Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450-1650

Very insightful,, a finely detailed and stimulating history of the varied Reformations and the Catholic responses

While this is a secular book of history, it is very well researched and really gets to the heart of the "Reformers" ideas and life.

A comprehensive overview that gives comparative perspective but attends to fascinating details as well. Excellent as a thoughtful intro to the crucial Reformation(s) period!

This is a very ambitious book. As the title implies it looks at multiple reformations, over nearly 200 years, not just the one which will be commemorated next year when Martin Luther nailed his theses to the Wittenberg church door ( or more likely posted them to his bishop). In particular, Eire takes a detailed look at the reform movements pre Luther and the so called "counter Reformation" of the Catholic Church which was designed to tackle the flaws that had led Luther to take up theological arms in the first place. The former include not only the familiar - Huss and Wycliffe - but also the much less well known. Eire argues that there were significant reforming movements underway around 1500 which in some cases led to a complete break with Rome but in other cases contributed to reform within the church. For example he suggest one of the main reasons why Spain was. along with Italy, the only country to be impervious to Protestant Reformation was that the Spanish Catholics had already undertaken a "proto Protestant " house clean — though they would have been horrified to hear it described as such. He sketches out how the Counter Reformation whilst addressing corruption, pluralism, simony and other abuses above all stressed those particular strains of Roman Catholic belief that the Protestants most criticised. Irony of ironies the assault on papal authority, argues Eire ended up making the papacy stronger, especially at the expense of the councils such as Trent which launched the "counter reformation" ( a term which was defined hundreds of years later ) and was again ironically initially strongly opposed by the Pope. The same was true of items regarded as unbiblical and superstitious such as prayer to Mary and the saints, purgatory, the use of art in religious worship, all of which were given an enhanced place by the Catholic church to create "theological clear blue water" between the Catholic Church and the Reformers. In turn Protestants defined themselves against catholics. This could have all been avoided, suggests the book implicitly, if the papacy had not been so flawed in the early C16th. This was the key issues that separated reformers who eventually ended up either staying in or leaving — would they accept the authority of a manifestly corrupt and money focused pope?Eire also helpfully delineates the various reformations within the Protestant "Reformation". He points out how the initial persecution after the powder keg was lit was to a surprising Protestant on Protestant - for example the anabaptists drowned in the Limmat River by Zwingli in Zurich. It was Lutheran and Catholic soldiers who stormed the millennial centre of Munster and so ironically the first "reconquest" of the Catholic Church was on the back of Protestant steel. Soon enough though the Catholics would get into the act and the degree of blood letting especially in Germany up to 1648 in the name of religion would eventually end in a Kantian dislike of all confessional religion.The book deals very throughly and sympathetically with the background of the Reformers. They were all born after 1480 - angry young men — and they were nearly all ordained priests. He is also careful to explain the huge impact on the Reformation of three seismic events — the invention of printing, the fall of Constantinople to the Turks and the opening up of the New World by Spain and Portugal. The last led to huge inflows of silver, sparking inflation and social discontent.I found Eire particularly good and thought provoking on Calvin. He stresses firstly the importance of the Swiss (mainly German speaking) reformers such as Zwingli and Bullinger. He argues that the differences between Calvin and Luther while substantial were really in the final analysis of emphasis. Calvin was to have in the long rum a much bigger impact on Protestant thinking, suggests Eire, above all because of the Institutes "In offering a through and masterful systematic digest of biblically based theology that was also a manual for Christian living, Calvin surpassed his distinguished predecessors." Eire also shows how in many ways Calvin was surprisingly modern — perhaps the first anthropologist and a man whose understanding of "false religion" was completely different to those of his fellow reformers. The source of the terrible “ butchery of souls” which Calvin objected to was the not the devil as depicted in the scatalogical Lutheran prints but was rather within us, our inability to stop erecting idols in the place where God alone should be worshipped. Nor was Calvin the gimlet eyed dictator of legend. He was very reluctant to talk about himself and his feelings (the very opposite of Luther) but what little we do know shows in particular a devoted husband. Women in particular flocked to Geneva. To quote a recent article “ Geneva in Calvin’s day and in his time of influence.. came to be known as “ he paradise of women.” There were good reasons for this. Calvin was strongly protective of "women's rights." Under his guidance, church consistories went after wife abusers. They prosecuted guardians who had misappropriated trust funds of widows and orphans. Deserted wives were protected, and so on. Writers have referred to "the attraction of Calvinism for women in that area."Not surprisingly given its ambitious scope, the book is rather long and discursive. It is also in places very technically written, for a work which is described as aimed at the general reader. We have numerous paradigm shifts and even some revolutionary paradigm shifts! Anthropology and other disciplines are raided for language which may leave even the averagely well informed reader reaching for their thesaurus. Having said that as a comprehensive and even handed account of the Reformation it will take some beating. Eire is scrupulously fair in my view in the way he deals with the main protagonists and has done very significant research. Here and there the scope of the work means some detail is skipped - for example the English Reformation post about 1580 is dealt with cursorily. The latter Puritans, Hooker and the Great Ejection of 1662 hardly get a look in. But there are plenty of less well researched areas that get considerable coverage. It avoids being Euro centric and looks at the impact of the Reformation on the rest of the world. We often think of missions as Protestant but in fact it was the Catholics who pioneered, often at the cost of incredible persecution and pain, in places as far apart as Japan and what is now Canada.Going back to Luther, Eire argues he was the spark to an enormous powder keg not of his own making. Nothing would ever be the same again and Eire argues that his actions and those of the other Reformers Continue to reverberate to the current day. "To redefine religion was to redefine the world" and at the end of the book in his conclusions Eire looks at what those redefinition involved. Most importantly he argues that Protestantism "desacralised the world", that is to say reduced the space for the sacred and the miraculous and strongly emphasised the here and now and this world. He argues in turn that this led to the Enlightenment and the empirical scientific world view which now tends to dominate Western thinking. Whether this actually had a direct causation or if it did whether the Reformers actually intended this is a moot point and indeed one can see the Pentecostal and Charismatic Movement of the C20 as to a great extent a reaction against what some may perceive as a too desacralised world view. But the Reformers themselves had an intensely sacred and supernatural world view - for example their concern to battle a real devil. Eire also takes an extended look at the focus after the Reformation on witchcraft. The burning of witches in particular was very patchy in scope — for example Scotland with a fraction of England's population had 3 times as many. And the body with which you were least likely to be burned if put on trial? Surprisingly enough the Spanish inquisition.What I particularly like about the book is that it takes religion itself very seriously — far from the case in many C21 books on religion, written in what at least in Europe is a profoundly un religious age. Eire explains how religion permeated all of life, even though of course not everyone was equally "religious". In other words he tries to understand the thinking and behaviour of the Reformers on their own terms, not by viewing through our decidedly non sacred lens. Religion, argues Eire was the cause of “a unique transformation of the West…(it was) not an isolated dimension of human experience…(but) a means of interpreting the world and of interacting with it.” Thus the central thesis of the book I suggest is that in 2016 the Reformation matters very much. This book which is an ambitious (in places over ambitious) attempt to summarise the breadth and complexity of all the various “reforming” movements is a good place to start. Even the well read historian of the Reformation will discover all kinds of myths being “busted” some of which are detailed above. If the reader can keep going through all the pages and twists and turns one will learn an awful lot about the Reformation(s).

In his Preface, Eire writes, "This is a narrative for beginners and nonspecialists" (p. xii). With all due respect for the author, this book is certainly more than that. One of its primary attributes is the integration or synthesis of a remarkable two-hundred-year period of Western Civilization, 1450-1650, into a single narrative that emphasizes the human impulse to analyze and understand, create a sense of personal distinctiveness, assert an identity, and defend our convictions. In the process, both then and now, men and women are vulnerable (in some degree or another) to self-righteousness and stridency. These impulses and vulnerabilities of the human condition are at the root of both the Renaissance (or Italian Humanism) and the multiple reformations that we often conveniently lump into 'The Reformation' associated with Martin Luther.Both the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation of Eire's story are also grounded in the idea of "looking back" in time and attempting to regain the perceived purity and glory of an earlier era. In the case of the Renaissance it was Ancient Greece, and in the reformations (both Catholic and the several Protestant variants) it was primitive Christianity. A critical step in each was to return to foundational texts and "recover" unvarnished truths. Of course, such attempts at change necessarily create tension with those who have a vested interest in the "varnished" status quo or their own version of the truth.Eire's treatment of Martin Luther is representative of the author's historical sensibility. He writes, "… he was as much a product of change as an agent of it" (p. vii) and, "He was but one of many reformers in his generation, some of whom pressed for more radical changes than he was willing to accept" (p. 131). Luther's relationship to other reformers, both preceding and contemporary, is assayed, as are the conditions that permitted Luther to emerge as a Reformation "rock star" (timeliness of Gutenberg's printing press, rising literacy, popular resentment of the Roman Catholic Church's wealth, powerful prose, and a fractured political situation in the Holy Roman Empire that created safe havens for him). In Luther's case, theology successfully met circumstance (just such intersections are at the heart of history).Eire uses the concept of fractals to illustrate the nature of the Protestant Reformation. He elaborates, "… the history of the Protestant Reformation can be systematically comprehended only through multiple narratives that parallel each other in time and even mirror each other, but sometimes interlace or branch out" (p. 219). In this telling, history, rightfully, has depth and texture.Consistent with the above, Eire writes of humanism spread among elites throughout Europe by "diffusion" (p. 86), or with regard to the impulse for Catholic reform he writes, "… [it] had been simmering throughout the Middle Ages …" (p. 128). Descartes, he writes, belonged to an "amorphous movement" (p. 662), while in discussing the Enlightenment (or "enlightenments"?) he likens it to a "rogue wave" (p. 686). Throughout the book we are given the sense that new ideas are seeking receptive minds and when they reach a critical mass, history comes alive. These ideas are expressed through multiple voices, some converging around them, some objecting and holding firm against them, and some just taking a runner. In Eire's prose, history surges and history percolates. His sensibility and tone are impressive.With historical change there are gains and losses (and sometimes cruel disasters - the recounting of wars of religion leaves me thinking of Hans Sach's monologue, "Wahn! Wahn!" in Wagner's 'Meistersinger'). These gains and losses are the product of our human quest for understanding and the desire for improvement in interaction with our complicated psyches (often leading to unintended consequences), as Eire makes plain.Appreciating 'Reformations' by Eire involves appreciating the very nature of 'history' itself. It is a reminder that 'history' is complex and hinged on circumstance (which holds value for more than "beginners and nonspecialists"). What it may lack in "cutting-edge" primary research, it more than compensates for with an epic scope and a sophisticated historical perspective.An appreciation for the complexity of 'history' should translate into an appreciation for the complexity of our 'present' and may, just may, help us to be more tolerant of others, since too often the consequences of self-righteousness and stridency are so dire. Ultimately, shouldn't changed conduct be one of the primary purposes of 'history'?Now there is one word of caution: this is a long book (about 750 pages of text) and a degree of fortitude is necessary. This is not a breezy read (minor differences over theology can get a bit tedious, even when they could literally mean temporal life-or-death) and I found myself digesting it in smaller bites than I am use to. Nonetheless, this book puts much of what I have read over the years into a more fulsome frame of reference so that, as is often the case, fortitude was rewarded.