Reformation Europe

New Approaches to European History #28

by Ulinka Rublack

How could the Protestant Reformation take off from a tiny town in the middle of Saxony, which contemporaries regarded as a mud hole? How could a man of humble origins who was deeply scared by the devil become a charismatic leader and convince others that the pope was the living Antichrist? Martin Luther founded a religion which up to this day determines many people's lives in intimate ways, as did Jean Calvin in Geneva one generation later. This is the first book which uses the approaches of new cultural history to describe how Reformation Europe came about and what it meant.

Genres: History, European History, Nonfiction

226 pages, Paperback

First published February 17, 2005

About the author

Ulinka Rublack is Professor at the University of Cambridge and has published widely on early modern European history as well as approaches to history. She edited the Oxford Concise Companion to History (2011), and, most recently, the Oxford Handbook of the Protestant Reformation (2016). Her monographs include Reformation Europe (2005), The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany (1999), and Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (2010), which won the Roland H. Bainton Prize.

Reviews

[Lauren Albert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rublack tries to contextualize the reformation thinkers (Luther, Calvin et al). She does a good job of this as well as showing the differences between them. There was not just one reformation even if one takes the Catholic reformation out of the equation.

[Mmetevelis · Rating 4 out of 5]

For those wanting a little more Reformation history than just retelling the debates and asking abstract questions about primal causes spurring the events this is a great read. Rublack's monograph is an examination of society and culture around the Reformation which examines how the ideas of Luther and Calvin disseminated in lived society and culture. The Weber thesis about consumption and ideas about "disenchantment" are disproved using real evidence about Protestant culture's use of luxury and the way that Protestant ideas encountered common people through each of the senses. Interesting to me as a pastor was the way that early Protestants believed in the potency of God's word so much that the word itself as well as it's content became a kind of icon where the Protestant faithful perceived the divine.

If you already know many of the basic dates and ideas of the Reformation this is the perfect place to continue your exploration and there is a detailed but not overwhelming bibliography of other things to read on more discrete subjects. Glad I found this one.

[Jefferson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like how there's no bibliography in the back because Rublack is fighting quite a few different battles with her account of the culture of Reformation. The argument makes sense and it reminds me of many of the questions that were raised in Darnton's The Great Cat Massacre, the biggest being about how we can utilize tools from anthropology and sociology to reconstruct worlds that are long gone. Good read.

[Eilidh]

Would be better titled Reformation in Europe. It begins with an introduction to Luther, which is followed by a discussion of Calvin (which I did not read). Reformation Europe did not have the social context for which I was hoping.

[Natalie · Rating 3 out of 5]

[3.5 rounded down] decent v decent but not life changing