Peter G. Wallace adeptly interweaves the influential events of the early modern religious reformation with the transformations of political institutions, socio-economic structures, gender relations, and cultural values throughout Europe. In this established study, Wallace: * examines the European Reformation as a long-term process * reconnects the classic sixteenth-century religious struggles with the political and religious pressures confronting late medieval Christianity * argues that the resolutions proposed by reformers, such as Luther, were not fully realised for most Christians until the early eighteenth century. Incorporating the latest research, the second edition of this essential text now features a new chapter on the Reformation and Islam, expanded discussion of gender issues, and a helpful glossary.

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.

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.

How could the Protestant Reformation take off from a tiny town in the middle of Saxony, which contemporaries regarded as a mud hole? How could a man of humble origins who was deeply scared by the devil become a charismatic leader and convince others that the pope was the living Antichrist? Martin Luther founded a religion which up to this day determines many people's lives in intimate ways, as did Jean Calvin in Geneva one generation later. This is the first book which uses the approaches of new cultural history to describe how Reformation Europe came about and what it meant.

New to theProblems in European Civilizationseries, this volume includes secondary-source essays organized around the major controversies and interpretations of Reformation history, includingThe "Successes" of the ReformationandThe Reformation of Rituals,with an emphasis on how the effects of the Reformation unfolded over time. The text is suitable for upper-level courses focused exclusively on the Reformation, as well as courses in Western Civilization, early modern Europe, or Renaissance history. The text's pedagogy—a hallmark of theProblems in European Civilizationseries—includes chapter introductions, timelines, illustrations, maps, and suggested readings.

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.

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.