What do you think?
Rate this book
Reformation: Europe's House Divided, 1490–1700
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 history brilliant re-creates the religious battles of priests, monarchs, scholars and politicians, from the zealous Luther to the radical Loyola, from the tortured Cranmer to the ambitious Philip II.
Weaving together the many strands of Reformation and Counter-Reformation, ranging widely across Europe and even to the New World, MacCulloch also reveals as never before how these upheavals affected everyday lives—overturning ideas of love, sex, death and the supernatural, and shaping the modern age.
Weaving together the many strands of Reformation and Counter-Reformation, ranging widely across Europe and even to the New World, MacCulloch also reveals as never before how these upheavals affected everyday lives—overturning ideas of love, sex, death and the supernatural, and shaping the modern age.
832 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
878 people are currently reading
8747 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 317 reviews
June 6, 2013
At times this book seemed like the most magisterial and thoughtful work I'd ever read on religion or early modern Europe. MacCulloch's descriptions of the Catholic Church before Luther, and of the monumental changes in life and society after Luther, are clear and beautiful examples of the history of culture and of thought, simply unparalleled in any work I've read on the subjects. The middle third of the book, however, is an impossibly confusing welter of names and dates.
First, however, the good. MacCulloch does a great job rehabilitating the image of the church in the 1400s. Far from being corrupt and in decline, he shows how people across Europe were creating new forms of worship. Catholic writers like Thomas Kempis, in his "Imitation of Christ," claimed for the first time that laypeople could have direct access to Jesus's wisdom and even mimic his spirituality, and they helped inspire the "Devotio Moderne" movement, which allowed average citizens to become more involved in church practices. New "gilds" or "confraternities" like the Oratories of Divine Love, first in Genoa in 1497 and then in Rome in 1517, allowed non-priests to express their spirituality through care of the poor and sick in original ways. Priests, too, began to try to reach out to their flock. They took note of friars' (Franciscans and Dominicans) success in preaching, and started to buy and exchange handy primers on how to sermonize. They tried to become more than mere illiterate ciphers from Rome, but real counselors to their parish.
Luther, in this version, was just one more offshoot of this combined professionalizing and, paradoxically, democratizing tendency. As MacCulloch shows, his great "break" with Rome, over his belief of justification by faith alone, was really just a cribbing from the 4th century bishop Augustine of Hippo, who was also inspiring other Catholic writers of the time like Dean Colet of London. The church's harsh reaction to Luther and his doctrine therefore inspired the Reformation more than Luther's ideas did. It then became a battle over Augustine's celebration of discipline to the holy church versus Augustine's celebration of "sole fide." As one writer remarked, the Reformation was after all just an extended battle inside the mind of Augustine.
MacCulloch demonstrates how these misunderstandings and some geopolitics turned a possibly innocuous moment into a revolution, but as he explains how this revolution played out, he gets lost in explaining every minor prince, duke, bishop or earl who said or did anything about religion over 100-odd years of European history. They are then all mashed together with a bewildering series of cross-references.
Returning to the social effects of the Reformation, however, the book becomes more sure-footed. The fascinating debate over the celibacy of the clergy, and how Protestant's reactions against it both ended up celebrating the family and denigrating the more medieval ease with the body, is well told. The displacement of Mary in Protestant iconography with the biblical patriarch Abraham is one clear example of a new emphasis on male prerogative, and of celebrating aged wisdom over physical presence. A similar example was the new-found love of beards among Protestant ministers. A myriad of other facts help explain how how life large and small was changed by this crucial period in religious history.
So this book will tell you a wealth of interesting things bout Europe and religion, but you might do best to just skip out the middle part.
November 6, 2010
This is simply put the best popular history book I've ever read. The subject is the Reformation, but MacCulloch goes far beyond the traditional "Luther to Westphalia" timeline, using the first few chapters to flesh out the world of Latin Christianity as it existed during the century or so before Luther arrived on the scene. Geographically the book also extends well beyond the borders of what we often view to be the main sphere of the Reformation - Germany, France, and England - to explore how the same forces for reform and spiritual experimentation were alive in Italy, Spain and other countries usually seen as solidly (and stolidly) orthodox Catholic. The lands east, north and south of Germany, including Transylvania, Bohemia, the Balkans and Scandinavia are also given a much more detailed examination than usual.
Nor is this at all accidental. MacCulloch is clearly determined to eliminate what he sees as blank spots and misinterpretations in the popular conception of what the Reformation was and how it came to be. The role of such famous characters as Erasmus and Loyola, Bethlen Gabor and Archbishop Laud, are reexamined, and pains are taken to give those who are often dismissed as bit characters or historical peculiarities - Zwingli, for example, who is so often overshadowed by the more well known Calvin - are given back their true significance. The book is thick with detail - if there is a flaw to it, it's that some readers may well be exhausted by the book, but it's all put together so skillfully that most readers will, I think, end up working their way through the whole massive tome in record time.
Despite all this detail within the main text, MacCulloch sets aside a few chapters at the end to deal with specific questions - gender roles and sexuality, for example - in a more specific manner. These are excellent resources, and ones which would have been difficult to include in the main text without either having to dilute them considerably in order to fit with the more chronological narrative of the rest of the book or breaking up the flow.
All in all, an excellent piece of work. Considerably better, in my opinion, than his (nevertheless quite good) History of Christianity, which suffers from the sheer vastness of the subject set into a single volume. The Reformation, on the other hand, shows what MacCulloch can do with a rich but temporally more limited subject, and the result is a thing of beauty.
Nor is this at all accidental. MacCulloch is clearly determined to eliminate what he sees as blank spots and misinterpretations in the popular conception of what the Reformation was and how it came to be. The role of such famous characters as Erasmus and Loyola, Bethlen Gabor and Archbishop Laud, are reexamined, and pains are taken to give those who are often dismissed as bit characters or historical peculiarities - Zwingli, for example, who is so often overshadowed by the more well known Calvin - are given back their true significance. The book is thick with detail - if there is a flaw to it, it's that some readers may well be exhausted by the book, but it's all put together so skillfully that most readers will, I think, end up working their way through the whole massive tome in record time.
Despite all this detail within the main text, MacCulloch sets aside a few chapters at the end to deal with specific questions - gender roles and sexuality, for example - in a more specific manner. These are excellent resources, and ones which would have been difficult to include in the main text without either having to dilute them considerably in order to fit with the more chronological narrative of the rest of the book or breaking up the flow.
All in all, an excellent piece of work. Considerably better, in my opinion, than his (nevertheless quite good) History of Christianity, which suffers from the sheer vastness of the subject set into a single volume. The Reformation, on the other hand, shows what MacCulloch can do with a rich but temporally more limited subject, and the result is a thing of beauty.
September 26, 2018
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b087pr2yDescription: 500 years after the Reformation, Diarmaid MacCulloch examines how the announcement of a university seminar in Germany led to the division of Europe. He examines the ideas of Martin Luther, where they came from and why they proved so revolutionary, tracing their development and influence, and reflecting on what they mean for us today.
June 15, 2022
This book deserves five stars for several reasons, in my view. First, it is a complete history of the Reformation. MacCulloch delves into its origins, developments, and effects. He looks at its effects throughout Europe and ultimately, although briefly, in the America's. Fair warning to anyone considering reading it, it is a slog. It is the kind of book that you read what you can and then put it down so as not to overload yourself with its content. It is a tome that took me nearly three weeks to make my way through. Given these facts one might wonder why I believe it merits 5 stars.
I grew up in the Catholic Church but I never knew what I did not know about it. Not the theology particularly, but elements of the Church that were always there but whose origins I never questioned. It also provided information about Protestant religions and their origins that I was unaware of or the intensity of feelings about certain issues that I had never even thought about. I grew up in the shadow of Vatican II with the idea that people had their own ideas about their beliefs and that even though I may not believe the same, it didn't really matter because everyone was entitled to their beliefs and they did not impinge on my own. McCullough does a good job of demonstrating the importance of religion to people during this period of time.
Life was short and brutal, childbirth was a gamble and even if a baby (or mother) survived it, the chances of living through to adulthood were minuscule compared to today. Disease racked the population, perhaps making people focus on what would happen after they died in a far more intense manner than we do today. The Plague had killed millions and recurred for a very long time afterward, coupled with other pandemics. Modern society cannot begin to understand how they impacted people living in those times and how it made them look at death. The general lack of education made people superstitious. People living in those turbulent times believed they were living through the "end times". This, according to MacCullough, may account for the actions of many people at the time.
How many of the actions were on account of this belief? Would Luther have pinned his 95 thesis to that church door? Would Zwingli, Calvin, and others have broken away otherwise? It seems plausible that it played a role.
This book is a scholarly history of the Reformation. It is researched and documented precisely and accurately. Throughout the book, when a topic arises, the author provides information on where he referenced it previously or where he will reference it. I would not recommend the book to anyone not willing to devote time and energy to reading the book. I can only say that although it was tough reading at times, I have learned a great deal about my own religion, and the religions involved in the events that helped shape the modern world.
I grew up in the Catholic Church but I never knew what I did not know about it. Not the theology particularly, but elements of the Church that were always there but whose origins I never questioned. It also provided information about Protestant religions and their origins that I was unaware of or the intensity of feelings about certain issues that I had never even thought about. I grew up in the shadow of Vatican II with the idea that people had their own ideas about their beliefs and that even though I may not believe the same, it didn't really matter because everyone was entitled to their beliefs and they did not impinge on my own. McCullough does a good job of demonstrating the importance of religion to people during this period of time.
Life was short and brutal, childbirth was a gamble and even if a baby (or mother) survived it, the chances of living through to adulthood were minuscule compared to today. Disease racked the population, perhaps making people focus on what would happen after they died in a far more intense manner than we do today. The Plague had killed millions and recurred for a very long time afterward, coupled with other pandemics. Modern society cannot begin to understand how they impacted people living in those times and how it made them look at death. The general lack of education made people superstitious. People living in those turbulent times believed they were living through the "end times". This, according to MacCullough, may account for the actions of many people at the time.
How many of the actions were on account of this belief? Would Luther have pinned his 95 thesis to that church door? Would Zwingli, Calvin, and others have broken away otherwise? It seems plausible that it played a role.
This book is a scholarly history of the Reformation. It is researched and documented precisely and accurately. Throughout the book, when a topic arises, the author provides information on where he referenced it previously or where he will reference it. I would not recommend the book to anyone not willing to devote time and energy to reading the book. I can only say that although it was tough reading at times, I have learned a great deal about my own religion, and the religions involved in the events that helped shape the modern world.
July 16, 2022
This is a rather exhaustingly detailed account of Christianity's great age of fanatical strife. I was most interested in the events affecting women. For example, after the Christian reconquest was finalized in 1492, popular religion in Spain still featured numerous independent female saints (known as “beatas”), such as Catalina de Jesus of Seville in the early 1600s. The Spanish Inquisition sought to discredit these holy women, claiming that their “abandonment of themselves” to ecstatic love for God posed a threat to religious morality (p. 64). A book by Juan Luis Valdez (in the 1500s) called "The Education of the Christian Woman," explained that “human laws do not require the same chastity of the man as the woman … men have to look after many more things; women are responsible only for their chastity” (p. 612).
July 30, 2025
In his introduction to this weighty and comprehensive history of the Reformation, Diarmaid MacCulloch presents reasons why this religious conflict, now more than five centuries in our past, is still crucial to understanding the world we now live in:
”In the United States of America, Protestantism stemming from England and Scotland set the original patterns of identity. American life is fired by continuing energy of Protestant religious practice derived from the 16th century. So the Reformation, particularly in its English Protestant form, has created the ideology dominant in the world’s one remaining superpower, and Reformation and Counter-Reformation ways of thought remain, often alarmingly, alive and central in American culture and in African and Asian Christianity, even when they have largely become part of history in their European homeland.”
MacCulloch’s Reformation is easily the best single volume history of its subject available. It is comprehensive, covering the years from 1490 to 1700, thus engulfing the religious and cultural history of Europe from shortly before the Reformation shattered the religious unity of Christendom through two centuries of its ongoing effects, not just on Western Christianity, but in political upheavals and transformations, and the shocking violence that accompanied these changes.
The sheer volume of the violence directly tied to this religious movement is staggering and much of this history is the history of warfare. MacCulloch writes:
”The Reformation might indeed be viewed simply as two centuries of warfare. The 16th century witnessed fewer than ten years of complete peace, and there were less than a couple of years during the first half of the 17th…The Reformation took only six years from its outbreak in 1517 to become a major trigger of violence in the Peasants Wars of the German lands. Very soon, it was the single greatest motive for the killing, as for Lutheran inspired Schmalkaldic Wars unfolding from 1547 were succeeded by the Reformed inspired Wars of Religion between the 1560s and 1590s, and then by the horrors of the Thirty Years War.”
While I was familiar with many of the names and incidents included here from books I’ve read on Luther, Erasmus, Cramner, and others, the massive scope of this big picture history is impressive. Beyond that, MacCulloch presented a core cause of the Reformation that I hadn’t previously considered. He writes that it was a clash of two separate doctrines set forth by the fifth century theologian Augustine of Hippo that brought about the religious cataclysm:
”The old Church was immensely strong, and that strength could only have been overcome by the explosive power of an idea — the idea proved to be a new statement of Augustine’s ideas on salvation.
Why did such a restatement of Augustine have such a particular impact at that moment? One reason why Augustine’s influence has varied so much in the history of Western Christianity is that there is much more to Augustine…He is at the heart of Western thinking about the nature of the Church and its sacraments, and in some eras it was this aspect of his thought that mattered more than what he said about salvation. When Martin Luther recalled the Church to Augustine’s soteriology, Western Christians would have to decide for themselves which aspect of his thought mattered more; his emphasis on obedience to the Catholic Church, or his discussion of salvation.
The Reformation was just the ultimate triumph of Augustine’s doctrine of Grace over Augustine’s doctrine of the Church. So from one perspective a century or more of turmoil in the Western Church from 1517 was a debate in the mind of long dead Augustine.”
This book is both fascinating and magisterial, and a must read for anyone interested in its subject. But though it is written well, it isn’t an easy read. Keeping track of all the names, dates and important events covered over two centuries of frenetic change is daunting. Yet MacCulloch’s magnificent history is worth the effort.
”In the United States of America, Protestantism stemming from England and Scotland set the original patterns of identity. American life is fired by continuing energy of Protestant religious practice derived from the 16th century. So the Reformation, particularly in its English Protestant form, has created the ideology dominant in the world’s one remaining superpower, and Reformation and Counter-Reformation ways of thought remain, often alarmingly, alive and central in American culture and in African and Asian Christianity, even when they have largely become part of history in their European homeland.”
MacCulloch’s Reformation is easily the best single volume history of its subject available. It is comprehensive, covering the years from 1490 to 1700, thus engulfing the religious and cultural history of Europe from shortly before the Reformation shattered the religious unity of Christendom through two centuries of its ongoing effects, not just on Western Christianity, but in political upheavals and transformations, and the shocking violence that accompanied these changes.
The sheer volume of the violence directly tied to this religious movement is staggering and much of this history is the history of warfare. MacCulloch writes:
”The Reformation might indeed be viewed simply as two centuries of warfare. The 16th century witnessed fewer than ten years of complete peace, and there were less than a couple of years during the first half of the 17th…The Reformation took only six years from its outbreak in 1517 to become a major trigger of violence in the Peasants Wars of the German lands. Very soon, it was the single greatest motive for the killing, as for Lutheran inspired Schmalkaldic Wars unfolding from 1547 were succeeded by the Reformed inspired Wars of Religion between the 1560s and 1590s, and then by the horrors of the Thirty Years War.”
While I was familiar with many of the names and incidents included here from books I’ve read on Luther, Erasmus, Cramner, and others, the massive scope of this big picture history is impressive. Beyond that, MacCulloch presented a core cause of the Reformation that I hadn’t previously considered. He writes that it was a clash of two separate doctrines set forth by the fifth century theologian Augustine of Hippo that brought about the religious cataclysm:
”The old Church was immensely strong, and that strength could only have been overcome by the explosive power of an idea — the idea proved to be a new statement of Augustine’s ideas on salvation.
Why did such a restatement of Augustine have such a particular impact at that moment? One reason why Augustine’s influence has varied so much in the history of Western Christianity is that there is much more to Augustine…He is at the heart of Western thinking about the nature of the Church and its sacraments, and in some eras it was this aspect of his thought that mattered more than what he said about salvation. When Martin Luther recalled the Church to Augustine’s soteriology, Western Christians would have to decide for themselves which aspect of his thought mattered more; his emphasis on obedience to the Catholic Church, or his discussion of salvation.
The Reformation was just the ultimate triumph of Augustine’s doctrine of Grace over Augustine’s doctrine of the Church. So from one perspective a century or more of turmoil in the Western Church from 1517 was a debate in the mind of long dead Augustine.”
This book is both fascinating and magisterial, and a must read for anyone interested in its subject. But though it is written well, it isn’t an easy read. Keeping track of all the names, dates and important events covered over two centuries of frenetic change is daunting. Yet MacCulloch’s magnificent history is worth the effort.
January 31, 2017
Magisterial. MacCulloch's scholarship is formidable. It took me a month to read and yet I never felt the urge to put it away. He gives in depth coverage to areas I've read little about despite having read a lot of books about the Reformation. One example I remember is a solid review of the Reformation in the Netherlands. It is not an easy read but it is a worthwhile one.
July 6, 2009
I picked this up because I knew almost nothing about the Reformation, and I felt like I should at least have the basic history straight for events which were so vital to the shaping of the modern world.
And, it mostly covered me for that. He did an excellent job of putting you inside the very alien worldviews and socio-cultural arrangements of the time, and illustrating just how revolutionary and sudden a change the Reformation really was. He gave engaging and detailed sketches of most of the main actors involved in the religious, political, and cultural arenas. He covered enough of the intricate theological problems which developed and were fought out, but not so much as to make my eyes glaze over. And he did an excellent job of taking you down to the level of everyday people and looking at how and why they embraced such a sudden change in such a vital part of their existence, and what the consequences were for their way of life going forward.
Where he fell down just a bit was in connecting the ground-level with the elite, and the religious with the political and especially the military. He did a good job on the elites insofar as they related to religion, but the political history was pretty thin. He also certainly covered all of the major conflicts of the time, but they always seemed like something that happened in the background and only flashed into full view at a few crisis points. I came in with a vague idea of how and why the French Wars of Religion, the English Civil War, and the 30 Years’ War were fought, and left with a not much clearer one.
Of course, any one of those conflicts can and has merited many an extensive history of its own, but I think he could have done a better job of fully describing them and linking them more thoroughly and organically with the political, social, cultural and religious turmoil that caused and sustained them. The 30 Years’ War especially seemed to be elided over. Constraints of space were probably a big concern, as the book still came in at over 700 pages, but I would have rather read another 100 or so and been left with a more complete picture.
Still, pretty minor quibbles for a book that taught me lot about a subject I came in with little background on, and that had plenty of major strengths to outweigh that one notable weakness. Definitely read if you want a solid social, cultural, religious, and basic political history of the Reformation from a modern point of view. If you’re more interested in the military history or in any of the specific conflicts, pick up a more specialized history of the case in question.
And, it mostly covered me for that. He did an excellent job of putting you inside the very alien worldviews and socio-cultural arrangements of the time, and illustrating just how revolutionary and sudden a change the Reformation really was. He gave engaging and detailed sketches of most of the main actors involved in the religious, political, and cultural arenas. He covered enough of the intricate theological problems which developed and were fought out, but not so much as to make my eyes glaze over. And he did an excellent job of taking you down to the level of everyday people and looking at how and why they embraced such a sudden change in such a vital part of their existence, and what the consequences were for their way of life going forward.
Where he fell down just a bit was in connecting the ground-level with the elite, and the religious with the political and especially the military. He did a good job on the elites insofar as they related to religion, but the political history was pretty thin. He also certainly covered all of the major conflicts of the time, but they always seemed like something that happened in the background and only flashed into full view at a few crisis points. I came in with a vague idea of how and why the French Wars of Religion, the English Civil War, and the 30 Years’ War were fought, and left with a not much clearer one.
Of course, any one of those conflicts can and has merited many an extensive history of its own, but I think he could have done a better job of fully describing them and linking them more thoroughly and organically with the political, social, cultural and religious turmoil that caused and sustained them. The 30 Years’ War especially seemed to be elided over. Constraints of space were probably a big concern, as the book still came in at over 700 pages, but I would have rather read another 100 or so and been left with a more complete picture.
Still, pretty minor quibbles for a book that taught me lot about a subject I came in with little background on, and that had plenty of major strengths to outweigh that one notable weakness. Definitely read if you want a solid social, cultural, religious, and basic political history of the Reformation from a modern point of view. If you’re more interested in the military history or in any of the specific conflicts, pick up a more specialized history of the case in question.
September 4, 2015
This was excellent -- readable, smooth, as comprehensive and unbiased as one can hope for. I now understand a whole lot of things more clearly, and know about a host of other things of which I was ignorant. I recommend this to anyone with an interest in European intellectual and social history. I especially recommend it to anyone who ever thought the Reformation was boring but that they ought to know more about it.
December 9, 2017
Comprehensive, but dry.
November 20, 2007
The story of the Reformation is long and complex, and so are many of MacCulloch's sentences, but never mind. This is a rich and full account of the Reformation, in which the motivations of faith and feeling, power and practicality are woven fine, the players in the drama are presented as whole people, and the meaning of this chapter of Western cultural history is modeled "in the round." Rakow and Torda are meaningfully placed in it, as are Calvin's two foils: Michael Servetus and Marguerite de Navarre. The effort of concentration sometimes demanded is relieved by memorable and meaningful stories, and richly rewarded in the end.
MacCulloch gave me a better understanding and appreciation of two figures active in Italy during the Reformation: Juan de Valdes and Reginald Pole. Valdes "developed a circle of friends and admirers, wealthy or talented or both, who shared his passion for humanist learning and his deep commitment to promoting a vital, engaged Christian faith." It included Bernardo Ochino, Peter Martyr, Vittoria Colonna, Giulia Gonzaga, Gasparo Contarini, and Pole. (Pole, a cousin of Henry VIII with a better claim to the English throne, was in Italy because he sided with the king's wife, Catherine of Aragon, and was exiled.) "Divergent themes naturally emerged from such a creative and articulate group, yet central was a renewed emphasis on the grace which God sent through faith, together with a consistent urge to reveal the Holy Spirit as the force conveying this grace – so that associates of the movement were soon characterized as Spirituali. ... Valdes ... believed that some favoured children of God would be led to ever deeper union with Christ, and the Scriptures might not be the only or the chief illumination on the way." He died in 1541; the next year the Roman Inquisition was created, and many in his circle fled Italy to influence the Reformation in Switzerland, southern Germany and eastern Europe. Pole remained in Italy and was a papal legate to the Council of Trent. When the death of Pope Paul III offered an opportunity "to turn the tide of authoritarianism in the Roman Church, [Pole was] one of the favourite candidates to succeed [him] ... a tribute to the continuing respect in which he was held... There were many diverse hopes invested in him – too many and too diverse for his own good. Even the dying Paul III had recommended him. The [Holy Roman] Emperor [Charles V] approved of him because he had ... championed Charles's aunt Catherine of Aragon..., because he was of royal blood, and because he was not Italian. Pole's upbringing linked him to the high-minded, tidy-minded clergy and their royal admirers who had made early Tudor England one of the best-run parts of Christendom... His cosmopolitan education made him a humanist scholar at the centre of a cultured international circle worthy of Erasmus. His patronage and friendship had attracted some of the most creative minds of southern Europe ... and ... he was generally recognized as one of the most thoughtful churchmen of his day. Perhaps only Marguerite [de Navarre] could rival him as a magnet for reformers who wished to remain true to the old Church... Yet Pole failed. ... the proceedings became drawn out (it was one of the longest conclaves in papal history) and Pole did not have the stomach for a face-to-face fight in such atmospheres of bitterness. Once more he drew back from the brink instead of seizing the hour [and] the last chance passed away for a Reformation such as Erasmus had sought." Who knew?
In portraits like these are food for thought about today's leaders and the import of their choices. And of yours.
MacCulloch gave me a better understanding and appreciation of two figures active in Italy during the Reformation: Juan de Valdes and Reginald Pole. Valdes "developed a circle of friends and admirers, wealthy or talented or both, who shared his passion for humanist learning and his deep commitment to promoting a vital, engaged Christian faith." It included Bernardo Ochino, Peter Martyr, Vittoria Colonna, Giulia Gonzaga, Gasparo Contarini, and Pole. (Pole, a cousin of Henry VIII with a better claim to the English throne, was in Italy because he sided with the king's wife, Catherine of Aragon, and was exiled.) "Divergent themes naturally emerged from such a creative and articulate group, yet central was a renewed emphasis on the grace which God sent through faith, together with a consistent urge to reveal the Holy Spirit as the force conveying this grace – so that associates of the movement were soon characterized as Spirituali. ... Valdes ... believed that some favoured children of God would be led to ever deeper union with Christ, and the Scriptures might not be the only or the chief illumination on the way." He died in 1541; the next year the Roman Inquisition was created, and many in his circle fled Italy to influence the Reformation in Switzerland, southern Germany and eastern Europe. Pole remained in Italy and was a papal legate to the Council of Trent. When the death of Pope Paul III offered an opportunity "to turn the tide of authoritarianism in the Roman Church, [Pole was] one of the favourite candidates to succeed [him] ... a tribute to the continuing respect in which he was held... There were many diverse hopes invested in him – too many and too diverse for his own good. Even the dying Paul III had recommended him. The [Holy Roman] Emperor [Charles V] approved of him because he had ... championed Charles's aunt Catherine of Aragon..., because he was of royal blood, and because he was not Italian. Pole's upbringing linked him to the high-minded, tidy-minded clergy and their royal admirers who had made early Tudor England one of the best-run parts of Christendom... His cosmopolitan education made him a humanist scholar at the centre of a cultured international circle worthy of Erasmus. His patronage and friendship had attracted some of the most creative minds of southern Europe ... and ... he was generally recognized as one of the most thoughtful churchmen of his day. Perhaps only Marguerite [de Navarre] could rival him as a magnet for reformers who wished to remain true to the old Church... Yet Pole failed. ... the proceedings became drawn out (it was one of the longest conclaves in papal history) and Pole did not have the stomach for a face-to-face fight in such atmospheres of bitterness. Once more he drew back from the brink instead of seizing the hour [and] the last chance passed away for a Reformation such as Erasmus had sought." Who knew?
In portraits like these are food for thought about today's leaders and the import of their choices. And of yours.
Read
December 12, 2025My third longest read of 2025 (after THE LORD OF THE RINGS and THE SECRET WORLD) but by far the most challenging, MacCulloch's history of the Reformation is dense, a bit dry, and probably meant more as a reference than to be read from cover to cover, the way I read it. The book covers more than two centuries' worth of history in religion and thought, a staggeringly immense task which makes it difficult for the narrative to zoom in on compelling stories of specific people and events, and therefore difficult to retain much of the story in the mind. I will say that I most appreciated the opening chapters on the prelude to the Reformation, which covered ground that's slightly more familiar to me as a medievalist, as well as the final 200 pages, which step back to discuss broader social themes such as outcomes and Reformation and Counter-Reformation views on the family.
In my teens as a Protestant homeschooler, I was fascinated by stories from this period of history, but my past eleven years of reading crusader history at an academic level told me that I'd never really done any serious reading on the Reformation. As a kid I loved Charles Coffin's 1879 STORY OF LIBERTY, but with age I became fairly certain that it was more propaganda than impartial history. Reading MacCulloch's standard work on the period, therefore, was fascinating as an exercise in seeing things anew. As suspected, many of the people and movements I was familiar with had a seamy side. I knew the Huguenots merely as a persecuted minority fighting for religious freedom, but MacCulloch adds nuance to the picture, showing how Huguenot nobles in the 1500s were a powerful political faction whose goals and methods were often far from peaceable. Beyond this, I learned about the Reformation (and Counter-Reformation) histories of regions that have been largely forgotten by modern Protestantism: I'd had no idea that there were strong Reformed movements in Poland and Transylvania, for instance, or that these regions were for a time remarkable for their religious toleration. Other elements of the history rather confirmed what I had already learned, than otherwise. There've been social media posts doing the rounds describing the Puritan settlers of New England as "religious extremists" who were fleeing "toleration" in Europe, a fashionable new perspective that simply isn't true; it's just a form of reverse American exceptionalism, which I find as baffling as the usual kind. As MacCulloch points out, the New England settlers were indeed very much fleeing persecution, and they did indeed, if not intentionally, found a country that was remarkable for its toleration, especially compared to the situation in Europe:
Subtlety or reflectiveness were nevertheless in short supply in 1662. By their hard-line stance, the Anglicans created "Dissent" out of those who had been part of the united pre-war Church of England: Presbyterians now found themselves alongside the Independents and the Baptists (together with the Quakers whom they all despised) outside the new establishment. English Protestantism was fractured in a way that has yet to be healed, and the reign of Charles II saw Dissenters putting up a desperate struggle to survive against often severe persecution from the Anglican authorities in Church and state. Legislation made the holding of public office dependent on taking Holy Communion in the Anglican form, and this perverse use of the sacrament of unity as a political "Test" was not abolished in England until the nineteenth century. This was a persecution of Protestants by Protestants unique in Europe in its intensity and bitterness; another major question-mark against the complacent English boast of a national history of tolerance. (Emphasis mine.)
As an inheritor of Reformation thought, for me the big takeaway of the book is this: so much that was good in the movement was compromised or corrupted, not so much by bad theology (although of course there was reams of that), as by the conviction nearly everyone shared, that the truth (as they saw it) ought to be imposed on others by brute government force. Catholics burned Protestants at the stake; Protestants sought to impose their own forms of religion on unwilling populations; theological disagreements joined with political rivalries to spark bitter wars that devastated Europe; nearly everyone harassed the Jews and executed witches. Of course they didn't really understand any other way to live; if you had the truth, you forced everyone else to follow suit. It was the way the world had always been, including throughout the medieval period; and the upheavals of the Reformation in a way enabled the concept of religious tolerance to develop at all, not just because of new concepts like the priesthood of all believers and the right and duty of private judgement, but far more practically because it fostered such a degree of religious fragmentation that those who wished to rule the consciences of others simply, practically, couldn't.
Which is why, to this day, I cannot find in myself a shred of remorse for the diversity of opinion within the Church Universal. The unity of the faith will be a grand thing when it arrives, but in my opinion it's far more important to allow people, whether within or without the Church, to hear from God in their own way, and to come to believe in him (or not) with sincerity. It remains a fact that the Reformation helped create the conditions in which this could happen. That it happened sorely against the wills and intentions of many of its most prominent men is one of those delicious ironies of history.
In my teens as a Protestant homeschooler, I was fascinated by stories from this period of history, but my past eleven years of reading crusader history at an academic level told me that I'd never really done any serious reading on the Reformation. As a kid I loved Charles Coffin's 1879 STORY OF LIBERTY, but with age I became fairly certain that it was more propaganda than impartial history. Reading MacCulloch's standard work on the period, therefore, was fascinating as an exercise in seeing things anew. As suspected, many of the people and movements I was familiar with had a seamy side. I knew the Huguenots merely as a persecuted minority fighting for religious freedom, but MacCulloch adds nuance to the picture, showing how Huguenot nobles in the 1500s were a powerful political faction whose goals and methods were often far from peaceable. Beyond this, I learned about the Reformation (and Counter-Reformation) histories of regions that have been largely forgotten by modern Protestantism: I'd had no idea that there were strong Reformed movements in Poland and Transylvania, for instance, or that these regions were for a time remarkable for their religious toleration. Other elements of the history rather confirmed what I had already learned, than otherwise. There've been social media posts doing the rounds describing the Puritan settlers of New England as "religious extremists" who were fleeing "toleration" in Europe, a fashionable new perspective that simply isn't true; it's just a form of reverse American exceptionalism, which I find as baffling as the usual kind. As MacCulloch points out, the New England settlers were indeed very much fleeing persecution, and they did indeed, if not intentionally, found a country that was remarkable for its toleration, especially compared to the situation in Europe:
Subtlety or reflectiveness were nevertheless in short supply in 1662. By their hard-line stance, the Anglicans created "Dissent" out of those who had been part of the united pre-war Church of England: Presbyterians now found themselves alongside the Independents and the Baptists (together with the Quakers whom they all despised) outside the new establishment. English Protestantism was fractured in a way that has yet to be healed, and the reign of Charles II saw Dissenters putting up a desperate struggle to survive against often severe persecution from the Anglican authorities in Church and state. Legislation made the holding of public office dependent on taking Holy Communion in the Anglican form, and this perverse use of the sacrament of unity as a political "Test" was not abolished in England until the nineteenth century. This was a persecution of Protestants by Protestants unique in Europe in its intensity and bitterness; another major question-mark against the complacent English boast of a national history of tolerance. (Emphasis mine.)
As an inheritor of Reformation thought, for me the big takeaway of the book is this: so much that was good in the movement was compromised or corrupted, not so much by bad theology (although of course there was reams of that), as by the conviction nearly everyone shared, that the truth (as they saw it) ought to be imposed on others by brute government force. Catholics burned Protestants at the stake; Protestants sought to impose their own forms of religion on unwilling populations; theological disagreements joined with political rivalries to spark bitter wars that devastated Europe; nearly everyone harassed the Jews and executed witches. Of course they didn't really understand any other way to live; if you had the truth, you forced everyone else to follow suit. It was the way the world had always been, including throughout the medieval period; and the upheavals of the Reformation in a way enabled the concept of religious tolerance to develop at all, not just because of new concepts like the priesthood of all believers and the right and duty of private judgement, but far more practically because it fostered such a degree of religious fragmentation that those who wished to rule the consciences of others simply, practically, couldn't.
Which is why, to this day, I cannot find in myself a shred of remorse for the diversity of opinion within the Church Universal. The unity of the faith will be a grand thing when it arrives, but in my opinion it's far more important to allow people, whether within or without the Church, to hear from God in their own way, and to come to believe in him (or not) with sincerity. It remains a fact that the Reformation helped create the conditions in which this could happen. That it happened sorely against the wills and intentions of many of its most prominent men is one of those delicious ironies of history.
January 10, 2017
500 years after the Reformation, Diarmaid MacCulloch examines how the announcement of a university seminar in Germany led to the division of Europe. He examines the ideas of Martin Luther, where they came from and why they proved so revolutionary, tracing their development and influence, and reflecting on what they mean for us today.
Producer: Dixi Stewart.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b087pr2y
Producer: Dixi Stewart.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b087pr2y
June 14, 2018
In Reformation: Europese House Divided (2004), Oxford theologian Diarmaid MacCulloch gives a deep and broad historical sketch of the reformation. The reformation has always intrigued me: how could people rally against each other, and commit the most horrible acts, for ideas. Hence, I was an easy prey for the mainstream scientific hypotheses, which explain the reformation as a (geo)political, social and economical phenomenon.
MacCulloch breaks this delusional spell, and he does this with a magnificent book. The author argues that social, economic and even (geo)political explanations are insufficient to explain the origin of the Reformation. True, princes and statesmen - especially in Germany and France - quickly saw the potential of these religious storms to increase their power or even change the whole game (as in the case of many German regions), but this only proves how people with power can jump on anything that might be beneficial to them.
So how did the Reformation start? To understand this, you have to go back to fourth century Hippo (in North Africa). The bishop of this Roman town, better known as Saint Augustine, came up with a sort of Christian philosophy which quickly became one of the foundations of the Western Church. Augustine meticulously studied the Bible, as well as contemporary sources on the Roman Empire (especially its history), and he was familiar with the Greek philosophical schools. The results of this? The doctrine of predestination. Augustine argued that God created the universe, and then he created man. At the moment of Creation, God already knew the sinfulness of human beings, and out of love for us (since God is supposedly all-loving), he selected a few of us who were marked for salvation. What about the rest of us? Well, most of us will burn in eternal hellfire, where our skins will burn, new skins will grow so they can burn again, etc. etc. In other words: the moment a human being is born, it is already determined - by God, at the moment of Creation - if that particular person is marked for salvation or will go to hell.
MacCulloch clearly explains how this doctrine is inhuman, and this is the reason that the Western Church, through the Middle Ages up to 1517, put gradually more emphasis on salvation and God's grace. For starters, if it is already determined at birth if you will burn forever or not, why should you follow God's commandments? Next, priests who helped people in their dying days saw human beings in intense agony and fear - of course they stressed that there were alternatives to Hell. This humane boundary between rigid doctrines and human lives, turned into official Church doctrine: Purgatory was invented. People don't go to Hell, they simply go to a temporary Hell - based on how many sins you committed you have to be purged in this temporary firing place.
But even the idea of thousands of years of burning alive wouldn't really soothe people's minds. So next came the indulgences and rewards for charity. The Church claimed that people who do good, for example donating money to hospitals after their death or giving alms to beggars, would be rewarded. The patients in the hospitals and the beggars would pray for you - this would give you time off in Purgatory. You could also buy an indulgence from the local priest and shorten the time of skin flaying in Purgatory.
Anyways, when Martin Luther went to university, he stumbled onto two problems. First, he couldn't stand Aristotle, and since Aristotelian philosophy was official Church doctrine (ever since Thomas Aquinas), this led him to an aversion to official Church teachings. Second, Luther found - when reading the works of Saint Augustine - that the practices of the Western Church, like selling indulgences and pronouncing the possibility of salvation through good deeds, had seriously run off course throughout the centuries.
We all know what came next. Luther started to proclaim that the Pope was Antichrist and that the Church was delusional. People should just read the Bible for themselves and then the Holy Ghost will see to it that people will be inspired and learn for themselves what's true. This idea was, of course, a serious threat to the power and authority of the Western Church, so swords would likely be drawn.
According to MacCulloch, the rise of Luther - and later Zwingli, Melanchton, Calvin, and others - came at a time when Europe was in a very bad state, and mood, so to speak. The Turks were continuously attacking Christian borders and capturing European slaves at the coasts of Europe. This was seen as punishment of God for bad Christian behavior. Second, there were famines, plagues, natural disasters, and man-made wars. This was also seen as punishment of God. In other words: during the 16th century there was much to worry about for Europeans and many people believed the end-times were coming.
Another catalyst for the later problems was the shape of the German territories. The Holy Roman Empire was superficially a huge force, but there was much internal strife and power play between different princes, dukes, etc. In short, the 16th century was a bad moment for a split in the Western Church.
All these troubles culminated in the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), in which entire Europe became a battlefield for religious strife. An illustration: current estimates point to 30-40% of the inhabitants of the German lands dying of warfare, or subsequent famine and disease. Think about what this means: every third person you know and care about dropping dead.
MacCulloch, as a Christian and a theologian, is very honest when he writes how the Thirty Years' War was, in essence, a religious conflict. It is all too cozy to explain it as power play of European princes and nobility - the alliances were religiously motivated, the frontiers were caused by (earlier) religious fracture, and in the end people killed in name of their religion. He clearly explains, throughout the whole book, how very abstract discussions about even more abstract ideas would culminate in broken relationships at best, and open war at worst.
Just a few examples to illustrate the key point of the book (the Reformation was about ideas), which probably sound absurd to modern day human beings, but try to imagine this was a matter of life or death for most people involved.
1. Do the wafer and wine at the Mass really contain the body and blood of Christ? Or is this just a metaphor? And if so, how does this happen? Isn't it the case that when an essence changes, the substance is different? The idea of transubstantiation was an inflammatory issue, not just in academic circles.
2. Is Jesus Christ of the same nature as God? Or is he of a different nature? If of the same nature: what is the relationship between Christ's human body and God's infinite spirit? If of a different Nature: should Christ then still be regarded as God, or should we see him as a 'mere' prophet? Once again, this debate was far from settled after the early Councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon.
To end this review, let me, once again, say that Reformation: Europe's House Divided is a magnificent book, written by a very eloquent and able writer. The only drawback is its length: it is more than 700 pages, which makes it a huge investment - so I can recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn more about Christianity and/or one of the most important historical epochs of Europe.
MacCulloch breaks this delusional spell, and he does this with a magnificent book. The author argues that social, economic and even (geo)political explanations are insufficient to explain the origin of the Reformation. True, princes and statesmen - especially in Germany and France - quickly saw the potential of these religious storms to increase their power or even change the whole game (as in the case of many German regions), but this only proves how people with power can jump on anything that might be beneficial to them.
So how did the Reformation start? To understand this, you have to go back to fourth century Hippo (in North Africa). The bishop of this Roman town, better known as Saint Augustine, came up with a sort of Christian philosophy which quickly became one of the foundations of the Western Church. Augustine meticulously studied the Bible, as well as contemporary sources on the Roman Empire (especially its history), and he was familiar with the Greek philosophical schools. The results of this? The doctrine of predestination. Augustine argued that God created the universe, and then he created man. At the moment of Creation, God already knew the sinfulness of human beings, and out of love for us (since God is supposedly all-loving), he selected a few of us who were marked for salvation. What about the rest of us? Well, most of us will burn in eternal hellfire, where our skins will burn, new skins will grow so they can burn again, etc. etc. In other words: the moment a human being is born, it is already determined - by God, at the moment of Creation - if that particular person is marked for salvation or will go to hell.
MacCulloch clearly explains how this doctrine is inhuman, and this is the reason that the Western Church, through the Middle Ages up to 1517, put gradually more emphasis on salvation and God's grace. For starters, if it is already determined at birth if you will burn forever or not, why should you follow God's commandments? Next, priests who helped people in their dying days saw human beings in intense agony and fear - of course they stressed that there were alternatives to Hell. This humane boundary between rigid doctrines and human lives, turned into official Church doctrine: Purgatory was invented. People don't go to Hell, they simply go to a temporary Hell - based on how many sins you committed you have to be purged in this temporary firing place.
But even the idea of thousands of years of burning alive wouldn't really soothe people's minds. So next came the indulgences and rewards for charity. The Church claimed that people who do good, for example donating money to hospitals after their death or giving alms to beggars, would be rewarded. The patients in the hospitals and the beggars would pray for you - this would give you time off in Purgatory. You could also buy an indulgence from the local priest and shorten the time of skin flaying in Purgatory.
Anyways, when Martin Luther went to university, he stumbled onto two problems. First, he couldn't stand Aristotle, and since Aristotelian philosophy was official Church doctrine (ever since Thomas Aquinas), this led him to an aversion to official Church teachings. Second, Luther found - when reading the works of Saint Augustine - that the practices of the Western Church, like selling indulgences and pronouncing the possibility of salvation through good deeds, had seriously run off course throughout the centuries.
We all know what came next. Luther started to proclaim that the Pope was Antichrist and that the Church was delusional. People should just read the Bible for themselves and then the Holy Ghost will see to it that people will be inspired and learn for themselves what's true. This idea was, of course, a serious threat to the power and authority of the Western Church, so swords would likely be drawn.
According to MacCulloch, the rise of Luther - and later Zwingli, Melanchton, Calvin, and others - came at a time when Europe was in a very bad state, and mood, so to speak. The Turks were continuously attacking Christian borders and capturing European slaves at the coasts of Europe. This was seen as punishment of God for bad Christian behavior. Second, there were famines, plagues, natural disasters, and man-made wars. This was also seen as punishment of God. In other words: during the 16th century there was much to worry about for Europeans and many people believed the end-times were coming.
Another catalyst for the later problems was the shape of the German territories. The Holy Roman Empire was superficially a huge force, but there was much internal strife and power play between different princes, dukes, etc. In short, the 16th century was a bad moment for a split in the Western Church.
All these troubles culminated in the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), in which entire Europe became a battlefield for religious strife. An illustration: current estimates point to 30-40% of the inhabitants of the German lands dying of warfare, or subsequent famine and disease. Think about what this means: every third person you know and care about dropping dead.
MacCulloch, as a Christian and a theologian, is very honest when he writes how the Thirty Years' War was, in essence, a religious conflict. It is all too cozy to explain it as power play of European princes and nobility - the alliances were religiously motivated, the frontiers were caused by (earlier) religious fracture, and in the end people killed in name of their religion. He clearly explains, throughout the whole book, how very abstract discussions about even more abstract ideas would culminate in broken relationships at best, and open war at worst.
Just a few examples to illustrate the key point of the book (the Reformation was about ideas), which probably sound absurd to modern day human beings, but try to imagine this was a matter of life or death for most people involved.
1. Do the wafer and wine at the Mass really contain the body and blood of Christ? Or is this just a metaphor? And if so, how does this happen? Isn't it the case that when an essence changes, the substance is different? The idea of transubstantiation was an inflammatory issue, not just in academic circles.
2. Is Jesus Christ of the same nature as God? Or is he of a different nature? If of the same nature: what is the relationship between Christ's human body and God's infinite spirit? If of a different Nature: should Christ then still be regarded as God, or should we see him as a 'mere' prophet? Once again, this debate was far from settled after the early Councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon.
To end this review, let me, once again, say that Reformation: Europe's House Divided is a magnificent book, written by a very eloquent and able writer. The only drawback is its length: it is more than 700 pages, which makes it a huge investment - so I can recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn more about Christianity and/or one of the most important historical epochs of Europe.
November 28, 2015
Confronted with the challenge of writing about an era too well-known, Lytton Strachey advised how the explorer of the past would proceed: “He will row out over the great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from the far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity.” This magisterial history of the Reformation by Diarmaid MacCulloch is a prolonged exercise in doing just that.
This is a subject I know a thing or two about, yet his text is liberally sprinkled with facts, insights and interpretations new to me, all of it told in an off-hand style that makes it seem as if he’s just sitting and chatting with you in a diffident way. Yet never did I feel that his examples were mere curiosities; invariably they illuminated the topic under discussion.
The section of New Possibilities: Paper and Printing (70–76) is a case in point. Many have made the connection between the invention of movable type and the rapid spread of the ideas of Luther and other Reformers. But MacCulloch thinks further. The rapid proliferation of (affordable) books made it worthwhile to learn to read—this, before 1516. In turn, the proliferation of profitable printers created an opportunity for new texts. The modern concept of “author” had its birth then. And it surely wasn’t accidental that it was only then that the Index was created: an attempt to control which of the new flood of books should not be read.
I also found enlightening his assertion that the Reformation can be seen as a conflict within the legacy of Augustine, with Luther emphasizing the inability of a human to work toward his or her own salvation, making him or her utterly dependent on God’s grace, while his opponents oriented themselves on Augustine’s stress on the need for obedience to the church to attain salvation.
The author shows throughout how much can be gained by considering how social, economic and political aspects of life then factored into the Reformation yet at the same time maintains the centrality of theology. People then were in dead earnest about matters of belief.
One feature of the book is its continent-wide scale. Too often, an emphasis on German-speaking Europe obscures the interesting developments to the east. Another is that after 500 pages of roughly chronological treatment, the author adds a section entitled Patterns of Life dealing with a variety of topics such as the use of images, the frenzy with regard to witches, and matters related to family and sexuality, focusing both on aspects that remained the same despite the split in Western Christianity, as well as what changed.
This is a thick book: my paperback copy has 700 pages of text set in small type, supplemented by suggestions for further reading, notes and an index. It may be more than the casual reader cares to digest. But with the 500th anniversary of the outbreak of the Reformation rapidly approaching, I say with confidence that if you read only one book on the topic, this would be an excellent choice.
This is a subject I know a thing or two about, yet his text is liberally sprinkled with facts, insights and interpretations new to me, all of it told in an off-hand style that makes it seem as if he’s just sitting and chatting with you in a diffident way. Yet never did I feel that his examples were mere curiosities; invariably they illuminated the topic under discussion.
The section of New Possibilities: Paper and Printing (70–76) is a case in point. Many have made the connection between the invention of movable type and the rapid spread of the ideas of Luther and other Reformers. But MacCulloch thinks further. The rapid proliferation of (affordable) books made it worthwhile to learn to read—this, before 1516. In turn, the proliferation of profitable printers created an opportunity for new texts. The modern concept of “author” had its birth then. And it surely wasn’t accidental that it was only then that the Index was created: an attempt to control which of the new flood of books should not be read.
I also found enlightening his assertion that the Reformation can be seen as a conflict within the legacy of Augustine, with Luther emphasizing the inability of a human to work toward his or her own salvation, making him or her utterly dependent on God’s grace, while his opponents oriented themselves on Augustine’s stress on the need for obedience to the church to attain salvation.
The author shows throughout how much can be gained by considering how social, economic and political aspects of life then factored into the Reformation yet at the same time maintains the centrality of theology. People then were in dead earnest about matters of belief.
One feature of the book is its continent-wide scale. Too often, an emphasis on German-speaking Europe obscures the interesting developments to the east. Another is that after 500 pages of roughly chronological treatment, the author adds a section entitled Patterns of Life dealing with a variety of topics such as the use of images, the frenzy with regard to witches, and matters related to family and sexuality, focusing both on aspects that remained the same despite the split in Western Christianity, as well as what changed.
This is a thick book: my paperback copy has 700 pages of text set in small type, supplemented by suggestions for further reading, notes and an index. It may be more than the casual reader cares to digest. But with the 500th anniversary of the outbreak of the Reformation rapidly approaching, I say with confidence that if you read only one book on the topic, this would be an excellent choice.
January 2, 2021
MacCulloch offers his readers a view from the mountaintop, a view that stretches far across Europe. It is a sometimes a tough hike to get to that vista, but his clear, eloquent style and interesting well-researched observations make it a fun one. I was enlightened and amazed by way more than I can remember. The concluding quotation, from Arthur Golding, will stick though. I knew a little bit about Golding as a translator of Ovid and Seneca, but I didn't know that he also translated the Beneficio Christi and that he made such an eloquent plea for tolerance in his forward. Hurrah for Golding for his reminder that translation is a way to understanding and tolerance.
July 31, 2016
لماذا مرت أوروبا بـ "الإصلاح الديني" الذي بدأه مارتن لوثر كينغ؟ ما هي نتائج هذا "الإصلاح" على العقل الأوروبي؟ وكيف غيرته للأبد. كيف تغيرت المسيحية مكانتها داخل الدول والمجتمعات الأوروبية من "الإصلاح الديني"؟
كل هذه الأسئلة وغيرها الكثير وإجاباتها في هذا الكتاب العميق.
كل هذه الأسئلة وغيرها الكثير وإجاباتها في هذا الكتاب العميق.
May 10, 2015
This is another book that has been sitting on my shelf, unread, for some time. Now, I've finally finished reading it and I am glad that I did. Mr. MacCulloch sweeps through the Reformation with an energy and verve that is not found in many similar, one-volume accounts of history. And he is quite adept at switching between the historical, theological, and social aspects of the period that tore Western Europe apart. For those who have taken a course on modern Western history, the basic outline of the Reformation will be familiar to the lay reader. But because he doesn't tie himself down to one particular historical figure or theology or even interpretation of events, but endeavors to explain everything, there will be countless historical nuggets that will surprise many. The lack of corruption, as portrayed by Protestants, in the Catholic church is just one of many. This book also shows the beginning of things that still profoundly impact our world today: the marketplace, and competition, of ideas; proto-public education as begun in catechisms and Sunday schools; missionary and evangelical movements (which explains why there is a revivalist-evangelical "crusade" going on next door to me for the next three weeks) and the ever-present question of how to interpret the Holy Bible and worship God and his Son, Jesus Christ. For those who are interested in the Western world and how it came to be, this is a book not to be missed.
September 6, 2010
Excellent but it's, occasionally, difficult to see the forest for the trees. Too much detail and written too close for comfort. A little on the dry side as well. But if you can persevere then you will learn a very great deal about the Reformation (1490-1700). Doesn't matter whether you are an atheist or one of the faithful baboons this will be a useful contextualizing history. Brilliant. Highly Recommended.
March 3, 2012
When deciding on the rating to give to the books I've read, I'm always torn between giving it a score reflecting how I enjoyed the book subjectively and a score reflecting how good I recognised the book to be objectively. Frequently I'll find these two perspectives agree (it's certainly easier to enjoy a book that you recognise to be a literary achievement than to enjoy one you don't), but that really wasn't the case here.
Let the record show that I didn't enjoy this book. It is long, dense and comprised of a seemingly endless string of names and locations. It's my own fault: I wanted to school myself on the history of the Reformation (a period of history I've always been a little foggy about) and perhaps I should have waded into something shallower first before diving into the dark, deep waters that Diarmaid McCulloch has formed here. I'm comfortable with longer, denser books normally, but I must say that completing this one was something of an ordeal, and I was a little relieved when I finally completed it.
But perhaps I'm being a little negative: the trajectory of the narrative (and the text does largely take the form of a narrative, spanning the years 1490-1700) is clear and consistent, and McCulloch's style is always readable. Those who expecting a thorough account of these tumultuous years will not be disappointed, and I can't imagine that there is a more authoritative account of the Reformation currently available on the market. The chapters dealing with the religious situation prior to the Reformation are particularly informative and worth reading, as are the sections dealing with the early schisms that existed within Protestantism from the beginning (i.e. the disagreements between Luther and Zwingli, the constantly shafting sectarian battles in 16th-17th England and so on). If you are prepared for the level of detail, this book really does stand tall as a work of quality scholarship that manages to remain eminently readable throughout. But its that degree of detail that represents this book's biggest problem.
Since this book intends to examine the effects of the Reformation in its entirety, we are treated parallel accounts of religious developments in almost all of Europe's countries during the period described. Some of these developments - such as those in England, Holland, France, Germany, Italy etc. - were genuinely important, and there is little doubt that the ramifications of these developments in such countries have left a deep impression in the course of global history. But did we really need dozens of pages of detail when describing the course of the Lithuanian church? Or the politics of 17th century Denmark? Or the plights of minor Bohemian religious sects? Did these developments in any way shape the course of the Reformation - let alone subsequent history - outside of these countries?
And let it be noted that I'm not simply complaining because I find such detail to be tedious or time-consuming, I think it really does detract from our ability to grasp the bigger picture. It becomes impossible to see the forest for all the trees and McCulloch only rarely raises us upon his great shoulders to get a better view. The spread of Protestantism and fate of Catholic Church is spelled out in great detail for (as I mentioned) almost every country in Europe, comprising a disorienting blur of minor names and locations, but we are never given a broader overview or explanation as to why, for instance, northern Europe came to be dominated by Protestantism while the south remained largely Catholic. An entire chapter (of over 50 pages, from memory) is devoted to the 30 Years War, and I'm still left almost completely unaware of what role religion might have played in the conflict. For those with a solid background understanding of the period this mightn't be such a problem, but it left me feeling like I'd learned little from the best part of a month of committed reading.
But, as I said, I must blame myself for much of this. I should have started with something simpler, and McCulloch can hardly be blamed for failing to tailor his work to my needs. If you have the kind of time, patience and knowledge that I don't, you're not going to find a better narrative account of the Reformation than this. Objectively, I cannot deny that this is an incredible book. I just really didn't enjoy reading it.
Let the record show that I didn't enjoy this book. It is long, dense and comprised of a seemingly endless string of names and locations. It's my own fault: I wanted to school myself on the history of the Reformation (a period of history I've always been a little foggy about) and perhaps I should have waded into something shallower first before diving into the dark, deep waters that Diarmaid McCulloch has formed here. I'm comfortable with longer, denser books normally, but I must say that completing this one was something of an ordeal, and I was a little relieved when I finally completed it.
But perhaps I'm being a little negative: the trajectory of the narrative (and the text does largely take the form of a narrative, spanning the years 1490-1700) is clear and consistent, and McCulloch's style is always readable. Those who expecting a thorough account of these tumultuous years will not be disappointed, and I can't imagine that there is a more authoritative account of the Reformation currently available on the market. The chapters dealing with the religious situation prior to the Reformation are particularly informative and worth reading, as are the sections dealing with the early schisms that existed within Protestantism from the beginning (i.e. the disagreements between Luther and Zwingli, the constantly shafting sectarian battles in 16th-17th England and so on). If you are prepared for the level of detail, this book really does stand tall as a work of quality scholarship that manages to remain eminently readable throughout. But its that degree of detail that represents this book's biggest problem.
Since this book intends to examine the effects of the Reformation in its entirety, we are treated parallel accounts of religious developments in almost all of Europe's countries during the period described. Some of these developments - such as those in England, Holland, France, Germany, Italy etc. - were genuinely important, and there is little doubt that the ramifications of these developments in such countries have left a deep impression in the course of global history. But did we really need dozens of pages of detail when describing the course of the Lithuanian church? Or the politics of 17th century Denmark? Or the plights of minor Bohemian religious sects? Did these developments in any way shape the course of the Reformation - let alone subsequent history - outside of these countries?
And let it be noted that I'm not simply complaining because I find such detail to be tedious or time-consuming, I think it really does detract from our ability to grasp the bigger picture. It becomes impossible to see the forest for all the trees and McCulloch only rarely raises us upon his great shoulders to get a better view. The spread of Protestantism and fate of Catholic Church is spelled out in great detail for (as I mentioned) almost every country in Europe, comprising a disorienting blur of minor names and locations, but we are never given a broader overview or explanation as to why, for instance, northern Europe came to be dominated by Protestantism while the south remained largely Catholic. An entire chapter (of over 50 pages, from memory) is devoted to the 30 Years War, and I'm still left almost completely unaware of what role religion might have played in the conflict. For those with a solid background understanding of the period this mightn't be such a problem, but it left me feeling like I'd learned little from the best part of a month of committed reading.
But, as I said, I must blame myself for much of this. I should have started with something simpler, and McCulloch can hardly be blamed for failing to tailor his work to my needs. If you have the kind of time, patience and knowledge that I don't, you're not going to find a better narrative account of the Reformation than this. Objectively, I cannot deny that this is an incredible book. I just really didn't enjoy reading it.
July 12, 2009
An excellent overview of the cataclysmic splintering of Western Christianity, The Reformation is long (700 pp) and intricate in detail, but the narrative never drags. Diarmid MacCulloch is thorough and almost always balanced in his view of both the Protestant and Catholic sides of the struggle.
The only time his biases seem to show are when he discusses the English Reformation. He seems to have very little patience for the more conservative and, to be honest, catholic side of the Church of England, treating the Elizabethan settlement as an anomaly and Richard Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity as idiosyncratic, and he calls Caroline Divines either "avant garde conformists" (what does that mean?) or "Arminians" (what their Calvinist Puritan opponents called them, even though they had no direct connection to Jacob Arminus). At one point, MacCulloch makes an intriguing connection between William Laud's efforts against the Puritans and the Catholic Counter Reformation, but he never pursues this idea beyond a few sentences. Deep down, I sense an evangelical sympathy that can't quite let go of the myth of a truly "Reformed" Church of England.
That is my one and only complaint, though. MacCulloch does an excellent job discussing the Continental Reformation. He covers both the major and at least some of the minor figures on both sides and shows how the events of this period have forever shaped the world for both better and worse.
The Reformation is great tragedy, a lost opportunity, and the foundation of the modern world. It is the stuff of epics, and MacCulloch tells the tale magnificently.
The only time his biases seem to show are when he discusses the English Reformation. He seems to have very little patience for the more conservative and, to be honest, catholic side of the Church of England, treating the Elizabethan settlement as an anomaly and Richard Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity as idiosyncratic, and he calls Caroline Divines either "avant garde conformists" (what does that mean?) or "Arminians" (what their Calvinist Puritan opponents called them, even though they had no direct connection to Jacob Arminus). At one point, MacCulloch makes an intriguing connection between William Laud's efforts against the Puritans and the Catholic Counter Reformation, but he never pursues this idea beyond a few sentences. Deep down, I sense an evangelical sympathy that can't quite let go of the myth of a truly "Reformed" Church of England.
That is my one and only complaint, though. MacCulloch does an excellent job discussing the Continental Reformation. He covers both the major and at least some of the minor figures on both sides and shows how the events of this period have forever shaped the world for both better and worse.
The Reformation is great tragedy, a lost opportunity, and the foundation of the modern world. It is the stuff of epics, and MacCulloch tells the tale magnificently.
April 19, 2015
This is a stunning work of synthesis. Mr. MacCulloch gives a strong analysis of the Reformation not only in France, Germany and England but he also examines the movements in Poland, Italy and Spain where the Reformation often gets less attention.
The best thing about this book is that MacCulloch manages to address the theological debates, the political impact of the Reformation and the popular, social religious trends all at the same time giving all the attention they merit.
Mr. MacCulloch also argues for his own personal views in an eloquent fashion, He believes that the Church of England is the greatest of the world's Christian Churches. The Lutheran and Reformed Churches went off in wrong directions theologically while the Roman Catholic Church failed to move forward. In contrast the Anglican Church managed to retain what was good in the Roman Church while only adopting the right ideas from Luther and Calvin. MacCulloch does such a good job of presenting his case that he almost had me convinced for five seconds.
The best thing about this book is that MacCulloch manages to address the theological debates, the political impact of the Reformation and the popular, social religious trends all at the same time giving all the attention they merit.
Mr. MacCulloch also argues for his own personal views in an eloquent fashion, He believes that the Church of England is the greatest of the world's Christian Churches. The Lutheran and Reformed Churches went off in wrong directions theologically while the Roman Catholic Church failed to move forward. In contrast the Anglican Church managed to retain what was good in the Roman Church while only adopting the right ideas from Luther and Calvin. MacCulloch does such a good job of presenting his case that he almost had me convinced for five seconds.
October 12, 2019
I had the privilege of attending MacCulloch's lectures on Reformation personalities when I studied abroad. His eloquence, wry comments, and impeccable research are on display here as they were in person. I don't really enjoy studying the Reformation period, honestly (more. drama. than. eighth. grade.), but MacCulloch makes it engaging and memorable.
May 28, 2012
"A learned, enlightening and disturbing masterwork."---Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World. Very fun to read, good very political interpretation of the Reformation history, but don't expect to find providence or love for Church there.
December 28, 2011
MacCulloch knows the words, but not the tune. Brilliant and sad.
May 19, 2021
Magisterial
February 3, 2022
Although I acknowledge that McCulloch is the GOAT of ecclesiastical history, I wasn’t all that fond of this particular book. His history of all of Christendom was a wonderful catalog of aspects of Christianity but necessarily couldn’t go into any real depth about any single strand of the vast story. Due to the grandeur of the project, I forgave him from moving quickly from one topic to the next in rapid succession. And I’m sure his more focused books on the English reformation really do give the reader a deep dive into a one strand of the Reformation. But for me this book fell somewhat awkwardly between these two stools: he demonstrated his mastery of every aspect of the topic but didn’t teach me very much. I knew the main aspects of the Reformation so had no need of the tour d’horizon. But I needed a deep analysis or a thesis about what the Reformation was all about. I felt that I never got either of these things. But perhaps I’ll read it again someday. The author is, after all, McCulloch.
April 16, 2021
Insanely depth history on the reformation. A little hard to read because of the vocabulary, but I'm big dumb
November 10, 2019
Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450 -1650 by Eire is a better book than this one. It is one of the few books I didn’t review because I thought it was perfect and anything that I would mumble about it would have only distracted from its superior history telling. Overall, I don’t feel that way about this book whatsoever.
I did like the line in this book the author quotes somebody saying that ‘one Dutch man is a theologian, two are a church, and three are a schism’. That was a good line. Unfortunately, well told history needs more than just well quoted lines it also needs the realization of explaining the past in terms of itself and MacCulloch forgets that from time to time and strays from seeing the past within its own terms and at times removes the reader from the actual story that is unfolding. Eire, in his superior book, never strayed from the meaning of the past as its meaning was being revealed in its own time period.
I was surprised that the author generally referred to the Protestants and the Reformers as ‘Humanist’. Partly, he defined Humanist as those who look beyond authority for truth, a somewhat slippery and misleading definition in my opinion. I think of Luther as the start of anti-humanism and Erasmus as a seminal Humanist (I have no problem adding Plutarch, Petrarch, and Dante to the list of seminal Humanist and perhaps Pelagius). Bondage of the Will by Luther a book mentioned multiple times in this book lays out the Protestants disagreement with Pelagius and Erasmus; cutting to the chase, they both believe that prayer makes a difference and good works matter. Luther does not. Calvin does not.
Anyways, overall I was surprised by how the author would describe people who I would consider as anti-Humanist characterized as Humanist. Calvin just doesn’t strike me as a Humanist as the author clearly states multiple times within this book that Calvinist was a Humanist. (I think the start of Fascism would start with the start of the anti-Humanist and I would definitely put Calvin and Luther in the anti-Humanist camp. I don’t want to connect all the dots since that would make this review too prolix, but I will say Hitler gives a special shout out in his monstrous auto-biography to Luther and his anti-Humanist beliefs for a reason, and Trump is also most easily and accurately described as an anti-Humanist or Fascist because in the end for him truth emanates from where the self anointed leader says it does and is interpreted through his privileged identity lens. Tell me again why Luther did not support the peasants’ revolt? Or why Trump forbids all Muslims or brown people to immigrate or why he spouts all that hate at his Nuremberg Rallies which the archetypal anti-Humanist, fascist or equivalently white supremacist, would be in sympathy with).
I enjoy this time period as much as the next person, after all who amongst us does not love esoteric discussions on theological fine points which led to killing others based on nothing more than ideological beliefs only within their own minds or unanswerable questions such as how many natures does Jesus have? I would also recommend reading Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind by Massing before reading this book. It is more narrowly focused than this book, but it too covers some of the topics in this book albeit superiorly.
I like almost all history books. I liked this one. I would recommend this one especially since it’s free from Hoopla. Though if you can’t get a free copy I would definitely recommend one of the other two books I mentioned above because there is remoteness in the way the author writes which makes his story telling less compelling than the time period warrants and besides Eire’s book is near perfect in its telling.
I did like the line in this book the author quotes somebody saying that ‘one Dutch man is a theologian, two are a church, and three are a schism’. That was a good line. Unfortunately, well told history needs more than just well quoted lines it also needs the realization of explaining the past in terms of itself and MacCulloch forgets that from time to time and strays from seeing the past within its own terms and at times removes the reader from the actual story that is unfolding. Eire, in his superior book, never strayed from the meaning of the past as its meaning was being revealed in its own time period.
I was surprised that the author generally referred to the Protestants and the Reformers as ‘Humanist’. Partly, he defined Humanist as those who look beyond authority for truth, a somewhat slippery and misleading definition in my opinion. I think of Luther as the start of anti-humanism and Erasmus as a seminal Humanist (I have no problem adding Plutarch, Petrarch, and Dante to the list of seminal Humanist and perhaps Pelagius). Bondage of the Will by Luther a book mentioned multiple times in this book lays out the Protestants disagreement with Pelagius and Erasmus; cutting to the chase, they both believe that prayer makes a difference and good works matter. Luther does not. Calvin does not.
Anyways, overall I was surprised by how the author would describe people who I would consider as anti-Humanist characterized as Humanist. Calvin just doesn’t strike me as a Humanist as the author clearly states multiple times within this book that Calvinist was a Humanist. (I think the start of Fascism would start with the start of the anti-Humanist and I would definitely put Calvin and Luther in the anti-Humanist camp. I don’t want to connect all the dots since that would make this review too prolix, but I will say Hitler gives a special shout out in his monstrous auto-biography to Luther and his anti-Humanist beliefs for a reason, and Trump is also most easily and accurately described as an anti-Humanist or Fascist because in the end for him truth emanates from where the self anointed leader says it does and is interpreted through his privileged identity lens. Tell me again why Luther did not support the peasants’ revolt? Or why Trump forbids all Muslims or brown people to immigrate or why he spouts all that hate at his Nuremberg Rallies which the archetypal anti-Humanist, fascist or equivalently white supremacist, would be in sympathy with).
I enjoy this time period as much as the next person, after all who amongst us does not love esoteric discussions on theological fine points which led to killing others based on nothing more than ideological beliefs only within their own minds or unanswerable questions such as how many natures does Jesus have? I would also recommend reading Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind by Massing before reading this book. It is more narrowly focused than this book, but it too covers some of the topics in this book albeit superiorly.
I like almost all history books. I liked this one. I would recommend this one especially since it’s free from Hoopla. Though if you can’t get a free copy I would definitely recommend one of the other two books I mentioned above because there is remoteness in the way the author writes which makes his story telling less compelling than the time period warrants and besides Eire’s book is near perfect in its telling.
February 13, 2021
I think MacCulloch spent too much time listing facts and not tying them into the story/point he is trying to make. He jumps from country to country and decade to decade in each paragraph and it's hard to remember what point he was making. Also, reading from the Catholic perspective, he doesn't do a good job giving a non-biased explanation. He takes it for granted the Catholics were always in the wrong so he makes accusations without always giving the full story or quoting Catholic leaders or documents: Here are examples:
-He states St. Augustine believed in pre-destination without giving any quote from him backing that up. I'm sure the author is well read in his work, but he takes it for granted that St. Augustine contradicted Church teaching so he doesn't show what St. Augustine said to give him (or Luther for that matter) the impression St. Augustine believed in predestination.
-He gives the Catholic belief of the Eucharist as having to do with something Aristotle said, as opposed to quoting Church counsels or most importantly, John 6 and 1 Corinthians 10/11.
-He states 5 of the sacraments are "unbiblical". That's a common Protestant statement, but it's a matter of opinion. Baptism and marriage is what I assume he is considering the 2 in the bible, but the Eucharist is (John 6 and 1 Cor 10/11), Confirmation is Acts 8 & 19 as well as Hebrews 6, Reconciliation has Leviticus roots (chapter 19, bringing a ram to the priest so he can sacrifice it for the offenders), and John 20:23, Anointing of Sick is Mark 6:13 and James 5: 14-15, and Holy Orders is 1 Tim 4:1-5, Titus 1:5, Matthew 28:18, 1 Tim 5:22, among others (priestly celibacy for that matter comes from 1 Cor 7:7-8, 32-35).
-I feel like it was a big miss for him to not mention any of the contents of Exsurge Domine. Even if one disagrees with the contents, why would such a key response by the Church to the 95 Thesis not be explained, and only mentioned in passing? The 95 Thesis is also explained as only being about paid indulgences, when there is a lot more content in it that deserves explaining
-Similar to the above point, he doesn't really go into any of the specifics of the Counsel of Trent, except saying that it consolidated Papal power. There was more to that counsel than that, as well as an explanation for the clarification on Papal authority, that was a key part of the Reformation in my opinion.
-He also makes a disclaimer each time an atrocity was committed on the side of the Reformers by saying something along the lines of "it wasn't as bad as the Inquisition". It's just one of the ways his opinion would make it's way into the book.
Overall, he's very smart and knows a lot about this subject, I just think the above points were misses on his end that would've made the book more honest and effective.
-He states St. Augustine believed in pre-destination without giving any quote from him backing that up. I'm sure the author is well read in his work, but he takes it for granted that St. Augustine contradicted Church teaching so he doesn't show what St. Augustine said to give him (or Luther for that matter) the impression St. Augustine believed in predestination.
-He gives the Catholic belief of the Eucharist as having to do with something Aristotle said, as opposed to quoting Church counsels or most importantly, John 6 and 1 Corinthians 10/11.
-He states 5 of the sacraments are "unbiblical". That's a common Protestant statement, but it's a matter of opinion. Baptism and marriage is what I assume he is considering the 2 in the bible, but the Eucharist is (John 6 and 1 Cor 10/11), Confirmation is Acts 8 & 19 as well as Hebrews 6, Reconciliation has Leviticus roots (chapter 19, bringing a ram to the priest so he can sacrifice it for the offenders), and John 20:23, Anointing of Sick is Mark 6:13 and James 5: 14-15, and Holy Orders is 1 Tim 4:1-5, Titus 1:5, Matthew 28:18, 1 Tim 5:22, among others (priestly celibacy for that matter comes from 1 Cor 7:7-8, 32-35).
-I feel like it was a big miss for him to not mention any of the contents of Exsurge Domine. Even if one disagrees with the contents, why would such a key response by the Church to the 95 Thesis not be explained, and only mentioned in passing? The 95 Thesis is also explained as only being about paid indulgences, when there is a lot more content in it that deserves explaining
-Similar to the above point, he doesn't really go into any of the specifics of the Counsel of Trent, except saying that it consolidated Papal power. There was more to that counsel than that, as well as an explanation for the clarification on Papal authority, that was a key part of the Reformation in my opinion.
-He also makes a disclaimer each time an atrocity was committed on the side of the Reformers by saying something along the lines of "it wasn't as bad as the Inquisition". It's just one of the ways his opinion would make it's way into the book.
Overall, he's very smart and knows a lot about this subject, I just think the above points were misses on his end that would've made the book more honest and effective.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 317 reviews