The Reformation: A History

Publisher's Description

At a time when men and women were prepared to kill - and be killed - for their faith, the Reformation tore the Western world apart. Acclaimed as the definitive account of these epochal events, Diarmaid MacCulloch's award-winning new history brilliantly re-creates the religious battles of priests, monarchs, scholars, and politicians from the zealous Martin Luther to the radical Loyola, from the tortured Cranmer to the ambitious Philip II.

Drawing together the many strands of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and ranging widely across Europe and the New World, MacCulloch reveals as never before how these dramatic upheavals affected everyday lives overturning ideas of love, sex, death, and the supernatural, and shaping the modern age.

Recipient of the Wolfson History Prize

864 Pages
Published March 2005

About the Author

Diarmaid MacCulloch was brought up in a country rectory in East Anglia and studied under the great Tudor historian Geoffrey Elton. He is now a Fellow of St. Cross College, Oxford, Fellow of the British Academy and Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University. His Thomas Cranmer (1996) won the Whitbread Biography Prize, the James Tait Black Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize. He is the author most recently of The Reformation: A History (2004), which won the Wolfson Prize for History, the British Academy Prize and the Non-Fiction Award from the National Book Critics Circle. He lives in Oxford, England.