The Chancery of God is the first English language study of the city of Magdeburg's resistance to Emperor Charles V's drive to consolidate Habsburg hegemony and reinstitute uniform Roman Catholic worship throughout Germany. The book offers an analysis of the flood of printed material published in Magdeburg during the crucial years of 1546-1551 articulating a broad spectrum of arguments for resistance. More than this, however, the pamphlets and broadsides suggest a coherent identity and worldview that is characteristically and self-consciously Protestant.