The Reformation. The Complete History of Protestantism

The Reformation and the Counter-Reformation represented the greatest upheavals in Western society since the fall of the Roman Empire a millennium ago. The consequences of those devastating events are still felt today - from the sharp disagreements between Catholic and Protestant countries (and within them) to the Protestant ideology that governs the United States, a nation claiming the title of the only superpower. The Western world was torn apart. Men and women were ready to kill and be killed for their faith. Priests, monarchs, scholarly politicians, common townspeople, and peasants became embroiled in an epochal confrontation that forever changed Europe. The history of these dramatic upheavals, their impact on daily life, when all notions of love, sex, death, and the sacred were inverted forever, and the principles that defined the entirety of European modernity were established, is outlined in this fundamental work prepared by the famous English historian for the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. Presenting an impressive multi-faceted picture of various social movements and religious-political processes under the banners of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation that spanned Europe and the New World, Diarmaid MacCulloch perhaps reveals this historical period on such a grand scale like no one else.