Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch Page A

Huldrych Zwingli (London, 1978), is a fine biography of this unjustly neglected Reformer, and a much better-known Reformed Protestant of the next generation is to be enjoyably encountered in the work of a fellow-Frenchman with a fine sense of Calvin's cultural context, B. Cottret, Calvin: A Biography (Grand Rapids and Edinburgh, 2000), translated from Calvin: biographie (Paris, 1995). The Reformed tradition of Protestantism which they shaped is now superbly introduced both by P. Benedict, Christ's Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (New Haven and London, 2002) and G. Murdock, Beyond Calvin: The Intellectual, Political and Cultural World of Europe's Reformed Churches, c. 1540-1620 (Basingstoke, 2004). The crisis which was in great measure triggered by the Reformation is presented in P. H. Wilson, Europe's Tragedy: A History of the Thirty Years War (London, 2009).
    One national Reformation which became a very individual branch of the Reformed family is introduced in D. MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (New Haven and London, 1996), D. MacCulloch, The Later Reformation in England, 1547-1603 (rev. edn, Basingstoke, 2001), C. Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics and Society under the Tudors (Oxford, 1993), and P. Marshall, Reformation England 1480-1642 (London, 2003). The contrasting Reformation which in the same islands became plus Calviniste que Calvin is absorbingly described in all its vitality in M. Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Haven and London, 2002), while the Reformation which went wrong and the Counter-Reformation which supplanted it are sympathetically evoked in R. Gillespie, Devoted People: Belief and Religion in Early Modern Ireland (Manchester, 1997). G. Williams, Wales and the Reformation (Cardiff, 1997), is one work from the master of the subject. The mid-century crisis of the whole Atlantic Isles is most comprehensively described in A. Woolrych, Britain in Revolution 1625-1660 (Oxford, 2002).
    One monumental gazetteer of 'non-magisterial' possibilities of Reformation in Europe has not yet been surpassed, even though its attempts at classification are disputable: G. H. Williams, The Radical Reformation (London, 1962). Classic studies of an alignment which was always problematic, but which has provoked much fruitful investigation tending to undermine the original proposition, are M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (various English edns from 1930), a translation of Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus , 190 4/5 ), and R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926). More than a century of debate about the Weber-Tawney thesis is most reliably analysed in H. Lehmann and G. Roth (eds.), Weber's Protestant Ethic : Origins, Evidence, Contexts (Cambridge, 1993).

18: Rome's Renewal (1500- 1700)
    A fine initial survey which has the advantage of taking seriously the worldwide mission of sixteenth-century Catholicism is R. Bireley, The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450-1700 (Houndmills, 1999), and a sprightly overview is given by one of the elder statesmen of the field in J. O'Malley, Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge, MA, 2000). His study of the origins of the Society of Jesus is currently the best available: The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA, 1993). A rich variety of sources with commentary is provided by J. C. Olin (ed.), The Catholic Reformation: Savonarola to Ignatius Loyola (New York, 1992), and a lively treatment of a controversial topic is J. Edwards, The Spanish Inquisition (Stroud, 1999). J. Bergin, Church, Society and Religious Change in France, 1580-1730 (New Haven and London, 2009), deals in masterly fashion with one Protestant Reformation which was eventually vanquished by Counter-Reformation. Admirably sensitive on one of the great mystics of the Christian tradition is A. Weber, Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton and London,