy father imposes cannot be that which
Jesus Christ demands; for whatever the holy father imposes he can
dispense with; and if these two penitences were one and the same,
it would follow that the holy father takes away what Jesus appoints,
and thereby makes void the commandment of God.... Ah! if it so
pleases him, let him maltreat me," continues Luther, after quoting
other false interpretations of Tezel; "let him call me heretic,
schismatic, calumniator, or anything he likes; I will not on that
account be his enemy, but will pray for him as for a friend. But it is
not possible to allow him to treat the Holy Scriptures, our
consolation, (Rom., xv, 4,) as a sow treats a sack of corn."[394]
We must accustom ourselves to Luther's occasional use of
expressions too harsh and homely for our age,—it was the custom of
the time; and under those words which in our days would violate the
proprieties of language, there is usually a force and justice which
disposes us to pardon their rankness. He continues thus:—
"He who buys indulgences, say our adversaries, does better than he
who gives alms to a poor man not absolutely in extremity. Now, let
them tell us that the Turks are profaning our churches and crosses,
we will be able to hear it without a shudder; for we have amongst
ourselves Turks a hundred times worse, who profane and annihilate
the only true sanctuary, the word of God, which sanctifies all

things.... Let him who would follow this precept take good care not
to give food to the hungry, nor clothing to the naked, before they
give up the ghost, and, consequently, have no need of his
assistance."
It is important to contrast the zeal which Luther thus manifests for
good works with what he says of justification by faith. Indeed, no
man who has any experience, or any knowledge of Christianity,
needs this new proof of a truth of which he is fully assured; viz., that
the more we adhere to justification by faith, the more strongly we
feel the necessity of works, and the more diligently we practise
them; whereas lax views as to the doctrine of faith necessarily lead
to laxity of conduct. Luther, as St. Paul before, and Howard after
him, are proofs of the former; all men without faith (and with such
the world is filled) are proofs of the latter.
Luther comes next to the insulting language of Tezel, and pays him
back in his own way. "At the sound of these invectives methinks I
hear a large ass braying at me. I am delighted at it, and would be
very sorry that such people should give me the name of a good
Christian." We must give Luther as he is with all his foibles. This turn
for pleasantry, coarse pleasantry, was one of them. The Reformer
was a great man, undoubtedly a man of God; but he was a man, not
an angel, and not even a perfect man. Who is entitled to call upon
him for perfection?
"For the rest," adds he, challenging his opponents to the combat,
"although it is not usual to burn heretics for such points, here, at
Wittemberg, am I, Doctor Martin Luther! Is there any inquisitor who
pretends to chew fire, and make rocks leap into the air? I give him
to know, that he has a safe-conduct to come here, an open door,
and bed and board certain, all by the gracious care of our admirable
Duke Frederick, who will never protect heresy."[395]
We see that Luther was not deficient in courage. He trusted to the
word of God—a rock which never gives way in the tempest. But God
in faithfulness gave him still further aid. The bursts of joy with which

the multitude had hailed Luther's theses were soon succeeded by a
gloomy silence. The learned had timidly drawn back on hearing the
calamities and insults of Tezel and the Dominicans. The bishops, who
had previously been loud in condemnation of the abuses of
indulgences, seeing them at length attacked, had not failed, with an
inconsistency of which there are but too many examples, to find that
at that time the attack was inopportune. The greater part of the
Reformer's friends were frightened. Several of them had fled. But
when the first terror was over, the minds of men took an opposite
direction. The monk of Wittemberg soon saw himself again
surrounded with a great number of friends and admirers.
There was one who, although timid, remained faithful to him
throughout this crisis, and whose friendship at once solaced and
supported him. This was Spalatin. Their correspondence was not
interrupted. "I thank you," says he, when speaking of a particular
mark of friendship which he had received from him; "but what do I
not owe you?"[396] It was on the 11th November, just fifteen days
after the publication of the theses, and consequently when the
minds of men were in a state of the greatest fermentation, that
Luther thus delights to unbosom his gratitude to his friend.
In the same letter to Spalatin, it is interesting to see the strong man,
who had just performed a most daring exploit, declaring from what
source he derives his strength. "We can do nothing of ourselves; we
can do everything by the grace of God. By us all ignorance is
invincible, but no ignorance is invincible by the grace of God. The
more we endeavour of ourselves to attain to wisdom, the nearer we
approach to folly.[397] It is not true that this invincible ignorance
excuses the sinner; were it so there would be no sin in the world."
Luther had not sent his propositions, either to the prince or to any of
his courtiers. The chaplain seems to have expressed some surprise
at this, and Luther answers:—"I did not wish my theses to reach our
illustrious prince or any of his court, before those who think
themselves specially addressed had received them, lest it should be

thought that I had published them by order of the prince or to gain
his favour, or from opposition to the Bishop of Mentz. I hear there
are already several who dream such things. But now I can swear in
all safety that my theses were published without the knowledge of
Duke Frederick."[398]
If Spalatin solaced his friend, and supported him by his influence,
Luther on his part was desirous to meet the requests of the modest
chaplain. The latter, among other questions, asked one which is
frequently repeated in our day, "What is the best method of studying
the Holy Scriptures?"
"Till now, my dear Spalatin," replied Luther, "you have asked
questions which I could answer. But to direct you in the study of the
Scriptures is more than I am able to do. However, if you would
absolutely know my method, I will not hide it from you.
"It is most certain that we cannot succeed in comprehending the
Scripture either by study or mere intellect. Your first duty, then, is to
begin with prayer.[399] Entreat the Lord that he will in his great
mercy deign to grant you the true knowledge of his Word. There is
no other interpreter of the word of God than the Author of that word
according as it is said, 'They will all be taught of God.' Hope nothing
from your works, nothing from your intellect. Trust only in God, and
in the influence of his Spirit. Believe one who is speaking from
experience."[400]
We here see how Luther attained possession of the truth of which he
was a preacher. It was not, as some pretend, by confiding in a
presumptuous reason, nor, as others maintain, by abandoning
himself to hateful passions. The source from which he drew it was
the purest, holiest, and most sublime—God himself consulted in
humility, confidence, and prayer. Few in our day imitate him, and
hence few comprehend him. To a serious mind these words of
Luther are in themselves a justification of the Reformation.

Luther likewise found comfort in the friendship of respectable
laymen. Christopher Scheurl, the excellent secretary of the imperial
city of Nuremberg, gave him gratifying marks of his friendship. We
know how pleasant expressions of sympathy are to the man who
feels himself assailed from all quarters. The secretary of Nuremberg
did more; he tried to make friends to his friend. He urged him to
dedicate one of his works to a then celebrated lawyer of Nuremberg,
named Jerome Ebner:—"You have a high idea of my studies,"
modestly replied Luther; "but I have the poorest idea of them
myself. Nevertheless, I was desirous to meet your wishes. I have
searched ... ; but in all my store, which I never found so meagre,
nothing presented itself which seemed at all worthy of being
dedicated to so great a man by so little a man."[401] Striking
humility! It is Luther who speaks thus, and the person with whom he
contrasts himself is Doctor Ebner, who is altogether unknown to us.
Posterity has not ratified Luther's judgment.
Luther, who had done nothing to circulate his theses, had not sent
them to Scheurl any more than to the Elector and his courtiers. The
secretary of Nuremberg expressed his surprise. "I had no intention,"
replies Luther, "to give my theses so much publicity. I wished only to
confer on their contents with some of those who reside with us or
near us;[402] intending, if they condemned, to destroy, and if they
approved, to publish them. But now they are printed, reprinted, and
spread far and wide, beyond my expectation; so much so that I
repent of their production.[403] Not that I have any fear of the truth
being known by the people, (for this was all I sought,) but this is not
the way of instructing them. There are questions in the theses as to
which I have still my doubts; and if I had thought that they were to
produce such a sensation, there are things which I would have
omitted, and others which I would have affirmed with greater
confidence." Luther afterwards thought differently. Far from fearing
he had said too much, he declared that he ought to have said still
more. But the apprehensions which Luther expresses to Scheurl do
honour to his sincerity. They show that he had nothing like a

premeditated plan, had no party spirit, no overweening conceit, and
sought nothing but the truth. When he had fully discovered the
truth, his language was different. "You will find in my first writings,"
said he, many years after, "that I very humbly made many
concessions to the pope, and on points of great importance;
concessions which I now detest, and regard as abominable and
blasphemous."[404]
Scheurl was not the only layman of importance who, at this time,
testified his friendship for Luther. The celebrated painter, Albert
Durer, sent him a present, (perhaps one of his pictures,) and the
doctor expressed his sense of the obligation in the warmest terms.
[405]
Thus Luther had practical experience of the truth of that saying of
Divine wisdom:—"A friend loveth at all times; and a brother is born
for adversity." Those words he remembered for the sake of others
also, and accordingly pleaded the cause of the whole population.
The Elector had just levied a tax, and it was confidently alleged that
he was going to levy another, probably on the advice of his
counsellor Pfeffinger, against whom Luther often throws out cutting
sarcasms. The doctor boldly placed himself in the breach. "Let not
your Highness," said he, "despise the prayer of a poor mendicant. In
the name of God I entreat you not to order a new tax. My heart is
broken, as well as that of several of your most devoted servants, at
seeing how much the last has injured your fair fame, and the
popularity which your Highness enjoyed. It is true that God has
endowed you with profound intellect, so that you see much farther
into things than I, or doubtless all your subjects, do. But, perhaps, it
is the will of God that a feeble intellect instruct a great one, in order
that no one may trust in himself, but only in the Lord our God. May
he deign to keep your body in health for our good, and destine your
soul to life eternal. Amen." In this way it is that the gospel, while it
makes us honour kings, makes us also plead the cause of the
people. While it tells them of their duties, it, at the same time,
reminds the prince of their rights. The voice of a Christian such as

Luther, raised in the cabinet of a sovereign, might often supply the
place of a whole assembly of legislators.
In this letter, in which Luther addresses a harsh lesson to the Elector,
he fears not to present a request to him, or rather to remind him of
a promise, viz., to give him a new suit. This freedom of Luther, at a
moment when he might have feared he had given offence to
Frederick, is equally honourable to the prince and to the Reformer.
"But," adds he, "if it is Pfeffinger who has the charge of it, let him
give it in reality, and not in protestations of friendship. He knows
very well how to weave a web of good words, but no good cloth
ever comes out of it." Luther thought, that, by the faithful counsel
which he had given to his prince, he had well deserved his court
dress.[406] Be this as it may, two years later he had not received it,
and renewed his request.[407] This seems to indicate that Frederick
was not so much under the influence of Luther as has been said.

CHAP. VIII.
Disputation at Frankfort—Tezel's Theses—Menaces—Opposition
of Knipstrow—Luther's Theses Burnt—The Monks—Luther's
Peace—Tezel's Theses Burnt—Luther's Vexation.
The minds of men had thus gradually recovered from their first
alarm. Luther himself was disposed to declare that his words did not
mean so much as had been imagined. New circumstances might
divert public attention, and the blow struck at Roman doctrine might,
as had been the case with so many others, spend itself in the air.
The partisans of Rome prevented this result. They fanned the flame
instead of smothering it.
Tezel and the Dominicans replied haughtily to the attack which had
been made upon them. Burning with eagerness to crush the
audacious monk who had disturbed their traffic, and to gain the
favour of the Roman pontiff, they uttered cries of rage. They
maintained that to attack the indulgence ordered by the pope was to
attack the pope himself, and they called in the aid of all the monks
and theologians of their school.[408] In fact, Tezel felt that an
opponent like Luther was too much for him single-handed. Quite
disconcerted, but more especially enraged at the doctor's attack, he
quitted the environs of Wittemberg, and repaired to Frankfort on the
Oder, where he arrived as early as November, 1517. The university of
that town, like that of Wittemberg, was of recent date. One of the
professors was Conrad Wimpina, a man of much eloquence, an old
rival of Pollich of Mellerstadt, and one of the most distinguished
theologians of the time. Wimpina's envy was excited both by the
doctor and by the university of Wittemberg; for their reputation
obscured his. Tezel applied to him for a reply to Luther's theses, and
Wimpina wrote two series of antitheses, the former to defend the

doctrine of indulgences, and the latter to defend the authority of the
pope.
This disputation, which had been long prepared and loudly
advertised, and of which Tezel entertained the highest hopes, took
place on the 20th January, 1518. Tezel having beaten up for recruits,
monks had been sent from all the neighbouring cloisters, and
assembled to the number of more than three hundred. Tezel read his
theses, one of which declared, "that whosoever says that the soul
does not fly away from purgatory as soon as the money tinkles on
the bottom of the strong box, is in error."[409]
But, above all, he maintained propositions, according to which, the
pope appeared to be truly, as the apostle expresses it, seated as
God in the temple of God. It was convenient for this shameless
merchant to take refuge under the pope's mantle, with all his
disorders and scandals.
In presence of the numerous assembly in which he stood, he
declared himself ready to maintain as follows:—
3. "Christians must be taught that the pope, by the greatness of his
power, is above the whole universal Church and all councils. His
orders ought to be implicitly obeyed.
4. "Christians must be taught that the pope alone is entitled to
decide in matters of Christian faith; that he, and none but he, has
the power to explain the meaning of Scripture in his own sense, and
to approve or condemn all words or works of others.
5. "Christians must be taught that the judgment of the pope in
things which concern Christian faith, and which are necessary to the
salvation of the human race, cannot possibly err.
6. "Christians must be taught that in matters of faith they ought to
lean and rest more upon the opinion of the pope, as manifested by
his decisions, than on the opinion of all wise men, as drawn by them
out of Scripture.

8. "Christians must be taught that those who attack the honour and
dignity of the pope are guilty of the crime of lese-majesty, and
deserve malediction.
17. "Christians must be taught that there are many things which the
Church regards as authentic articles of universal truth, although they
are not found either in the canon of Scripture or in ancient doctors.
44. "Christians must be taught to regard those as obstinate heretics,
who, by their words, their actions, or their writings, declare that they
would not retract their heretical propositions were excommunication
after excommunication to rain or hail upon them.
48. "Christians must be taught that those who protect heretics in
their error, and who, by their authority, prevent them from being
brought before the judge who is entitled to try them, are
excommunicated; that if, in the space of a year, they desist not from
doing so, they will be declared infamous, and severely punished with
various punishments, in terms of law, and to the terror of all men.
[410]
50. "Christians must be told that those who spoil so many books and
so much paper, and who preach or dispute publicly and wickedly on
the confession of the mouth, the satisfaction of works, the rich and
great indulgences of the Bishop of Rome, and on his power; that
those who ally themselves with those so preaching or writing, who
take pleasure in their writings, and circulate them among the people
and in the world; that those, in fine, who secretly speak of those
things in a contemptuous and irreverent manner, may well tremble
at incurring the pains which have just been named, and of
precipitating themselves and others with them, at the last day, into
eternal condemnation, and even here below into great disgrace. For
every beast that toucheth the mountain shall be stoned."
We see that Luther was not the only person whom Tezel attacked. In
the forty-eighth thesis he had probably the Elector of Saxony in
view. These propositions savour much of the Dominican. To threaten

every contradictor with severe punishment was an inquisitor's
argument, and scarcely admitted of a reply. The three hundred
monks whom Tezel had brought together gaped and stared in
admiration of his discourse. The theologians of the university were
too much afraid of being classed with the abettors of heresy, or were
too much attached to the principles of Wimpina, candidly to adopt
the extraordinary theses which had just been read.
The whole affair, about which so much noise had been made,
seemed destined to be only a sham fight; but among the crowd of
students present at the disputation was a young man of about
twenty, named John Knipstrow. He had read the theses of Luther,
and found them conformable to the doctrines of Scripture. Indignant
at seeing the truth publicly trampled under foot, while no one
appeared to defend it, this young man rose up, to the great
astonishment of the whole assembly, and attacked the
presumptuous Tezel. The poor Dominican, who had not counted on
such opposition, was quite disconcerted. After some efforts, he
quitted the field of battle, and gave place to Wimpina, who made a
more vigorous resistance; but Knipstrow pressed him so closely,
that, to put an end to a contest, which in his eyes was so
unbecoming, Wimpina, who presided, declared the discussion
closed, and proceeded forthwith to confer the degree of doctor on
Tezel, in recompence of this glorious combat. Wimpina, to
disencumber himself of the young orator, caused him to be sent to
the convent of Pyritz in Pomerania, with orders that he should be
strictly watched. But this dawning light was only removed from the
banks of the Oder that it might afterwards shed a bright effulgence
in Pomerania.[411] When God sees it meet, he employs scholars to
confound teachers.
Tezel, wishing to repair the check which he had received, had
recourse to the ultima ratio of Rome and the inquisitors,—I mean
the faggot. On a public walk in one of the suburbs of Frankfort, he
caused a pulpit and a scaffold to be erected, and repaired thither in
solemn procession with his insignia of inquisitor. Mounting the pulpit,

he let loose all his fury. He darted his thunder, and with his
Stentorian voice exclaimed, that the heretic Luther ought to be
burned alive. Then placing the doctor's theses and sermon on the
scaffold, he burned them.[412] He was better acquainted with this
kind of work than with the defence of theses. Here he met with no
opponents, and his victory was complete. The impudent Dominican
returned in triumph to Frankfort. When parties in power are
vanquished, they have recourse to certain demonstrations which
must be conceded to them as a kind of consolation to their disgrace.
The second theses of Tezel form an important epoch in the
Reformation. They changed the locality of the dispute, transporting it
from the indulgence market to the halls of the Vatican, and diverting
it from Tezel to the pope. Instead of the contemptible creature
whom Luther had taken in his fist, they substituted the sacred
person of the Head of the church. Luther was stunned at this. It is
probable that he would himself have taken the step at a later period,
but his enemies spared him the trouble. Thenceforward the question
related not merely to a disreputable traffic, but to Rome; and the
blow by which a bold hand had tried to demolish the shop of Tezel,
shook the very foundations of the pontifical throne.
Tezel's theses were only a signal to the Roman troops. A cry against
Luther arose among the monks, who were infuriated at the
appearance of an adversary more formidable than either Erasmus or
Reuchlin had been. The name of Luther resounded from the pulpits
of the Dominicans, who addressed themselves to the passions of the
people, and inveighed against the courageous doctor, as a madman,
a deceiver, and a demoniac. His doctrine was denounced as the most
dreadful heresy. "Wait only for a fortnight, or four weeks at
farthest," said they, "and this noted heretic will be burned." Had it
depended only on the Dominicans, the fate of the Saxon doctor had
soon been that of Huss and Jerome, but his life was destined to
accomplish what the ashes of Huss had begun. Each does the work
of God, one by his death, and another by his life. Several now began
to cry out that the whole university of Wittemberg was tainted with

heresy, and pronounced it infamous.[413] "Let us pursue the villain,
and all his partisans," continued they. In several places these
exclamations had the effect of stirring up the passions of the people.
Those who shared the opinions of the Reformer had the public
attention directed towards them; and in every place where the
monks were strongest, the friends of the gospel felt the effects of
their hatred. Thus, in regard to the Reformation, the Saviour's
prediction began to be accomplished, "They will revile you and
persecute you, and say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my
sake." This is a recompence which the world at no time fails to
bestow on the decided friends of the gospel.
When Luther was made acquainted with Tezel's theses, and with the
general attack of which they were the signal, his courage rose. He
felt that it was necessary to withstand such adversaries to the face;
and his intrepid zeal had no difficulty in resolving so to do. At the
same time, their feebleness made him aware of his own strength,
and told him what he was.
He did not, however, allow himself to give way to those emotions of
pride which are so natural to the heart of man. "It gives me more
difficulty," he writes to Spalatin, "to refrain from despising my
adversaries, and so sinning against Jesus Christ, than it would give
me to vanquish them. They are so ignorant in things human and
divine, that one is ashamed at having to fight with them; and yet it
is their very ignorance which gives them their inconceivable audacity
and face of brass."[414] But the most powerful support to Luther's
heart, in the midst of this universal opposition, was the deep
conviction that his cause was the cause of truth. "Let it not surprise
you," he writes to Spalatin, at the beginning of the year 1518, "that
I am so much insulted. I am delighted with these insults. Did they
not curse me, I could not believe so firmly that the cause which I
have undertaken is God's own cause.[415] Christ has been set up for
a sign to be spoken against. I know," added he, "that from the
beginning of the world the nature of the word of God has been such,
that every one who has preached it to the world, has been obliged,

like the apostles, to leave all and lay his account with death. Were it
otherwise, it would not be the word of Jesus Christ."[416] This peace
in the midst of agitation is a thing unknown to the world's heroes.
Men placed at the head of a government, or of a political party, are
seen to give way under their labours and their vexations. The
Christian in his struggles usually acquires new strength, because he
has access to a mysterious source of repose and courage, unknown
to those whose eyes are closed to the gospel.
One thing, however, sometimes distressed Luther, viz., the thought
of the dissensions which his courageous opposition might produce.
He knew that a single word might be sufficient to set the world in a
flame; and when he foresaw prince against prince, and perhaps
nation against nation, his patriotic heart was saddened, and his
Christian charity alarmed. His wish was for peace; but he behoved to
speak out. So God required. "I tremble," said he, "I shudder at the
thought of being the cause of discord among such mighty princes."
[417]
He still kept silence in regard to Tezel's propositions concerning the
pope. Had he been carried away by passion, he would doubtless
have made an impetuous assault on the extraordinary doctrine
under which his opponents sought to take shelter. He did not do so;
and there is in this delay, reserve, and silence, something grave and
solemn, which sufficiently explains the spirit by which he was
animated. He waited, but not through weakness; for when he struck
he gave a heavier blow.
Tezel, after his auto da fe at Frankfort on the Oder, had hastened to
send his theses into Saxony. There, thought he, they will serve as an
antidote to those of Luther. A man from Halle, employed by the
inquisitor to circulate his propositions, arrived at Wittemberg. The
students of the university, still indignant at Tezel for having burned
the theses of their master, no sooner heard of the messenger's
arrival, than they sought him out, and, gathering round, jostled and
frightened him. "How dare you bring such things here?" demanded

they. Some purchasing part of the copies with which he was
provided, and others seizing the rest, they got possession of his
whole stock, amounting to eight hundred copies. Then, unknown to
the Elector, the senate, the rector, Luther, and all the other
professors,[418] they put up the following notice on the boards of the
university:—"Whosoever is desirous to be present at the burning and
funeral of Tezel's theses, let him repair at two o'clock to the market-
place."
Crowds assembled at the hour, and committed the propositions of
the Dominican to the flames, amid loud acclamations. One copy
which escaped, Luther afterwards sent to his friend, Lange of Erfurt.
These generous but imprudent youths followed the old precept, "Eye
for eye, and tooth for tooth" and not that of Jesus Christ; but after
the example which doctors and professors had given at Frankfort,
can we be astonished that young students followed it at
Wittemberg? The news of this academical execution spread
throughout Germany, and made a great noise.[419] Luther was
extremely vexed at it.
"I am astonished," he writes to his old master, Jodocus, at Erfurt,
"how you could think it was I that burned Tezel's theses. Do you
think that I am so devoid of sense? But what can I do? When I am
the subject of remark, every thing seems to be believed.[420] Can I
tie up the tongues of the whole world? Very well! Let them say, let
them hear, let them see, let them pretend whatever they please; I
will act as long as the Lord gives me strength, and with his help will
fear nothing." "What will come out of it," says he to Lange, "I know
not, unless it be that my danger is much increased."[421] The act of
the students shows how much their hearts already burned for the
cause which Luther defended. This was an important symptom; for a
movement among the young of necessity soon extends to the whole
nation.
The theses of Tezel and Wimpina, though little esteemed, produced
a certain effect. They heightened the dispute, widened the rent

which had been made in the mantle of the Church, and brought
questions of the highest interest into the field. Accordingly, the
heads of the Church began to look more narrowly at the matter, and
to declare decidedly against the Reformer. "Verily, I know not in
whom Luther confides," said the Bishop of Brandenburg, "when he
dares thus attack the power of bishops." Perceiving that this new
circumstance called for new proceedings, the bishop came in person
to Wittemberg; but he found Luther animated with the inward joy
which a good conscience imparts, and determined to give battle. The
bishop felt that the Augustin monk was obeying an authority
superior to his, and returned to Brandenburg in a rage. One day, in
the winter of 1518, when sitting at his fireside, he turned to those
who were about him and said, "I will not lay down my head in peace
till I have thrown Martin into the fire, as I do this brand," throwing
one into the grate. The revolution of the sixteenth century was not
to be accomplished by the heads of the Church any more than that
of the first century had been by the Sanhedrim and the synagogue.
In the sixteenth century, the heads of the Church were opposed to
Luther, the Reformation, and its ministers, in the same way as they
were opposed to Jesus Christ, the gospel, and his apostles, and as
they too often are at all times to the truth. "The bishops," says
Luther, in speaking of the visit which the Bishop of Brandenburg had
paid him, "begin to perceive that they ought to have done what I am
doing, and they are consequently ashamed. They call me proud and
audacious, and I deny not that I am so. But they are not the people
to know either what God is, or what we are."[422]

CHAP. IX.
Prierio—System of Rome—The Dialogue—System of Reform—
Reply to Prierio—The Word—The Pope and the Church—
Hochstraten—The Monks—Luther replies—Eck—The School
—The Obelisks—Luther's Sentiments—The Asterisks—
Rupture.
A more serious resistance than that of Tezel was already opposed to
Luther. Rome had answered. A reply had issued from the walls of the
sacred palace. It was not Leo X who had taken it into his head to
speak theology. "A quarrel of monks," he had one day said. "The
best thing is not to meddle with it." And on another occasion, "It is a
drunken German who has written these theses; when he recovers
from his wine he will speak differently."[423] A Dominican of Rome,
Sylvester Mazolini de Prierio or Prierias, master of the sacred palace,
exercised the functions of censor, and in this character was the first
man in Italy who knew of the Saxon monk's theses.
A Roman censor and the theses of Luther! What a rencounter!
Liberty of speech, liberty of investigation, liberty of faith, come into
collision in Rome, with that power which pretends to have in its
hands a monopoly of intelligence, and to open and shut the mouth
of Christendom at its pleasure. The struggle between Christian
liberty, which begets children of God, and pontifical despotism,
which begets slaves of Rome, is, as it were, personified during the
first days of the Reformation, in the encounter between Luther and
Prierio.
The Roman censor, prior-general of the Dominicans, employed to
determine what Christendom must say, or not say, and know or not
know, hastened to reply, and published a tract, which he dedicated
to Leo X. He spoke contemptuously of the German monk, and

declared, with a self-sufficiency altogether Roman, "that he was
anxious to know whether this Martin had a nose of iron, or a head of
brass, which could not be broken."[424] Then, in the form of a
dialogue, he attacked the theses of Luther, employing alternately,
ridicule, insult, and threatening.
The combat between the Augustin of Wittemberg and the Dominican
of Rome took place on the very question which lies at the foundation
of the Reformation; viz., "What is the sole infallible authority to
Christians?" The following is the system of the Church, as
expounded by its most independent organs.[425]
The letter of the written Word is dead without the spirit of
interpretation, which alone unfolds its hidden meaning. Now this
spirit is not granted to every Christian, but to the Church; in other
words, to the priests. It is great presumption to maintain, that he
who promised to be with his Church always to the end of the world,
could abandon it to the power of error. It will be said, perhaps, that
the doctrine and constitution of the Church are not the same as we
find them in the sacred oracles. This is true; but the change is only
apparent, relating to the form, and not to the substance. Moreover,
the change is an advance. The living power of the Spirit has given
reality to what exists in Scripture only in idea; it has embodied the
sketches of the Word, put a finishing hand to these sketches, and
completed the work of which the Bible had furnished only the first
outlines. Scripture ought, therefore, to be understood in the sense
determined by the Church, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
Here the Catholic doctors are divided. General councils, say some,
and Gerson among the number, are the representatives of the
Church. The pope, says others, is the depositary of the Spirit of
interpretation; and no man is entitled to understand Scripture in a
sense differing from that of the Roman pontiff. This was the opinion
of Prierio.
Such was the doctrine which the master of the sacred palace
opposed to the rising Reformation. On the power of the pope and

the Church he advanced propositions at which the most shameless
flatterers of the court of Rome would have blushed. The following is
one of the points which he maintains at the commencement of his
tract:—"Whoever rests not in the doctrine of the Roman Church, and
the Roman pontiff, as the infallible rule of faith, from which the Holy
Scripture itself derives its force and authority, is a heretic."[426]
Then in a dialogue, in which Luther and Sylvester are the speakers,
the latter tries to refute the doctor's propositions. The sentiments of
the Saxon monk were quite new to a Roman censor. Accordingly,
Prierio shows that he understood neither the emotions of his heart,
nor the motives of his conduct. To the teacher of truth he applied
the little standards of the valets of Rome. "Dear Luther!" says he,
"were you to receive a bishopric and a plenary indulgence for the
repair of your Church from our lord the pope, you would proceed
more gently, and would even prose in favour of the indulgence
which you are now pleased to blacken!" The Italian, so proud of the
elegance of his manners, sometimes assumes the most scurrilous
tone. "If the property of dogs is to bite," says he to Luther, "I fear
your father must have been a dog."[427] The Dominican begins at
last to be almost astonished at his own condescension in speaking to
a rebellious monk; and concludes with showing his opponent the
cruel teeth of an inquisitor. "The Roman Church," says he, "having in
the pope the summit of spiritual and temporal power, may, by the
secular arm, constrain those who after receiving the faith, stray from
it. She is not bound to employ arguments for the purpose of
combating and subduing the rebellious."[428]
These words traced by the pen of one of the dignitaries of the
Roman court had a very significant meaning. They failed, however,
to terrify Luther. He believed, or feigned to believe, that this dialogue
was not by Prierio, but by Ulrich von Hütten, or by some other of the
authors of "The Letters of some Obscure Men," who (said he in his
sarcastic strain) had, in order to stir up Luther against Prierio,
compiled this mass of absurdity.[429] He had no desire to see the

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