Christopher J. Zehnder Volgorde van de boeken

This, the third and last volume of the Song for Else carries the story through the aging of Luther's reform into middle age, its institutionalization, and its contention with the newer and more radical revolutions that are its spawn. The heroism that marked the Reformation's earlier period has been gentled. Luther's once radical doctrine has been subordinated to the politics and passions of princes. Its old fervor, taken up by the new sects, is easily agitated into fanaticism. Through this world Lorenz and his Else move in their own private quest for a joy that is almost in their grasp but ever elusive.

Peace. This is what Lorenz List seeks, peace for a troubled conscience and an unfulfilled longing. But the peace eludes him until he meets Frater Martin, a scholar of the small, insignificant university of Wittenberg in Saxony. Martin's strange new teaching speaks peace to Lorenz-or does it? For Lorenz soon discovers that this same teaching unsheathes a sword that strikes at the peace of the Church, state, and his own soul. A member of Frater Martin's inner circle, Lorenz experiences the hope and terror that stirs Germany but finally shakes her to her foundations. This volume, The Overthrow, continues the story Lorenz List and "Else" begun in the The Vow, Part I of A Song for Else. As he emerges from the dramatic "heroic years" of the German Reformation movement and their climax, the bloody Peasants' War of 1525, will Lorenz find the peace and happiness that have so long eluded him?

Lorenz List didn't know what awaited him in the great city of Nürnberg. It was an impossibly large city for a boy from the rural hinterlands, where ancient custom, seething discontent, and (at times) a mystical fanaticism held sway. In Nürnberg, he hopes to fulfill a destiny for which he never had dared to dream. He could move from obscurity to fame, perhaps, and from poverty to wealth. In Nürnberg he begins to move among an urbane and cultivated class of people far superior (he thinks) to the peasant folk from which he came. And he finds unexpected love - a love that could prove the ruin of all his hopes. Set in early 16th century Germany, this is a tale of a young man in a time of impending revolution, felt but as yet unseen. This volume is the first part of a trilogy set against the backdrop of the dramatic events of the Protestant Reformation in Germany.