Protestant reformers sought to effect a radical change in the way their contemporaries understood and coped with the suffering of body and soul that were so prominent in the early modern period. This book examines the genesis of Protestant doctrines of suffering among the leading reformers and then traces the transmission of these doctrines from the reformers to the common clergy. It also examines the reception of these ideas by lay people.

Charity and Lay Piety in Reformation London, 1500-1620 explores how the English Protestant Reformation was a reflection of genuine popular piety, as opposed to a political necessity imposed by the country's rulers. Through the prism of charity and lay piety, as expressed in the wills and testaments taken from selected London parishes, it charts the shifting religious ideas about salvation and the nature and causes of poverty in early modern London and England over a 120 year period. Studying the evolution of lay piety through the long stretch of the period 1500 to 1620, Claire Schen unites pre-Reformation England with that which followed, helping us understand how 'Reformations' or a 'Long Reformation' happened in London.

The Riveting Story of the Reformation and Its Significance Today The Reformation unfolded in the cathedrals and town squares of Europe--in Wittenberg, Worms, Rome, Geneva, and Zurich--and it is a stirring story of courage and cowardice, of betrayal and faith. The story begins with the Catholic Church and its desperate need for reform. The dramatic events that followed are traced from John Wycliffe in England, to the burning of John Hus at the stake in Prague, to the rampant sale of indulgences in the cities and towns of Germany, to Martin Luther nailing the Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Castle Church in 1517, to John Calvin's reform of Geneva. Erwin Lutzer captures the people, places, and big ideas that fueled the Reformation and explains its lasting influence on the church and Western Civilization.

In a work that is as much about the present as the past, Brad Gregory identifies the unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation and traces the way it shaped the modern condition over the course of the following five centuries. A hyperpluralism of religious and secular beliefs, an absence of any substantive common good, the triumph of capitalism and its driver, consumerism—all these, Gregory argues, were long-term effects of a movement that marked the end of more than a millennium during which Christianity provided a framework for shared intellectual, social, and moral life in the West. Before the Protestant Reformation, Western Christianity was an institutionalized worldview laden with expectations of security for earthly societies and hopes of eternal salvation for individuals. The Reformation’s protagonists sought to advance the realization of this vision, not disrupt it. But a complex web of rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Christianity gradually replaced the religious fabric that bound societies together in the West. Today, what we are left with are fragments: intellectual disagreements that splinter into ever finer fractals of specialized discourse; a notion that modern science—as the source of all truth—necessarily undermines religious belief; a pervasive resort to a therapeutic vision of religion; a set of smuggled moral values with which we try to fertilize a sterile liberalism; and the institutionalized assumption that only secular universities can pursue knowledge. The Unintended Reformation asks what propelled the West into this trajectory of pluralism and polarization, and finds answers deep in our medieval Christian past.

This book examines the coming of the Protestant Reformation from the viewpoint of eight common people, who were sufficiently disturbed by the events of 1521-5 to write treatises, letters, dialogues, and sermons, which they published. Their works are lively testimony to the interest of laypeople in the affairs of the church, and their willingness to discuss often complex theological training. These works are among the first documents of lay theology and piety, but they are also propaganda: disappointed with the Catholic clergy and with secular authorities, the authors of these pamphlets were called to prophesy, preach, and convert their readers/listeners lest Christ return soon to find his church unprepared. They demanded a new apostolate for laypeople, something the clergy had feared for centuries and something which civic authorities feared as a potential source of radical ideas.

This volume collects significant new scholarship on the late mediaeval and early modern Bible, engaging with the work of theologians, the devotional needs of the laity and the shape their concerns gave to the most important book of the age.

London and the Reformation (1989) was the first book by Susan Brigden (later to win the prestigious Wolfson Prize for her Thomas Wyatt: The Heart's Forest). It tells of London's sixteenth-century transformation by a new faith that was both fervently evangelised and fiercely resisted, as a succession of governments and monarchs - Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Mary - vied for control. London's disproportionate size and wealth, its mix of social forces and high politics, and the strength of its religious sectors made the capital a key factor in the reception of the English Reformation. Brigden draws upon rich archival sources to examine how these religious dilemmas were confronted. 'A tour de force of historical narrative... which can be read with both pleasure and profit by scholars and non-scholars alike.' Times Literary Supplement 'Magisterial... richly detailed... teeming with the vivid street language of the sixteenth century.' London Review of Books