Diarmaid MacCulloch wrote what is widely considered to be the authoritative account of the Reformation—a critical juncture in the history of Christianity. "It is impossible to understand modern Europe without understanding these sixteenth-century upheavals in Latin Christianity," he writes. "They represented the greatest fault line to appear in Christian culture since the Latin and Greek halves of the Roman Empire went their separate ways a thousand years before; they produced a house divided." The resulting split between the Catholics and Protestants still divides Christians throughout the Western world. It affects interpretations of the Bible, beliefs about baptisms, and event how much authority is given to religious leaders. The division even fuels an ongoing war. What makes MacCulloch's account rise above previous attempts to interpret the Reformation is the breadth of his research. Rather than limit his narrative to the actions of key theologians and leaders of the era—Luther, Zingli, Calvin, Loyola, Cranmer, Henry VIII and numerous popes—MacCulloch sweeps his narrative across the culture, politics and lay people of Renaissance Western Europe. This broad brush approach touches upon many fascinating discussions surrounding the Reformation, including his belief that the Latin Church was probably not as "corrupt and ineffective" as Protestants tend to portray it. In fact, he asserts that it "generally satisfied the spiritual needs of the late medieval people." As a historical document, this 750-page narrative has all the key ingredients. MacCulloch, a professor of history as the Church of Oxford University, is an articulate and vibrant writer with a strong guiding intelligence. The structure is sensible—starting with the main characters who influenced reforms, then spreading out to the regional concerns, and social intellectual themes of the era. He even fast forwards into American Christianity—showing how this historical era influences modern times. MacCulloch is a topnotch historian—uncovering material and theories that will seem fresh and inspired to Reformation scholars as well as lay readers. --Gail Hudson


From Publishers Weekly
Many standard histories of Christianity chronicle the Reformation as a single, momentous period in the history of the Church. According to those accounts, a number of competing groups of reformers challenged a monolithic and corrupt Roman Catholicism over issues ranging from authority and the role of the priests to the interpretation of the Eucharist and the use of the Bible in church. In this wide-ranging, richly layered and captivating study of the Reformation, MacCulloch challenges traditional interpretations, arguing instead that there were many reformations. Arranging his history in chronological fashion, MacCulloch provides in-depth studies of reform movements in central, northern and southern Europe and examines the influences that politics and geography had on such groups. He challenges common assumptions about the relationships between Catholic priests and laity, arguing that in some cases Protestantism actually took away religious authority from laypeople rather than putting it in their hands. In addition, he helpfully points out that even within various groups of reformers there was scarcely agreement about ways to change the Church. MacCulloch offers valuable and engaging portraits of key personalities of the Reformation, including Erasmus, Luther, Zwingli and Calvin. More than a history of the Reformation, MacCulloch's study examines its legacy of individual religious authority and autonomous biblical interpretation. This spectacular intellectual history reminds us that the Reformation grew out of the Renaissance, and provides a compelling glimpse of the cultural currents that formed the background to reform. MacCulloch's magisterial book should become the definitive history of the Reformation. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
The subtitle here is surely wrong, if only by one word. This isn't merely "a history" of the Reformation, but rather "the history." One would be hard put to imagine a more detailed, even-handed, clearly written account of the religious controversies of the 16th century. By comparison, G.R. Elton's Reformation Europe (1963) reads like a brisk, albeit elegantly composed, précis. If you have more than a passing interest in the advent of Protestantism and the Catholic response to it, this is your book for the spring.And for the summer. And possibly the autumn as well. Diarmaid MacCulloch -- professor of history at Oxford and author of a much-honored biography of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556), Henry VIII's chief episcopal lieutenant -- knows everything about the theological and ecclesiastical life of this time, and he doesn't want to shortchange any of its complexities. In the first three quarters of his in-depth survey he focuses appropriately, if somewhat austerely, on intellectual currents and questions of dogma, resisting the seduction of mere anecdote. But in his last section MacCulloch turns his attention to what it was actually like to live through this period of upheaval, emphasizing the new views of the family, sex and marriage.In other words, this is a serious work of scholarship, and the casual page-turner will need to slow down. But he or she will be rewarded for the requisite effort. To begin with the most obvious: It is startling how much the first half of the 16th century calls to mind the 21st. Islamic jihad threatens the West, even laying siege to great cities like Vienna (in 1529). Central Europe -- the Holy Roman Empire -- is divided into warring and bloodthirsty factions. There is widespread racial and religious distrust, often leading to military action and ruthless ethnic cleansing (the expulsion of the Moors from Spain, the forced conversion of its Jews, the burning of heretics). Arrogant civic leaders behave like swaggering bravos wholly convinced that God is on their side, or even in their pocket. New communications technology -- the printing press -- speeds the dissemination of information and subversive ideas. Visionaries like Savanorola and John Calvin call for a total recasting of society, a return to fundamentalist principles and a rejection of the modern world's gross secularism. Other dogmatists, fanatics and martyrs arise, reinforcing the era's disorientation, pervasive uneasiness and latent hysteria. Inevitably, extremism results in heavy-handed government regulation and a call for order from the lofty ecclesiastical powers that be. More and more people choose to die for principles and beliefs that strike an outsider as utterly trivial, if not insane. It is widely believed that the world is coming to an end.Against this backdrop of overheated thinking, genuine piety and violent action, MacCulloch tracks the principal contemporary force-fields. He spotlights the mundane as well as the mystical. When printing replaced the laborious hand-copying of manuscripts, scholars unexpectedly discovered more time to think for themselves, to move beyond a reflexive veneration for the past. Early on, the crafty humanist Erasmus adumbrated the key problem that still divides Christians: "Did the Bible contain all sacred truth? Or was there a tradition the Church guarded, independent of it?" Luther and Calvin derived their views on predestination -- that God has chosen in advance who will be saved and who damned -- from that pessimistic pillar of the Church, St. Augustine,who said neither good works nor human merit had any necessary pull with the Lord above. Indulgences -- get-out-of-purgatory-sooner cards -- may have infuriated Luther, but what truly marked the Protestant world-view was the doctrine of predestination, very darkly so in the case of the profoundly intelligent though dour John Calvin. Predestination, writes MacCulloch, "was part of Calvin's growing conviction that he must proclaim the all-embracing providence of God in every aspect of human life and experience. . . . Calvin was perfectly aware that the determinism of divine predestination was 'dreadful indeed' to humanity. Moreover, like most believers in predestination (Luther and Augustine included), he felt that only a minority would be saved. . . . Calvin was not prepared to put a figure on the proportion of the saved, varying his estimates for artistic effect from his habitual estimate of one in a hundred to one in twenty, or even one in five in more generous moods. He was also very wary of saying that people could be certain of their own election, let alone identify others among the elect." MacCulloch -- himself a lapsed Scottish Episcopalian, still mildly nostalgic for its humane culture -- tries to understand the beliefs of everyone in his cast of hundreds, from the most devout to the most deluded. He admires many Catholic thinkers -- in particular, Cardinal Reginald Pole -- but rightly deplores the fanatic stupidity of several heirs to St. Peter's throne. Pope Paul IV "was a good hater, and his hatreds ranged from the trivial to the profoundly politically important. He hated nudity in art, and famously commissioned a forest of fig leaves for the sensuous religious painting and sculpture of Renaissance Rome, including Michelangelo's forty year old frescos on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. He hated Jews, and confined the Jewish communities of the Papal States for the first time in ghettos and made them wear distinctive yellow hats. He hated the independent spirit of the Jesuits. . . . Above all, Paul's old loathing of Spaniards was undiminished: They had stolen Italy, and he would do his best to see them expelled. It was not merely the Society of Jesus that suffered for its Spanish associations: Paul detested the Hapsburgs who ruled Spain. So amid the crisis of the Catholic Church, a pope regarded the devoutly Catholic Holy Roman Emperor and King Philip of Spain not as the Church's best defenses but among its chief enemies, and he behaved accordingly. . . . Overall, it is no exaggeration to see Pope Paul's behavior as lunatic." Though the mid-century Council of Trent, MacCulloch contends, established important new dogma for the Counter Reformation, many of its edicts simply led to an augmentation of papal power, leaving the Vicar of Christ the principal decision-maker on questions of faith.On the other hand, MacCulloch rather admires the Jesuits, not only for their persistence, shrewdness and energy, but for their selflessness and devotion to teaching. "If anything turned back the tide of noble and popular Protestant advance it was this Jesuit offer of high-quality education, employing a curriculum decided at the international level and so guaranteeing an international standard of excellence. Small wonder that the elites began sending their children to such schools, their ambitions for their children often outweighing their suspicion of Catholic indoctrination, and small wonder that the children so educated increasingly turned to Roman Catholic belief." Ranging from the Atlantic Islands to the Polish-Lithuanian empire, MacCulloch's ambitious history nets all the great and famous, and not only Luther and Calvin: Hus, Zwingli, Cranmer, John Knox, Cardinal Borromeo (known for his "emaciated joylessness"), Melanchthon, Elizabeth I, Savonarola, Ignatius Loyola, Robert Bellarmine, our own Baptist dissenter Roger Williams and even Renaissance polymaths like Michael Servetus, Paracelsus and Giordano Bruno. MacCulloch points out that in Zurich the evangelical Zwingli employed elections and a tiered structure of civic legislation -- and thus provided a model for later forms of secular government. He reminds us that the purity and beauty of Luther's German and Calvin's French contributed more than a little to the success of their message. And in what was for me a startling passage, MacCulloch stresses the key importance of the metrical Psalms in spreading the Protestant wake-up call. They were "the secret weapon of the Reformation." Written in the vernacular, encouraging singing, whether communal or individual, loaded with observations and dicta for every occasion, psalms could be "redeployed . . . to articulate the hope, fear, joy, and fury of a new movement." A murmured phrase could hint at a world of meaning, a few bars of melody might affirm one's outlawed belief. Not unexpectedly, MacCulloch likes to linger on the excesses and successes of that "triumph of Lent over Carnival," the Scottish church or, rather, kirk. But he also points to the entertainment value of church-going -- highly theatrical sermons as the social events of the week, how for many Protestants a growing belief in angels replaced Rome's devotion to the saints. After he tells us the crude Catholic taunt to Protestants -- "Where was your church before Luther?" -- MacCulloch doesn't overlook the even cruder rhetorical question of Pope Paul V: "Do you not know that so much reading of Scripture ruins the Catholic religion?" In fact, Catholics wishing to study a vernacular Bible required special permission from their local bishop. In 1596 the Roman Index actually banned the vernacular Bible completely. "Bibles were publicly and ceremonially burned, like heretics. . . . As a result, between 1567 and 1773, not a single edition of an Italian language Bible was printed anywhere in the Italian peninsula."Religious conviction during the Reformation lurched from committee-like wrangling over minute points of theology to an ecstatic surrendering -- Alleluia! -- to the spirit of the Lord. One form of this latter enthusiasm, called devotio moderna, was "an intense, introspective and creatively imaginative mode of reaching out to God," one that led eventually to the visions of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. Such mysticism found philosophical reinforcement in Plato's newly fashionable theories about the self and the nature of things: The Greek thinker had been largely unknown to the Middle Ages, and it wasn't until scholar-refugees from Byzantium (fallen to the Turks in the 15th century) started translating his work into Latin that people began to glimpse connections between Platonism and Christianity. To the agnostic reader the Reformation often seems "vandalistic, meanminded or money-grubbing," and even the sympathetic may come away from this magisterial book saddened yet again by the horrors perpetrated by spiritual arrogance and human intolerance. So much waste, destruction and bloodshed over the nature of the Eucharist, the virginity of Mary, the doctrines of prevenient grace or predestination. Yet as MacCulloch properly emphasizes, "Few people in modern Europe now understand how urgent these arguments were in the sixteenth century. That urgency gave rise to what has been called 'theological road rage,' and we have viewed many of the dire consequences. Europeans were prepared to burn and torture each other because they disagreed on whether, or how, bread and wine were transformed into God, or about the sense in which Jesus Christ could be both divine and human." He adds, "We have no right to adopt an attitude of intellectual or emotional superiority, especially in the light of the atrocities that twentieth-century Europe produced because of its faith in newer, secular ideologies. Anxiety and a sense of imperfection seem to be basic components of being human, for those of no religion as well as the religious. Some continue to call the answer to these miseries by the name of God." The Reformation is a learned, enlightening and disturbing masterwork, and likely to become the standard one-volume history. Not least among its virtues, the book faithfully reflects the variousness and confusion of the times, when it was hard to distinguish the madman from the future saint. Then religion inspired nobility of soul, personal sacrifice and spiritual seriousness -- but also the Inquisition, the destruction of much art, beauty and learning, the puritanizing of the human spirit, and every form of fanaticism. On the one hand, Teresa of Avila; on the other Tomás de Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor. Alas, matters aren't much different now -- only the names, geographies and particular beliefs have changed. In the end, one really can't help but wonder: Is this game worth the candle? I do know that if the Last Judgment ever comes, God as well as mankind will have a lot to answer for. Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.


From Booklist
In the West, religious conviction is generally viewed as a private matter, and tolerance is enshrined in our secular creed. So it may seem incomprehensible that a few centuries ago Europeans enthusiastically slaughtered each other over what, today, seem trivial doctrinal differences. MacCullouch, an Oxford University professor, makes clear in this comprehensive and superbly written history of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation that men of the sixteenth century did not regard these differences as trivial. He seamlessly weaves his account of religious differences into the fabric of political disputes between German princes, the papacy, and monarchs of nation-states. In his portraits of the major personalities, including Luther, Calvin, and Ignatius of Loyola, it is striking that most of them claimed to desire a return to a "purer" or more "catholic" Christianity as envisioned by the church fathers. This is an outstanding work that examines fairly and objectively a definitive epoch in the history and spiritual development of the Western world. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

ANNOTATION

Winner of the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The Reformation and the Counter-Reformation it provoked are one of the great discontinuities in European and world history. The dramatic changes that began when Martin Luther proclaimed his ninety-five theses in Wittenberg in 1517 were of a different order to anything that had gone before. In the following two hundred years, the Christian world broke apart and the nature not just of religion but also of politics, thought, society and culture all changed utterly. The course of history down to our own time has been decisively shaped by this revolution.

Diarmaid MacCulloch's magnificent new history is the most authoritative and wide-ranging account of these epochal and often bloody events. He brilliantly describes the changing late medieval world into which Luther, Calvin and the other reformers erupted. He proposes an original understanding of the often confusing origins of the exceptionally violent disagreements that divided men and women of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries -- disagreements for which they were prepared to kill and be killed. He examines the personalities of the leading Reformers and their opponents and the mix of ideas, prejudices and accidents that shaped the various versions of Protestantism and Catholicism.

But this is not simply a book about popes, scholars and reformers, religious battles and secular powers. MacCulloch examines the impact of the Reformation on everyday lives -- on sex and love, on the changing sense of being a man and being a woman, on beliefs about life after death and punishment in this life, on belief in witches and ghosts. He shows the power of ideas to ruin lives and rebuild them: to bring hope, fear, hatred, anger and joy to the humblest as well as the most exalted places on the continent.

FROM THE CRITICS

Michael Dirda - The Washington Post

The Reformation is a learned, enlightening and disturbing masterwork, and likely to become the standard one-volume history. Not least among its virtues, the book faithfully reflects the variousness and confusion of the times, when it was hard to distinguish the madman from the future saint.

Publishers Weekly

Many standard histories of Christianity chronicle the Reformation as a single, momentous period in the history of the Church. According to those accounts, a number of competing groups of reformers challenged a monolithic and corrupt Roman Catholicism over issues ranging from authority and the role of the priests to the interpretation of the Eucharist and the use of the Bible in church. In this wide-ranging, richly layered and captivating study of the Reformation, MacCulloch challenges traditional interpretations, arguing instead that there were many reformations. Arranging his history in chronological fashion, MacCulloch provides in-depth studies of reform movements in central, northern and southern Europe and examines the influences that politics and geography had on such groups. He challenges common assumptions about the relationships between Catholic priests and laity, arguing that in some cases Protestantism actually took away religious authority from laypeople rather than putting it in their hands. In addition, he helpfully points out that even within various groups of reformers there was scarcely agreement about ways to change the Church. MacCulloch offers valuable and engaging portraits of key personalities of the Reformation, including Erasmus, Luther, Zwingli and Calvin. More than a history of the Reformation, MacCulloch's study examines its legacy of individual religious authority and autonomous biblical interpretation. This spectacular intellectual history reminds us that the Reformation grew out of the Renaissance, and provides a compelling glimpse of the cultural currents that formed the background to reform. MacCulloch's magisterial book should become the definitive history of the Reformation. (May 3) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Does the world really need another general history of the Reformation? MacCulloch (history of the Church, Oxford Univ.; Thomas Cranmer: A Life, etc.) thinks so, believing that contemporary scholarship needs wider dissemination. To that end, he has produced the definitive survey for this generation. As in similar studies, religious and political disputes are covered thoroughly. What sets this work apart is the sweep of its coverage, both geographically (from Britain and Ireland in the west to Poland and Lithuania in the east) and chronologically (1490-1700). Also noteworthy is the attention to the movement's social impact on such diverse topics as calendar reform, colonization, family life and sex roles, homosexuality, witchcraft, and more. This well-written book is a joy to read, with new facts and interpretations on nearly every page; still, the work's size and information density will make it slow going for those without a basic knowledge of the subject. With that caveat, this is highly recommended for larger public libraries and academic library collections in European and Christian history. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/03.]-Christopher Brennan, SUNY Coll. at Brockport Lib. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews