The Oxford Illustrated History of the Reformation
Peter Marshall
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0199595488
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The Reformation was a seismic event in history, whose consequences are still working themselves out in Europe and across the world. The protests against the marketing of indulgences staged by the German monk Martin Luther in 1517 belonged to a long-standing pattern of calls for internal reform and renewal in the Christian Church. But they rapidly took a radical and unexpected turn, engulfing first Germany and then Europe as a whole in furious arguments about how God's will was to be discerned, and how humans were to be 'saved'.
However, these debates did not remain confined to a narrow sphere of theology. They came to reshape politics and international relations; social, cultural, and artistic developments; relations between the sexes; and the patterns and performances of everyday life. They were also the stimulus for Christianity's transformation into a truly global religion, as agents of the Roman Catholic Church sought to compensate for losses in Europe with new conversions in Asia and the Americas.
Covering both Protestant and Catholic reform movements, in Europe and across the wider world, this beautifully illustrated volume tells the story of the Reformation from its immediate, explosive beginnings, through to its profound longer-term consequences and legacy for the modern world. The story is not one of an inevitable triumph of liberty over oppression, enlightenment over ignorance. Rather, it tells how a multitude of rival groups and individuals, with or without the support of political power, strove after visions of 'reform'. And how, in spite of themselves, they laid the foundations for the plural and conflicted world we now inhabit.
doubts about faith, about the truth of his theology, and about whether or not he was saved; he was aware that for others, they could concern the doctrine of God’s providence. The idea that God had already decided who was saved and who was damned remained an intellectual contradiction at the heart of Luther’s theology, which he dealt with by saying that even thinking about it was wrong. An aspect that passed human understanding, providence should be left to God to worry about. Although they made
between the clerical and lay estates, should be formed. The ‘evangelical peasant’, with his hoe and flail, became a Reformation hero, his image prefacing many tracts demanding religious reform. In –, the peasants in many areas of Germany rose up against their lords. Their demands mixed religious and secular concerns, many beginning with a call for true Christian preaching to be instituted. In villages and towns across the Empire, peasant bands formed, demanding to ‘drink brotherhood’ with the
Dutch painters who celebrated the stark aesthetics of ‘purified’ church. LESS IS MORE. lucrative one, and –year-old Jean Cauvin became the absentee curate of Marteville, a village near Noyon. It would not be until May , after he had already finished his studies and turned Protestant, that Calvin would resign the post wangled by his father. By then, ironically, his education had provided him with all the tools he would need to wage war against the Catholic Church and reform the Protestant
creation of a Republic, and then the Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell. In the wake of these dramatic upheavals, radical Protestants appeared, in ways unseen for more than a century, under the penumbra of parliamentarian ‘Independency’. In another parallel to the early German Reformation, nearly all of them were marked by apocalyptic sensibilities. Already in , the Presbyterian minister Thomas Edwards viewed their profusion as a socially subversive disease in his famous heresiographical
the city’s past. Catholic Reformation and Renewal The Roman Calendar only included the names of those saints who had been martyred in the Eternal City or whose bones had been buried there. But it also contained the names of those non-martyr (confessor) saints who enjoyed an officially recognized, universal cult. Indeed, for a saint to enjoy universal cult status, his or her inclusion in the Roman Martyrology was mandatory. In other words, Rome stood also for the Universal, Catholic Church.