[2] The Theologia was written during the disruptive reign of the Avignon Papacy (1309–78), when many clerics were forbidden to perform Catholic rites because of the power struggle between the Pope and Holy Roman Emperor.
[citation needed] The Theologia Germanica survives today in only eight manuscripts, all from the second half of the fifteenth century, suggesting that it was not widely disseminated before it came to the attention of Martin Luther.
Luther wrote, [N]ext to the Bible and St. Augustine, no book has ever come into my hands, from which I have learned... more of God, and Christ, and man and all things that are...[3]Another goal of Luther in the publication was supporting his thesis that the German language was just as well-suited for expressing theological ideas as the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin languages.
In 1528, Ludwig Haetzer republished Theologia Germanica with interpretive "Propositions" by the Radical Reformer Hans Denck.
Sebastian Castellio published Latin (1557) and French (1558) translations, after his break with John Calvin over the execution of Michael Servetus (1553).
In 1612, Pope Paul V placed it on the Catholic Church’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum, where it remained into the second half of the twentieth century.