Revolution of the Saints
- sofiapbaker
- Aug 31, 2017
- 1 min read
Carlos Eire, America’s leading historian of the Reformation, which marked its 500th anniversary in October, has written a masterpiece of historical synthesis. The product of a lifetime’s teaching and writing at Yale, his Reformations—the plural denoting not one unified turn in Christianity but rather several movements and counter-movements (Lutheran, Reformed, Radical, and Catholic) unfolding over time—surveys two centuries between the collapse of medieval Christendom and the founding of the modern Western world. Avoiding scholarly controversies and unencumbered with scholarly apparatus, the volume condenses the results of recent research into a coherent, well-structured narrative ranging from the Renaissance to the Thirty Years’ War, the English Civil War, and beyond. Though a massive doorstop of a book, it is written in clear, often lively prose, with over 200 illustrations, and is addressed to “beginners and non-specialists”…