A review by nigellicus
The Reformation: A History by Diarmaid MacCulloch

challenging dark informative

4.0

We had a book in secondary school, and Irish convent secondary school, called Renaissence And Reformation and the one thing I remember about it is that at one point it said something like 'now, obviously, the Spanish Inquisition was no summer camp, but...' The effects of the Reformation are so huge and run so deep they're hard to fathom, but here we go, several hundred years worth of intense theological disagreement and the subsequent social upheavals, displacement of peoples, wars and persecutions, the whole damn thing. A considerable percentage of this book details various and endless and sincere life-or-death disgreements about things that seem to belong in a fantasy novel they're so arbitrary, generated out of the mess of human faillibility in an effort to transcend it. It's fascinating. I doubt I'll remember a fraction of it, but it was a marvelous read.