This Day in History: 1517-10-31

Martin Luther posts the 95 Theses onto the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany on this day in 1517, and in the process, kicks off the Protestant Reformation. Luther’s theses were an argument that the Roman Catholic Church was corrupted and needed to reform. If this had simply been shouted from the pulpits, or copied by hand, it could have been easily ignored or suppressed. Similar calls for reform from John Wycliffe of London and Jan Huss of Prague had been put down a century beforehand. But the new printing press amplified Luther’s voice to an extent that astonished everyone—including Luther. The 95 Theses were  in such demand that crowds surged around printing shops, grabbing for pages still wet from the press. For the first time in history, the power of a revolutionary idea was fully amplified by a mass medium.