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.

At the colloquy of Poissy, revived Catholicism and emergent international Protestantism met in an attempt to establish peace, unity, and reconciliation. The author argues that the colloquy was the final crossroads of the Reformation.

This collection of essays charts the influence of the Lutheran Reformation on various (northern) European languages and texts written in them. The central themes of *Languages in the Lutheran Reformation: Textual Networks and the Spread of Ideas* are: how the ideas related to Lutheranism were adapted to the new areas, new languages, and new contexts during the Reformation period in the 16th and 17th centuries; and how the Reformation affected the standardization of the languages. Networks of texts, knowledge, and authors belong to the topics of the present volume. The contributions look into language use, language culture, and translation activities during the Reformation, but also in the prelude to the Reformation as well as after it, in the early modern period. The contributors are experts in the study of their respective languages, including Czech, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, High German, Icelandic, Latvian, Lithuanian, Low German, Norwegian, Polish, and Swedish. The primary texts explored in the essays are Bible translations, but genres other than biblical are also discussed.

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

George Williams' monumental The Radical Reformation has been an essential reference work for historians of early modern Europe, narrating in rich, interpretative detail the interconnected stories of radical groups operating at the margins of the mainline Reformation. In its scope--spanning all of Europe from Spain to Poland, from Denmark to Italy--and its erudition, The Radical Reformation is without peer. Now in paperback format, Williams' magnum opus should be considered for any university-level course on the Reformation.

When Martin Luther published his 95 Theses in October 1517, he had no intention of starting a revolution. But very quickly his criticism of indulgences became a rejection of the papacy and the Catholic Church emphasizing the Bible as the sole authority for Christian faith, radicalizing a continent, fracturing the Holy Roman Empire, and dividing Western civilization in ways Luther—a deeply devout professor and spiritually-anxious Augustinian friar—could have never foreseen, nor would he have ever endorsed. From Germany to England, Luther’s ideas inspired spontaneous but sustained uprisings and insurrections against civic and religious leaders alike, pitted Catholics against Protestants, and because the Reformation movement extended far beyond the man who inspired it, Protestants against Protestants. The ensuing disruptions prompted responses that gave shape to the modern world, and the unintended and unanticipated consequences of the Reformation continue to influence the very communities, religions, and beliefs that surround us today. How Luther inadvertently fractured the Catholic Church and reconfigured Western civilization is at the heart of renowned historian Brad Gregory’s Rebel in the Ranks. While recasting the portrait of Luther as a deliberate revolutionary, Gregory describes the cultural, political, and intellectual trends that informed him and helped give rise to the Reformation, which led to conflicting interpretations of the Bible, as well as the rise of competing churches, political conflicts, and social upheavals across Europe. Over the next five hundred years, as Gregory’s account shows, these conflicts eventually contributed to further epochal changes—from the Enlightenment and self-determination to moral relativism, modern capitalism, and consumerism, and in a cruel twist to Luther’s legacy, the freedom of every man and woman to practice no religion at all. With the scholarship of a world-class historian and the keen eye of a biographer, Gregory offers readers an in-depth portrait of Martin Luther, a reluctant rebel in the ranks, and a detailed examination of the Reformation to explain how the events that transpired five centuries ago still resonate—and influence us—today.

This book rescues three little-known bestsellers of the English Reformation and employs them in an examination of intellectual and religious revolution. How did sixteenth-century English Protestant manuals of private devotion - often to be read aloud - stream continental theology into the domestic contexts of parish, school, and home? Patterson elucidates ideological programs presented in key texts in light of evolving patterns of public and private worship; she also considers the processes of transmission by which complex doctrinal debates were packaged for cultivating an everyday piety in a confusing age of inflammatory, politicized religion. It is in the most prosaic challenges of daily realities, that the deepest opportunities lie for experiencing the divine. Intersecting issues of piety, rhetoric, and the devotional life of the home, this book brings to life reformists' endeavors to guide popular responses to the Protestant revolution itself.