The Reformation

A History

De: Diarmaid MacCulloch

Narrado por: Anne Flosnik

At a time when men and women were prepared to kill - and be killed - for their faith, the Protestant Reformation tore the Western world apart. Acclaimed as the definitive account of these epochal events, Diarmaid MacCulloch's award-winning history brilliantly recreates the religious battles of priests, monarchs, scholars, and politicians - from the zealous Martin Luther and his 95 Theses to the polemical John Calvin to the radical Igantius Loyola, from the tortured Thomas 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.

©2003 Diarmaid MacCulloch (P)2017 Tantor

Reseñas de la Crítica

"Superb...An essential work of religious history." ( Kirkus)

An essential piece of history to understand the modern world

Best book I’ve read in years. Political, scientific, and military history of Europe require this *detailed* understanding of religion. Also illuminates today, our schisms, our end-of-the-world obsessions, our 'morals', our weaponizing of thought.
Also illuminates many of the great things of today - our tolerance, our pursuit of scientific truth, our desire to make a better world and be better people, our ability to sacrifice and persevere for beliefs, our ability to change, to adapt, and to strike out on our own if needed.
Highly recommended.

Very biased, but vast

In terms of depth and breadth (geographically and chronologically), this is definitely the best history of the Reformation on Audible and maybe in print. I was shocked by how many regions this book covered and by the great scope of time it covered. It is a scholarly work, not a textbook or popular work, but it will hold your attention as well as any popular history.

The author, Diarmaid MacCulloch, is a leading historian of the Reformation period. Though he claims to be non-biased, this is nonsense and is definitely one of the biggest defects in this book. At the time of writing this, he was non-religious, having parted with the Church of England and, as he says, "lost his faith," over their teachings on sexual mores. He is famous for being a staunch opponent of the Catholic revisionist histories of the reformation period one finds in the works of Eamon Duffy (and more popularly G. J. Meyer's history of the Tudors). The result of MacCulloch's philosophical perspective is a strong bias in this narrative toward non-institutional religious movements and figures—familiarists, anabaptists, etc.—and against institutional religion, whether Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed. MacCulloch also, for some reason, extends his narrative all the way up to John Paul II, claiming he is some return to the dark ages... This book is great, but some things in it just deserve to go in one ear and out the other.

I would recommend that anyone looking to learn about the reformation read this book, but also balance it out with the very different (much more balanced) perspective one gets from Catholic authors like Carlos Eire (Reformations) or Eamon Duffy (Reformation Divided; Stripping of the Altars) (also on Audible).

The narration is absolutely perfect in my opinion.

Research Supreme

I will have to re-read (listen) many times. It opened my mind to the pure & destructive power this subject was on the " Commoner's" lives. Highly Recommend! Well done

Worth listening to at least thrice....

So much information packed into this book... Connects the dots to other things about Christianity I learned elsewhere....

MacCulloch did good with this one...

Unlistenable narration

You would be forgiven for mistaking the narrator’s voice for an automatically-generated one. I would actually prefer to listen to an AI’s voice if that option were available.