Special and Chosen Sermons of D. Martin Luther

In 1519 Martin Luther’s books were being exported to England, where, as Erasmus informed him, certain very great people admired them, and the daily ledger of the Oxford bookseller John Dorne shows that he sold some dozen titles by Luther in 1520. A year later, Cardinal Wolsey publicly burned a collection of Luther’s works in London, following a mass at St Paul’s with a sermon by John Fisher against heresy. From 1534, when Henry VIII broke from the Catholic Church, Luther’s works began to be printed in England and in English, where their popularity is clear from the publication of some fifty sixteenth-century titles by or partly by him. The Special and Chosen Sermons first appeared in 1578. The translator, William Gace, was a convinced evangelical who translated several Latin works by German and Danish Lutheran reformers into English to bring people ignorant of Latin to God and edify the church, using a plain style for maximum effect. The martyrologist John Foxe in his introduction emphasises the value of the vernacular:

so this translator has no lesse plainly and faithfully [than Luther] englished the same [sermons] for the commoditie and vse of our contry folke of England.