The European Reformation

A fully revised and updated version of this authoritative account of the birth of the Protestant traditions in sixteenth-century Europe, providing a clear and comprehensive narrative of these complex and many-stranded events.

An unabridged, unaltered edition of the Disputation on the Power & Efficacy of Indulgences Commonly Known as The 95 Theses

A study of the European Reformation from 1500 to 1610. It is designed to fulfil the AS and A Level specifications in place from September 2000. The AS section deals with narrative and explanation of the topic. The A2 section reflects the different demands of the higher level examination.

The sixteenth-century Reformation remains a fascinating and exciting area of study. The revised edition of this distinguished volume explores the intellectual origins of the Reformation and examines the importance of ideas in the shaping of history. Provides an updated and expanded version of the original, highly-acclaimed edition. Explores the complex intellectual roots of the Reformation, offering a sustained engagement with the ideas of humanism and scholasticism. Demonstrates how the intellectual origins of the Reformation were heterogeneous, and examines the implications of this for our understanding of the Reformation as a whole. Offers a defence of the entire enterprise of intellectual history, and a reaffirmation of the importance of ideas to the development of history. Written by Alister E. McGrath, one of today’s best-known Christian writers.

An expert re-interpretation of how religious toleration and conflict developed in early modern Europe.

The Reformation was the seismic event in European history over the past 1000 years, and one which tore the medieval world apart. Not just European religion, but thought, culture, society, state systems, personal relations - everything - was turned upside down. Just about everything which followed in European history can be traced back in some way to the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation which it provoked. The Reformation is where the modern world painfully and dramatically began, and MacCulloch's great history of it is recognised as the best modern account.

Recent decades have witnessed the fragmentation of Reformation studies, with high-level research confined within specific geographical, confessional or chronological boundaries. By bringing together scholars working on a wide variety of topics, this volume counteracts this centrifugal trend and provides a broad perspective on the impact of the European reformation. The essays present new research from historians of politics, of the church and of belief. Their geographical scope ranges from Scotland and England via France and Germany to Transylvania and their chronological span from the 1520s to the 1690s Considering the impact of the Reformation on political culture and examining the relationship between rulers and ruled; the book also examines the church and its personnel, another sphere of life that was entirely transformed by the Reformation. Important aspects of knowledge and belief are discussed in terms of scientific knowledge and technological progress, juxtaposed with analyses of elite and popular belief, which demonstrates the limitations of Weber's notion of the disenchantment of the world. Together they indicate the diverse directions in which Reformation scholarship is now moving, while reminding us of the need to understand particular developments within a broader European context; demonstrating that movements for religious reform left no sphere of European life untouched.

In the generation that followed Martin Luther's protest the evangelical movement in Europe attracted very different levels of support in different parts of the continent. Whereas in eastern and central Europe the new movement brought a swift transformation of the religious and political landscape, progress elsewhere was more halting: in the Mediterranean lands and western Europe initial enthusiasm for reform failed to bring about the wholesale renovation of society for which evangelicals had hoped. These fascinating contrasts are the main focus of this volume of specially commissioned essays, each of which charts the progress of reform in one country or region of Europe. Written in each case by a leading specialist in the field, they provide a survey based on primary research and a thorough grasp of the vernacular literature. For both scholars and students they will be an invaluable guide to recent debates and literature on the success or failure of the first generation of reform.

In this widely praised history, noted scholar James D. Tracy offers a comprehensive, lucid, and masterful exploration of early modern Europe's key turning point. Establishing a new standard for histories of the Reformation, Tracy explores the complex religious, political, and social processes that made change possible, even as he synthesizes new understandings of the profound continuities between medieval Catholic Europe and the multi-confessional sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This revised edition includes new material on Eastern Europe, on how ordinary people experienced religious change, and on the pluralistic societies that began to emerge. Reformation scholars have in recent decades dismantled brick by brick the idea that the Middle Ages came to an abrupt end in 1517. Martin Luther's Ninety-five Theses fitted into an ongoing debate about how Christians might better understand the Gospel and live its teachings more faithfully. Tracy shows how Reformation-era religious conflicts tilted the balance in church-state relations in favor of the latter, so that the secular power was able to dictate the doctrinal loyalty of its subjects. Religious reform, Catholic as well as Protestant, reinforced the bonds of community, while creating new divisions within towns, villages, neighborhoods, and families. In some areas these tensions were resolved by allowing citizens to profess loyalty both to their separate religious communities and to an overarching body-politic. This compromise, a product of the Reformations, though not willed by the reformers, was the historical foundation of modern, pluralistic society. Richly illustrated and elegantly written, this book belongs in the library of all scholars, students, and general readers interested in the origins, events, and legacy of Europe's Reformation.

The first survey to utilise the approaches of the new cultural history in analysing how Reformation Europe came about.