Suzannah Rowntree’s Reviews > The Reformation: A History > Status Update

"The [child abuse] crisis places a question-mark against the imposition of compulsory celibacy on the Church's ministry as formidable as any posed by Protestants in the four decades of the Reformation" the HELL did you just say???????? No, MacCulloch, I can assure you that one can either succeed or fail at celibacy equally well without PREYING ON CHILDREN

MacCulloch argues that it was inadvertent and unwilling, but the Reformation produced greater religious tolerance in western Europe as a byproduct of its greater religious diversity. He also gives medieval Islam credit for being more tolerant, but imo that's giving them a bit too much: Even the Latins were forced to be more tolerant by the greater religious diversity in the East.

Into the final chapter, "Outcomes", and it's fascinating to me that one of the effects of the confrontation between Protestant and Catholic in the 1500s-1700s was a strengthening of state power, which stemmed obviously from a desire to have the state enforce a unified religion on all its subjects. Areas with religious diversity and toleration were also areas where decentralised secular power structures survived.

Shrieking because growing up I heard so much handwringing about how church attendance is demographically skewed towards women, unlike the good old days of muscular Christianity, and isn't that terrible but IT STARTED ALL THE WAY BACK IN THE REFORMATION??? SPECIFICALLY IN THE AREAS WHICH ENJOYED FREEDOM OF WORSHIP??? IT DESTROYED WITHIN A FREE DECADES THE STEREOTYPE OF WOMEN AS CHAOTIC AND MORALLY INFERIOR??? SHUT UP

Not only was Anne Askew, burned as a Protestant by Henry VIII during his Catholic era, a fugitive from an abusive marriage, but MacCulloch points out that this did not prevent her being virtually canonised in English Protestantism. The reformation exalted marriage but also permitted divorce more easily.

Fascinating that MacCulloch claims that during the medieval period, convents for female religious were often built to be less cloistered and enclosed than monasteries for men. It was in the wake of the Counter Reformation that convents became so enclosed.

Not the Scottish Presbyterian official book of discipline directing ministers to marry a couple against their parents' wishes if need be??? and calling romantic love a "work of God"???? "For the work of God ought not to be hindered by the corrupt affections of worldly men" clutching my heart

"Calvinism is a Eucharist-centred and therefore community-minded faith" - fascinating pushback here against the notion that Protestantism is uncomplicatedly linked with capitalism and/or radical individualism.

On the global Catholic missions of the 16th & 17th centuries: "The perpetual trouble in all these mission-fields was the European reluctance to accept on equal terms the peoples whom they encountered... It was not surprising that when a Church infrastructure which remained European fell into decay in any area of the world, the Church as a whole soon began to fade away."

"In fact England judicially murdered more Roman Catholics than any other country in Europe, which puts English pride in national tolerance in an interesting perspective" history is always more chequered than propaganda will admit