The Reformation
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- ISBN13: 9780143035381
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
At a time when men and women were prepared to kill—and be killed—for their faith, the Reformation tore the Western world apart. Acclaimed as the definitive account of these epochal events, Diarmaid MacCulloch’s award-winning new history brilliantly re-makes the religious battles of priests, monarchs, scholars, and politicians—from the zealous Martin Luther to the radical Loyola, from the tortured Cranmer to the ambitious Philip II.
Drawing together the many strands of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and ranging widely across Europe and the New World, MacCulloch reveals as never before
how these dramatic upheavals affected everyday lives—overturning thoughts of like, sex, death, and the supernatural, and shaping the modern age.Amazon.com Review
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 know modern Europe lacking 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 power is agreed 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 copious 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 described it. In fact, he asserts that it “generally satisfied the spiritual needs of the late medieval people.” As a past 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 quick forwards into American Christianity—showing how this past 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
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Check out the free samples of this book online–seems the sentences are unduly complex, and the book is prolix. Avoid like the plague.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
The book covers too much. It covers the Reformers, the counter-Reformation in the Catholic church, the Anglican church, and the spread of the church throughout the world between the late 1400s and the early 1700s. Even so, it is an useful and fascinating book.
There are negatives. I am not a historian, but I have some non-literary criticisms. The leader comes off as condescending sometimes. His attempts at humor is hit and miss at best. He had a couple chapters on sex and like he could have left out. His observations and conclusions on persons topics did not really enlightened me. I know I am asserting that he covered too much ground, but I wished he talked about the 18th century some more. I wanted to see more on how church leaders like Edwards and the Wesleys fit into the overall scheme of things. But, he asserts the Reformation age was over by 1700.
The book is incredibly ambitious. McCulloch wrote well and I learned some theology as well. I wished he had selected a more point topic, there was just too much to absorb and he covered too many topics superficially.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
MacCulloch’s book is indeed a fine overview of the Reformation across Europe. But as regards Britain, he fails to know the importance of the Reformation as an expression of our national sovereignty and independence.
The Reformation in Britain was largely made by ordinary people, who had less emotional and financial investment in the ancient order than did the clergy and the landed class. The people of Britain opposed the Church’s pomps, ceremonies, fasts and holy days, its cults of saints and veneration of images and relics, and its beliefs in ghosts, angels and demons. They opposed mysteries, signs and wonders, and obsessions with Dooms and Last Days. They opposed shrines and pilgrimages, indulgences (remissions of punishment for sins), pardons, the Latin Mass and the cult of intercession on behalf of the dead in Purgatory. They opposed the monastic ideal, which neglected the service of widows, children and the poor in the selfish quest of personal salvation.
They opposed the hierarchical, compulsorily celibate, mediating priesthood, and a church hierarchy that claimed proprietorial rights over what people should reflect and judge. They opposed church decrees (canon law) and the power of the Pope. They forbade appeals to the Pope and payments such as annates and `Peter’s pence’. They opposed the claims of revealed religion and the all-embracing medieval Western church which sought to override the sovereignty and independence of Britain.
They stirred against the religious corporations, the Pope’s fortresses, which ran vast estates and made huge profits. In 1535 the monasteries’ total net income was £140,000, when the Crown’s was £100,000. The monasteries were rentiers for two-thirds of their income, from whole estates place out to farm, from rents taken from smallholders, from tenements and from woods. Even their historian, Dom David Knowles, admitted, “monks and canons of England … had been living on a scale of personal comfort and corporate magnificence … which were neither necessary for, nor consistent with, the fashion of life indicated by their rule and early institutions.”
By the Act of Supremacy of 1534, the monarch became the head of the Church of England, able to appoint its leading officials and determine its doctrine. The Church would no longer be a part of an international organisation, but a part of the British state, tamed and subordinate. Henry VIII permanently suspended the study of canon law in England’s universities.
A series of laws between 1532 and 1540 ruined monastic life in England and Wales and in half of Ireland too. In 1535 Henry ordered visits to the smaller monastic houses to ensure that they “shall not show no reliques, or feyned miracles, for increase of lucre.” The Act of Suppression of 1536 finished 376 of the smaller houses. In 1538 Henry dissolved the friaries, which were centralised on the papacy. He dissolved the gilds, voluntary organisations where clergy prayed for the gild’s membership.
The Injunctions of 1538 opposed “wandering to pilgrimages, offering of money, candles or tapers to images or relics, or kissing or licking the same, adage over a number of beads, not understood or minded on.” In 1539 Henry suppressed the rest of the houses. The Injunction of 1547, Edward VI’s first year, was to “ruin all shrines, covering of shrines, all tables, candlesticks, trindles or rolls of wax, pictures, paintings and all additional monuments of feigned miracles, pilgrimages, idolatry and superstition.” The state finally dissolved the chantries – chapels where priests sang masses for the founder’s soul – and abolished the laws against heresy.
In the parishes of England, all that sustained the ancient devotion was attacked. The church furniture and images came down, the Mass was abolished, Mass-books and breviaries surrendered. The altars, veils and vestments, chalices and chests and drapery all were gone, the niches were empty and the walls were whitened.
Land and properties were seized and sold to landowners and capitalist farmers, building the settlement impossible to back. Queen Mary tried to re-set up Catholicism, but few monasteries were re-customary and few new chantries founded; few shrines were retrieved and few gilds revived. Purgatory was not preached and the Pope was still unpopular. Lacking the support of the religious orders, Mary’s effort was doomed. Her failure proved that there was no going back. Monasticism, a major factor in the medieval world ever since the fall of the Roman Empire, was over.
The Reformation made the Bible available in English, stimulating reading and the English language and ending the priestly monopoly of learning. It urged people to go `ad fontes’, back to the sources. It stimulated people to reflect for themselves, actively to compare and assess, rather than passively contemplate and acquiesce. Doubts were welded into a systematic and self-confident confrontation with all religious tradition, against all orthodoxy.
The Reformation enabled the development of science and of industry, of history and archaeology, promoting the rational investigation of empirical evidence as a replacement for of relying on texts and authorities, and ignoring the pressures from church and state. Amid the complexities and divisions of the Protestant world, there was more room to manoeuvre, to question and innovate.
Finally, the Reformation asserted the sovereignty and independence of Britain, a nation free from foreign ownership and control, “a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks” in Milton’s magnificent words.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
A dull work. I couldn’t get past the first few chapters. His silly kow-towing to political correctness by referring to the British Isles as the Atlantic Isles didn’t help.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
In MacCulloch’s “The Reformation”, his latest of several books dealing with 1400-1700s Europe, he painstakingly explores all the issues and characters involved in the reforming of western Christianity. But he seems to assume the reader is familiar with that period, which I was not. Still, I was enlightened by many of his anecdotes and trivia, eventho I establish his amount of detail to some extent overwhelming, and his geographic and chronologic jumping around sometimes hard to follow (he helpfully references additional significant pages elsewhere in the book). Even so I was able to glean from it what I wanted.
I wanted to see if there are any lessons from the Reformation that might be applicable to a modern-day reformation of religious beliefs – a cultural shift from belief in God, saints, angels and devils `out there’, to belief in whatever it is deep in our human scenery that makes us susceptible to persons obsolete beliefs. In my book “Concepts: A ProtoTheist Quest for Science-Minded Skeptics” I propose an explanation for the origin, dynamics and persistence of religious beliefs – a science of religion. I judge that eventually a modern-day reformation will displace obsolete beliefs; thus understanding the Reformation could be essential to navigating the transition.
What I establish arresting was the nearly universal conviction on all sides back then of the being of God, the afterworld and the imminent apocalypse. As an alternative to their reliance on scripture and the classics, science was only beginning to emerge as a `heretical’ way of knowing. Today science is gradually eclipsing religious beliefs, at least for most educated thinkers. Yet Fundamentalists still cling to persons archaic beliefs – they discredit science yet see no contradiction in benefiting from applied science such as in medicine, electronics and transportation – and they arrogantly want to impose persons archaic beliefs on the rest of us (as did the competing sects during the Reformation).
Of course the 1500-1600s Reformation wasn’t the first; Constantine’s conversion of the Roman Empire in the 300s from Paganism to Christianity wasn’t either. What we can learn from these historic reformations is that, altho’ the roots can germinate for years, agreed the right circumstances, the inception can be precipitous and then take a couple bloody centuries to workout stable and enduring forms. And of course politics plays a pivotal role. In the coming reformation, how can we avoid the blood and smooth the transition? “Persons who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” If this question intrigues you, have a look at both MacCulloch’s and my books.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5