Virtually every textbook account of the Reformation repeats the claim that Erasmus laid the egg that Luther hatched. In an influential essay published in 1959, \u201cThe German Humanists and the Beginnings of the Reformation,\u201d the German church historian Bernd Moeller generalized this association between Erasmus and Luther to link two broader movements. His dictum, \u201cwithout humanism, no Reformation,\u201d is cited in textbooks almost as frequently as Erasmus\u2019s egg. In a second groundbreaking essay, \u201cImperial Cities and the Reformation,\u201d published three years later, Moeller argued that the success ofthe Reformation in the cities of South Germany and Switzerland was due to \u201cthe encounter ofthe peculiarly \u2018urban\u2019 theology of Zwingli and Bucer with the particularly vital communal spirit in Upper Germany.\u201d That essay sparked a lively debate and a host ofstudies on the urban reformation in the decades after its publication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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