What do you think?
Rate this book
The Counter-Reformation
The reform of the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century was historically as important as the contemporary Protestant Reformation. Though never committed solely to fighting Protestantism, it inevitably also became a Counter Reformation, since it soon face the threat created by Luther and his successors. The century between the career of Ignatius Loyola nad that of Vincent de Paul became a classic age of Catholicism. The lives of its saints, popes and secular champions could hardly be made more fascinating by any novelist. A must-read for Catholics or for anyone who wishes to greater understand the bedrock of Western Civilization and the beginning of Two Cultures in Europe and the world.
215 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1968
1 person is currently reading
69 people want to read
About the author
A.G. Dickens
29 books6 followersArthur Geoffrey Dickens FBA, English academic and author.
Educated at Oxford, served in the military government of Lübeck from May to October 1945 and was appointed Professor of History at Hull in 1949.
Best known for his work on the English Reformation.
Educated at Oxford, served in the military government of Lübeck from May to October 1945 and was appointed Professor of History at Hull in 1949.
Best known for his work on the English Reformation.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
Read
January 7, 2017In hindsight it seems pretty obvious that A.G.Dickens' The Counter Reformation would share a lot in common with his book The English Reformation. His tolerance and sympathetic interest for the people he is discussing is the same. We get a broadly similar picture of a Church at the beginning of the sixteenth century, if not quite so hollowed out due to the leadership being geared towards government service, but which was structurally weak in a Europe with a vigorous anti-clerical culture co-existing with an equally strong tendency to popular piety. The eventual outcomes are also alike – the top down imposition of a renewed religious culture, more defined, more ordered, with a strong emphasis on training and maintaining parish clergy.
Dickens again takes a chronological approach to the subject. Perhaps this was not best advised. This book is two hundred pages in large print, richly illustrated, so maybe a third or less the length of his book on the English reformation, yet covers a longer time period and a larger geographic area. Reading I had the not entirely delightful sense that my ignorance was increasing - what one learns from books heightens the awareness of what you don't know. One of the points he raises is that the Counter Reformation can be considered the first world-wide cultural movement. The reader can appreciate that what is covered in these pages had an impact on people not just in Europe, but also in the Americas and in Asia, while at the same time the book doesn't have the space to develop the idea. On the other hand a thematic approach might have been less approachable to that mythical beast, the general reader. Sticking to the chronology is one way of trying to order the messy heaps of actual lives and their explosive interactions.
A few themes present themselves, the rise (again?) of the Papacy, new religious orders, national or local traditions, and just to be balanced, the tensions between all three. All of these were apparent at the Council of Trent which eventually managed to define Catholicism for the next few hundred years down to Vatican I and II, turning its back decisively on clerical marriage, the laity taking communion in both kinds, church services in the vernacular, and several theological positions that suddenly appeared to be dangerously Protestant.
If one was of an economical bent of mind one might nod sagely and attribute the new life in the Church to the benefits of competition. If not one might recall that centuries of division between the eastern and the western churches don't seem to have had a like effect, and taking a longer perspective heresy, renewal and reform were ongoing processes in the medieval church with often only a thin line between the heretic and the reformer. I was reminded of this reading here about the treatment of Ss Theresa of Avila and John of the Cross who both fell under suspicion during their lifetimes with the latter held by unreformed Carmelites, occasionally flogged, kept in a dungeon, and fed on the traditional bread and water at one point. The passage of time smooths down the jagged edges of actual lives which the historian seeks to restore.
But to get back to ignorance and to what is in my opinion the central problem with this study, the boundaries between Catholic and Protestant in Europe today are not the result of the Reformation, but of the limits of the Counter-Reformation . What we don't get from this book is the process of how the Reformation came to an end in parts of Italy, in Austria, in bits of Poland, over stretches of Hungary, across chunks of Germany and France. Was the Counter-Reformation organised, organic, something in-between? What was the balance between carrot and stick in winning people back? Education of the sons of the elites, particularly at the hands of the Jesuits, seems to have been important in Dickens' account, but can we allow that this was sufficient over time, plus thirty years of conflict in and around Germany during the seventeenth-century, to have made all the difference?
A case study or three would have been helpful. Was the priest who won back, so to speak, a region of Switzerland to Catholicism alone the active ingredient in Counter-Reformation success? What about the secular authorities, what about ecclesiastical back-up, Protestant weakness, persecution, the political balance?
On the other hand Dickens shares a nice, in the seventeenth-century sense of the word, sense of the interplay between the various popes and the secular rulers. Something particularly apparent in how the Papacy was able to play off the interests of the French against the Spanish during the Council of Trent. Likewise apparent is the drive of the individuals and groups who set up the Jesuits and the Oratorial movement among others. Yet how decentralised this could all be also comes through in the question of artistic patronage - local secular patrons were apparently the ones who were making the stylistic decisions. Maybe a hint that the Counter-Reformation was made up of many regional counter-reformations and perhaps why this study is not as solid and successful as his book on the English Reformation.
Dickens again takes a chronological approach to the subject. Perhaps this was not best advised. This book is two hundred pages in large print, richly illustrated, so maybe a third or less the length of his book on the English reformation, yet covers a longer time period and a larger geographic area. Reading I had the not entirely delightful sense that my ignorance was increasing - what one learns from books heightens the awareness of what you don't know. One of the points he raises is that the Counter Reformation can be considered the first world-wide cultural movement. The reader can appreciate that what is covered in these pages had an impact on people not just in Europe, but also in the Americas and in Asia, while at the same time the book doesn't have the space to develop the idea. On the other hand a thematic approach might have been less approachable to that mythical beast, the general reader. Sticking to the chronology is one way of trying to order the messy heaps of actual lives and their explosive interactions.
A few themes present themselves, the rise (again?) of the Papacy, new religious orders, national or local traditions, and just to be balanced, the tensions between all three. All of these were apparent at the Council of Trent which eventually managed to define Catholicism for the next few hundred years down to Vatican I and II, turning its back decisively on clerical marriage, the laity taking communion in both kinds, church services in the vernacular, and several theological positions that suddenly appeared to be dangerously Protestant.
If one was of an economical bent of mind one might nod sagely and attribute the new life in the Church to the benefits of competition. If not one might recall that centuries of division between the eastern and the western churches don't seem to have had a like effect, and taking a longer perspective heresy, renewal and reform were ongoing processes in the medieval church with often only a thin line between the heretic and the reformer. I was reminded of this reading here about the treatment of Ss Theresa of Avila and John of the Cross who both fell under suspicion during their lifetimes with the latter held by unreformed Carmelites, occasionally flogged, kept in a dungeon, and fed on the traditional bread and water at one point. The passage of time smooths down the jagged edges of actual lives which the historian seeks to restore.
But to get back to ignorance and to what is in my opinion the central problem with this study, the boundaries between Catholic and Protestant in Europe today are not the result of the Reformation, but of the limits of the Counter-Reformation . What we don't get from this book is the process of how the Reformation came to an end in parts of Italy, in Austria, in bits of Poland, over stretches of Hungary, across chunks of Germany and France. Was the Counter-Reformation organised, organic, something in-between? What was the balance between carrot and stick in winning people back? Education of the sons of the elites, particularly at the hands of the Jesuits, seems to have been important in Dickens' account, but can we allow that this was sufficient over time, plus thirty years of conflict in and around Germany during the seventeenth-century, to have made all the difference?
A case study or three would have been helpful. Was the priest who won back, so to speak, a region of Switzerland to Catholicism alone the active ingredient in Counter-Reformation success? What about the secular authorities, what about ecclesiastical back-up, Protestant weakness, persecution, the political balance?
On the other hand Dickens shares a nice, in the seventeenth-century sense of the word, sense of the interplay between the various popes and the secular rulers. Something particularly apparent in how the Papacy was able to play off the interests of the French against the Spanish during the Council of Trent. Likewise apparent is the drive of the individuals and groups who set up the Jesuits and the Oratorial movement among others. Yet how decentralised this could all be also comes through in the question of artistic patronage - local secular patrons were apparently the ones who were making the stylistic decisions. Maybe a hint that the Counter-Reformation was made up of many regional counter-reformations and perhaps why this study is not as solid and successful as his book on the English Reformation.
February 27, 2018
Probably not what you are looking for
Drawn by the copious and attractive illustrations, I picked up a copy of this book, which promised to educate me about a process and period of European history that I knew little about. I had heard the word "Counter-Reformation" used in college history courses as well as seen it in many a history book, but had never really managed to grasp what it referred to. I thought that A.G. Dickens' THE COUNTER-REFORMATION would be the ticket. Unfortunately, I was wrong. Every page is packed with names, events, and terms referring to schools of philosophy, church decisions, titles of men, and titles of books, the sum total of which is to lead the reader to total confusion. Furthermore, as it is obviously a rush through the whole subject, you seldom meet any of these names again. A chapter is enough to send you reeling. I wonder for whom the author wrote the book ? If it were for specialists, this book is obviously too thin, too quickly paced, and without documentation. No, it was not for them. So, I suppose,(and also because it is one in the series called "Library of European Civilization") it must have been meant for the general reader like myself. The result, I fear, is quite appalling. Why should anyone try to punish themselves by reading this book when there are so many excellent histories in other areas available?
Drawn by the copious and attractive illustrations, I picked up a copy of this book, which promised to educate me about a process and period of European history that I knew little about. I had heard the word "Counter-Reformation" used in college history courses as well as seen it in many a history book, but had never really managed to grasp what it referred to. I thought that A.G. Dickens' THE COUNTER-REFORMATION would be the ticket. Unfortunately, I was wrong. Every page is packed with names, events, and terms referring to schools of philosophy, church decisions, titles of men, and titles of books, the sum total of which is to lead the reader to total confusion. Furthermore, as it is obviously a rush through the whole subject, you seldom meet any of these names again. A chapter is enough to send you reeling. I wonder for whom the author wrote the book ? If it were for specialists, this book is obviously too thin, too quickly paced, and without documentation. No, it was not for them. So, I suppose,(and also because it is one in the series called "Library of European Civilization") it must have been meant for the general reader like myself. The result, I fear, is quite appalling. Why should anyone try to punish themselves by reading this book when there are so many excellent histories in other areas available?
January 28, 2024
Although this book was published in 1968, it stands up well as a very good, English language overview of this complicated subject. Dickens was an eminent historian of the Reformation period and in this concise work, he discusses the background and principal features of the Catholic/Counter-Reformation. It is written in a balanced fashion and remains, in my view, an indispensable introduction to the subject.
March 3, 2010
I especially liked Dickens' objectivity, or rather, his lack of discernible bias. His book seems to have sufficient respect for all the people and the institutions involved in this complicated time, in these complex issues.
One of my history professors told us that British historians have to be very competent writers as well as well versed in their periods of choice. I have found this is generally true, and Dickens is well toward the front of the line.
One of my history professors told us that British historians have to be very competent writers as well as well versed in their periods of choice. I have found this is generally true, and Dickens is well toward the front of the line.
February 8, 2021
somewhat nice
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews