Inside the Reformation is a visual journey through the Reformation with concise text and richly designed pages. While not laid out as a traditional history book, it communicates the same information through pictures, illustrations, and short articles in a fun way. This book makes a great addition to school libraries, classrooms, and personal collections.

Book Review

The collection of essays by prominent historians of the Reformation explores the experience of religious reform in 'national context', discussing similarities and differences between the reform movements in a dozen different countries of sixteenth-century Europe. Each author provides an interpretative essay emphasising local peculiarities and national variants on the broader theme of the Reformation as a European phenomenon. The individual essays thus emphasise the local preconditions and limitations which encountered the Reformation as it spread from Germany into most of the countries of western and central Europe. Together they present a picture of the many-sided nature of the Reformation as it grew up in each 'national context'. The book includes examples of countries where the Reformation was strikingly successful, as well as those where it failed to make an impact. A final comparative essay seeks to understand the different 'Reformations' as variations on an overall theme. This volume forms part of a sequence of collections of essays which began with The Enlightenment in national context (1981) and has continued with Revolution in history (1986), Romanticism in national context (1988), Fin de siecle and its legacy (1990), The Renaissance in national context (1991), The Scientific Revolution in national context (1992), and The national question in Europe in historical context (1993). The purpose of these and other envisaged collections is to bring together comparative, national and interdisciplinary approaches to the history of great movements in the development of human thought and action.

Prostitute, apostle, evangelist—the conversion of Mary Magdalene from sinner to saint is one of the Christian tradition’s most compelling stories, and one of the most controversial. The identity of the woman—or, more likely, women—represented by this iconic figure has been the subject of dispute since the Church’s earliest days. Much less appreciated is the critical role the Magdalene played in remaking modern Christianity. In a vivid recreation of the Catholic and Protestant cultures that emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, The Magdalene in the Reformation reveals that the Magdalene inspired a devoted following among those eager to find new ways to relate to God and the Church. In popular piety, liturgy, and preaching, as well as in education and the arts, the Magdalene tradition provided both Catholics and Protestants with the flexibility to address the growing need for reform. Margaret Arnold shows that as the medieval separation between clergy and laity weakened, the Magdalene represented a new kind of discipleship for men and women and offered alternative paths for practicing a Christian life. Where many have seen two separate religious groups with conflicting preoccupations, Arnold sees Christians who were often engaged in a common dialogue about vocation, framed by the life of Mary Magdalene. Arnold disproves the idea that Protestants removed saints from their theology and teaching under reform. Rather, devotion to Mary Magdalene laid the foundation within Protestantism for the public ministry of women.

Italian sermons tell a story of the Reformation that credits preachers with using the pulpit, pen, and printing press to keep Italy Catholic when the region’s violent religious wars made the future uncertain, and with fashioning a post-Reformation Catholicism that would survive the competition and religious choice of their own time and ours.

This book celebrates the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. This book is designed to be prominently featured on a coffee table or bookshelf as a conversation starter; it's filled with images that enhance the historically accurate text and make this book a beautiful and educational statement piece.

“No revolution however drastic has ever involved a total repudiation of what came before it.” The religious reformations of the sixteenth century were the crucible of modern Western civilization, profoundly reshaping the identity of Europe’s emerging nation-states. In The Reformation, one of the preeminent historians of the period, Patrick Collinson, offers a concise yet thorough overview of the drastic ecumenical revolution of the late medieval and Renaissance eras. In looking at the sum effect of such disparate elements as the humanist philosophy of Desiderius Erasmus and the impact on civilization of movable-type printing and “vulgate” scriptures, or in defining the differences between the evangelical (Lutheran) and reformed (Calvinist) churches, Collinson makes clear how the battles for mens’ lives were often hatched in the battles for mens’ souls. Collinson also examines the interplay of spiritual and temporal matters in the spread of religious reform to all corners of Europe, and at how the Catholic Counter-Reformation used both coercion and institutional reform to retain its ecclesiastical control of Christendom. Powerful and remarkably well written, The Reformation is possibly the finest available introduction to this hugely important chapter in religious and political history.

When the present publisher first issued The Reformation in England in 1962, it was hoped, in the words of its editor, S. M. Houghton, that it would 'be a major contribution to the religious needs of the present age, and that it [would] lead to the strengthening of the foundations of a wonderful God-given heritage of truth'. In many ways there has been such a strengthening. Renewed interest in the Reformation and the study of the Reformers' teaching has brought forth much good literature, and has provided strength to existing churches, and a fresh impetus for the planting of biblical churches.

The first study of how women from different backgrounds encountered the Counter-Reformation in early sixteenth-century Münster.

It is nearly impossible to separate contemporary Iranian cinema from the Islamic revolution that transformed film production in the country in the late 1970s. As the aims of the revolution shifted and hardened once Khomeini took power and as an eight-year war with Iraq dragged on, Iranian filmmakers confronted new restrictions. In the 1990s, however, the Reformist Movement, led by Mohammad Khatami, and the film industry, developed an unlikely partnership that moved audiences away from revolutionary ideas and toward a discourse of reform. In Reform Cinema in Iran, Blake Atwood examines how new industrial and aesthetic practices created a distinct cultural and political style in Iranian film between 1989 and 2007. Atwood analyzes a range of popular, art, and documentary films. He provides new readings of internationally recognized films such as Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry (1997) and Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Time for Love (1990), as well as those by Rakhshan Bani, Masud Kiami, and other key Iranian directors. At the same time, he also considers how filmmakers and the film industry were affected by larger political and religious trends that took shape during Mohammad Khatami's presidency (1997-2005). Atwood analyzes political speeches, religious sermons, and newspaper editorials and pays close attention to technological developments, particularly the rise of video, to determine their role in democratizing filmmaking and realizing the goals of political reform. He concludes with a look at the legacy of reform cinema, including films produced under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose neoconservative discourse rejected the policies of reform that preceded him.