All Things Made New: Writings on the Reformation - Hardcover

MacCulloch, Diarmaid

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0241254000 ISBN 13: 9780241254004

Publisher: Allen Lane, 2016

Synopsis

A brilliant kaleidoscope on the Reformation from its leading scholar and 'one of the best historians writing in English today' (Sunday Telegraph)

The Reformation which engulfed England and Europe in the sixteenth century was one of the most highly-charged, bloody and transformative periods in their history. Ever since, it has remained one of the most contested.

Diarmaid MacCulloch is one of the leading British historians of this turbulent and endlessly fascinating era. Many essays in this volume expand upon his now classic Reformation: Europe's House Divided, tracing, for example, the evolution of the English Prayer Book and Bible or reassessing the impact of the Reformation on Catholicism. Henry VIII and his archbishop, Thomas Cranmer, are both central presences, and MacCulloch swiftly dispatches some of the received wisdom about them. Throughout the book, he brilliantly undermines one persistent English tradition of interpreting the Reformation - that it never really happened - and establishes that Anglicanism was really a product of Charles II's Restoration in 1660 rather than the 'Elizabethan Settlement' of 1559. The inexhaustible variety of the Reformation is seen in a delightful mix of writings on angels, Protestant opinions about the Virgin Mary and such diverse personalities as William Byrd, John Calvin and the extraordinary seventeenth-century forger Robert Ware, some of whose malicious fantasies have polluted parts of Reformation history ever since.

All Things Made New shows Diarmaid MacCulloch at his best - learned, far-seeing, sometimes subversive, and often witty. At the end of his essay on the great Elizabethan divine Richard Hooker, he writes 'The disputes which currently wrack Western Christianity are superficially about sexuality, social conduct or leadership style: at root, they are about what constitutes authority for Christians. The contest for the soul of the Church in the West rages around the question as to how a scripture claiming divine revelation relates to those other perennial sources of human revelation, personal and collective consciousness and memory; whether, indeed, there can be any relationship between the two.' There is much wisdom, as well as much enjoyment, in this book.

About this title

Review

MacCulloch is an eminent professor of history at the University of Oxford, and not only brings a lifetime's learning to bear on his subject, but writes with vigour, empathy and wit ... not narrowly about religion, but broadly about identity and memory, about the importance of myths and why historians need to challenge them. (Malcolm Gaskill Financial Times)

All Things Made New is a serious book on a serious subject. It is written with elegance and sometimes donnish wit, but it is very far from being a book for specialists. As the author says, he aims to "reflect on scholarship and interpret it for a wider audience", and he wears his learning pretty lightly in a miscellany of essays covering the European and English Reformations. (Robert Tombs The Times)

Dazzling ... prodigiously learned ... MacCulloch has a gift for explaining complicated things simply. (Jack Scarisbrick Catholic Herald)

MacCulloch is ... able to write authoritatively and engagingly on a remarkably diverse range of topics in the history of Christian culture and thought. ... MacCulloch is too incisive and astringent a commentator to spout pieties. No Anglian or other Christian reading these essays is likely to be left in a condition of complacent satisfaction. (Peter Marshall Literary Review)

From the Author

Diarmaid MacCulloch is 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; Reformation: Europe's House Divided 1490-1700 (2004) won the Wolfson Prize and the British Academy Prize. A History of Christianity (2010), which was adapted into a six-part BBC television series, was awarded the Cundill and Hessel-Tiltman Prizes. His Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh were published in 2013 as Silence: A Christian History. His most recent television series, Sex and the Church, broadcast in 2015. He was knighted in 2012.

About this edition

• Publisher: Allen Lane
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0241254000
• ISBN 13: 9780241254004
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 464