And I quote:
The confessional polemics of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries consisted very largely of attacks upon, and apologies for, Luther the Reformer. In an interesting and illuminating study of Roman Catholic polemical literature Adolf Herte (Das katholische Lutherbild im Bann der Luther-kommentare des Cochlaeus, 1943) has shown that the character assassination perpetrated by Johann Cochlaeus' biography of Luther continued to pass from one Roman Catholic writer to another for centuries after the Reformation, making an objective assessment of Luther and his work almost impossible. On the Lutheran side objectivity was also difficult, for the discussion of Luther's personal virtues and vices was more often a confessional issue than a biographical one. Lutheranism was defending itself, but in so doing it was defending Luther.
Such a congruence between the biographical issue and the confessional issue was due in part to the circumstance that Lutheranism was -- or at least thought it was -- faced with the same set of opponents against whom Luther had contended. The Roman Catholicism with which it had to deal was post-Tridentine both chronologically and theologically, and the Reformed thought it confronted was Calvinistic rather than Zwinglian. Both of these transformations should probably have brought about a revision of Luther's judgments; in any case there is considerable ground for such a contention. But most confessional theologians continued to interpret Trent in the light of Luther's Roman Catholic antagonists and to read both Calvin and Beza as Zwinglians. Engaged as it was in this confessional polemic during the centuries following the Reformation, Lutheranism tended to develop a stereotype of Luther as well as of his opponents. Luther at Worms was its answer to Rome; Luther at Marburg, its answer to Geneva. And against both Rome and Geneva Lutheranism continued to hurl many of the charges Luther had voiced at Worms and Marburg.