May 13, 2004
THOSE WERE THE DAYS:
-REVIEW: of The Reformation by Diarmaid Macculloch (Benjamin Schwarz, Atlantic Monthly)
MacCulloch has taken on this vast subject and produced one of the most magisterial and stylishly written historical works to be published in a decade. The book sparklingly synthesizes scholarship on an astonishing array of subjects, ranging from repentance rituals in Protestant Transylvania to the Jesuits' reactions to what they saw as the "Judaizing deviations" of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church to church architecture. Throughout, MacCulloch, professor of the history of the Church at Oxford, explicates complex theological issues with startling lucidity. And his analyses of the lives, personalities, ideas, and struggles of Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, Cranmer, Philip II, and Ignatius of Loyola are at once sharp and profound (and not infrequently funny). Yet this is far more than an intellectual or institutional history. The Reformation is the great and sanguinary fault line in Europe's history, in part because the divides within Western Christendom soon came to express themselves in the chronic rivalries and dynastic clashes among Europe's states (during the Thirty Years' War as much as 40 percent of the population of the German lands suffered an early death because of the fighting or the concomitant famine and disease), and MacCulloch treats that tricky and often lethal interplay of religion and politics with nuance and care. Although he attends to high politics and theological disputes, his book is also a sophisticated work of social history, focusing on the ways these two centuries of turbulent change affected the daily lives of ordinary people -- specifically in popular attitudes toward death, childhood, sexuality, marriage, and the family. MacCulloch's supreme achievement, though, is his appreciation of the foreignness of his subject.
The Europeans were much more likable when they had ideals they were willing to kill and die for.
MORE:
-REVIEW: of Felicity Heal. Reformation in Britain and Ireland. (Diarmaid MacCulloch, September, 2003, H-Albion)
Comments
It's an excellent book - but the reviewer should really have mentioned Melanchthon as well in that paragraph (if only because I've always thought his name sounds so great ...). It's a shame that, if I recall, I've read some less than great comments recently on the current "situation" by the author (which I can't be bothered searching for now).
Book's well worth reading though.