At a time when men and women were prepared to kill – and be killed – for their faith, the reformation tore the western world apart. Acclaimed as the definitive account of these epochal events, Diarmaid MacCulloch’s history brilliantly re-creates the religious battles of priests, monarchs, scholars and politicians, from the zealous Luther to the radical Loyola, from the tortured Cranmer to the ambitious Philip II.

Weaving together the many strands of reformation and counter-reformation, ranging widely across Europe and even to the New World, MacCulloch also reveals as never before how these upheavals affected everyday lives – overturning ideas of love, sex, death and the supernatural, and shaping the modern age. 

‘Monumental … Reformation is set to become a landmark’ 
Lisa Jardine, Observer

‘A triumph of human sympathy’ 
Blair Worden, Sunday Telegraph

‘From politics to witchcraft, from the liturgy to sex; the sweep of European history covered here is breathtakingly panoramic. This is a model work of history’ 
Noel Malcolm, Sunday Telegraph, Books of the Year

‘A masterpiece of readable scholarship … In its field it is the best book ever written’ 
David L. Edwards, Guardian

‘A historical tour de force … He shows how the Reformation was about much more than religion and politics. It was about what kind of bell-ringing you heard, or whether your neighbours noticed your reading habits, about attitudes to the family … breathtaking’ 
Daniel Johnson, Daily Telegraph

‘A milestone book … A masterpiece of learning, and yet written with a disarming lightness of touch’ 
Andrew Pettegree, The Times Literary Supplement

‘Dazzling’ 
Michael Howard, The Times Literary Supplement, Books of the Year

‘Reviewers reach too easily for the adjective “magisterial”, but few historical works of recent times can have earned it as securely as Diarmaid MacCulloch’s vast survey … This is a sharply perceptive and beautifully organized book, lit by a delicious wit and identifying, amid the rich detail, large patterns of development and contrast’ 
Blair Worden, Sunday Telegraph

‘There are moments of sheer pleasure – unforced flashes of wit and unforgettable stories, such as those of the “miracle of the Puritan mice” in Boston in 1640 … MacCulloch’s well-paced style makes the book seem half its length’ 
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Sunday Times

‘MacCulloch’s declared aim is to describe the Reformation to a world which has largely forgotten or half-understood what it was about. He succeeds triumphantly’ 
Ian McIntyre, The Times, Books of the Year

‘A magisterial and eloquent book. Diarmaid MacCulloch is uniquely able to communicate the religious passions of the past to the unbelief and indifference of the present’ 
David Starkey

‘A blockbuster history … MacCulloch keeps the narrative fizzing with sharply observed detail and a sardonic wit … no other history of the Reformation covers so much, so authoritatively, and so entertainingly’ 
Eamon Duffy, BBC History Magazine

‘A marvel: lucid, humane, enormous, eloquent and alive’ 
Adam Nicolson, Evening Standard, Books of the Year

‘Superb … recounted as grippingly as a novel … MacCulloch brings the history of those upheavals, collectively known as the Reformation, into vivid focus, providing what must surely be the best general account available … He illustrates the deep reasons why people were prepared to kill and die over such matters as whether bread can metamorphose into God’ 
A. C. Grayling, Financial Times

Seeing Salvation in Church

Lurking in a little English country church, at Preston Bissett in Buckinghamshire, is an object lesson in the difficulty of understanding the religious outlook of past generations. Holding up the arch at the entrance to the chancel, the most sacred part of the church building, are two carved stone figures, sculpted sometime in the early fourteenth century. The figure on the north side, crouched on all fours under the weight of the arch, is displaying his ample buttocks towards the high altar, the place where, day-by-day before the Reformation, the priest of Preston presided at the Mass, transforming bread and wine into the flesh and blood of the crucified Christ. Some later vandal has knocked the head off the carving, as with countless other carvings in Protestant Europe, but the buttocks are unscathed.

It is easier to understand a Protestant sparing the buttocks - which would admirably convey what he or she thought of the miracle of the Mass - than to understand why they were carved in the first place. Preston Bissett's priest could hardly have avoided staring at them as he blessed the people at the end of Mass, before processing down the altar steps and out through the wooden screen which filled the chancel arch and hid the sculpture from his parishioners' eyes. The buttocks are too early to have been carved by a craftsman who was a Lollard, one of those religious dissidents who formed discreet communities in this part of England in the fifteenth century. Did the carving express the impatience which many devout people felt with their clergy when they did not perform their sacred task to public satisfaction? Was it meant to be a warning to a lazy or incompetent priest, or was it a private joke? Was it a symbol of Satan who sought to destroy the Church's proclamation of good news at God's altar?

Otherwise the meaning of the figure is now irrecoverable from a belief system where the physical and the spiritual were much more intimately, unexpectedly and exuberantly fused than they became in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. This was a religion where shouts of laughter as well as roars of rage were common in church, where the clergy waged a constant if perhaps sometimes half-hearted battle against the invasion of fun, entertainment and commerce into their church building. It was also a religion where death, and the cheating of death, mattered desperately. Preston Bissett's cheeky chancel arch sculpture was only one component in a spectacular and elaborate piece of church furniture at the chancel entrance that celebrated the mystery of the conquest of death: the Rood (the crucified figure of Christ), the screen on which it stood, and its Doom.

Another English parish church, Wenhaston in Suffolk, preserves a fine early sixteenth-century example of this Doom or last judgement by God, painted on boards that once filled the arch above the Rood screen. As the parishioners listened to the Latin of the Mass in the nave of their church, they would stare up at these pictures, but they would experience them as the backdrop to the most dramatic sculpture in their church, the body of Jesus Christ nailed to the cross, flanked by the grief-stricken standing figures of his mother Mary and his beloved disciple John, to whom the dying Jesus had entrusted his mother. Wenhaston's crowded composition is unbalanced now because image-hating Protestants have ripped away the Rood group and destroyed it, leaving only blank outlines against the painted boards, but around these ghosts of wood-carving the boards are crowded with naked figures, an array of graphically nude flesh that would be considered tasteless or improper if it appeared in the art of modern Western Christianity.

The naked were the souls of dead humanity, in the process of their judgement at the end of time. Some were marching into heaven, newly released from purging their sins in the trials of Purgatory, to enjoy eternal bliss. Others had been excluded by the grossness of their sin even from Purgatory pain, and were already suffering the unending torments of hell, tortured and terrified by demons. The vivid nakedness of these saved and damned souls may have prompted some in the congregation to lustful thoughts, whose foulness would have been a timely personal reminder of why that broken, almost-nude figure of a God made flesh was hanging there on the Cross. A fifteenth-century Buckinghamshire wall painting at Broughton, near enough Preston Bissett for people there to have seen it quite often, makes the same point in a different way: pictures of blasphemous, drunkards and gamblers surround the Virgin, cradling her dead son in her arms, each sin inflicting a fresh wound on the body of Jesus.

Jesus, the Christ or Messiah, son of God and son of Mary, had died in Palestine for human sin, in order to retrieve something from the wreckage of humanity's failure when Adam and Eve had disobeyed God in the Garden of Eden in the dawn of creation. At the Last Judgement, Christ risen from the dead, fully God and fully Word made human, still gloriously bearing the wounds of his crucifixion, decided the fates of all people: heaven or hell. The Church told the story without ceasing - in Wenhaston, in Preston Bissett, and throughout the churches of western Christendom. The whole drama of the Christian faith was built into this floor-to-ceiling ensemble of the Rood and Doom, extending from the jostle of the living worshippers in the nave of the church, through the array of the Church's saints in heaven painted on the rood-screen, up to the sacrifice of the dying Saviour, then finally to the life everlasting. Beyond it all, through what people called the chancel door of the screen, the priest busied himself with bringing the Saviour in physical form into the church at the high altar. The Rood figure of Christ showed the people the real, bodily presence of God, for it represented the broken body which lay in the round white wafer of bread in the priest's hands. As he held up the consecrated wafer and chalice of wine for the people to see, his assistant rang the church bell to tell the people outside the church building throughout his parish that the Church's work of representing them before God was done once more.

The people of Preston Bissett and Wenhaston knew (because their parish priest told them) that Christ had been nailed to the Rood in Palestine because the Jews hated him. Some of the more sceptical or reflective might have found it strange that their Saviour was also born a Jew, although the problem would hardly affect them personally. They had never seen a Jew, for back in 1290 King Edward I had expelled all the Jews from England, the first monarch in all Christian Europe to do so. The nearest contact they would have with a Jew would be in the caricature villains played on stage when their parish or a nearby town performed a play about the life and death of Christ. They had no chance of knowing the strange tangled history of the Christian Church: a small Jewish sect had separated out from all the other Jewish identities of first-century Palestine after it proclaimed its founder Jesus to be the Messiah whom all Jews sought. Over four centuries the little sect had grown into the Mediterranean-wide community which was Christianity, and after 312 CE it had grown powerful when it allied with the emperors of Rome. Judaism and Christianity were fully distinct from the end of the first century CE, and their relationship thereafter was tangled and often bitter: they shared a sacred book of Hebrew Scripture which Christians called their Old Testament. Christians could never forget their debt to the Jews, though they frequently resented it and turned their resentment into condemnation of the parent religion. They borrowed from the law contained in the Hebrew Scripture to suit themselves: they invented a distinction between moral, judicial and ceremonial law which was wholly absent from the intentions of the writers, labelling what they wanted to use as moral law, selecting at will from what they defined as judicial law, and relegating ceremonial law to Jewish history.

The greatest theologian of the western Church was a Roman intellectual born in the fourth century CE, Augustine of Hippo: we will be meeting him very often, for his thoughts decided much in the future thinking of Latin-speaking Christianity. Augustine puzzled about what Christians ought to think about Jews. Against Christian extremists, some of whom wanted to reject all the Hebrew Scripture, he strongly reaffirmed that God had chosen the Jews to be a special people; against Jews themselves, he thundered that they were blind in rejecting Christ as their Messiah. Augustine's generation of Christians was one of the first to enjoy the luxury of backing up its opinions with Roman military force. Should this force be directed against obstinate and offensive Jews in the same way as Augustine recommended that Christian rulers ought to put down obstinate and offensive Christian heretics? Augustine thought not. He decided that God had allowed the Jews to survive all the disasters in their history to act as a sign and a warning to Christians. Therefore they ought to be allowed to continue their community life, although without the full privileges of citizenship that Christians enjoyed: God only intended them to be converted en masse when he chose to bring the world to an end.

Accordingly, the Christian Church allowed Jewish communities to survive, while over centuries it destroyed all other religious competitors. Jews kept their own places of worship (synagogues) and they generally spoke the language of the people around them, particularly whatever language was spoken by the wealthy and powerful, reserving their ancestral Hebrew solely for worship and reading their sacred books. Although they thus sought to avoid standing out from the wider population, they were generally excluded from positions of power, which forced them to turn towards other ways of making a living, especially lending money. Most Christians understood the Old Testament to forbid taking of interest on money, and so generally kept away from this activity: Jews had a rather clearer grasp of the nuanced discussion of this subject in their sacred Scripture, and they stepped into the gap. This specialization in money-lending and credit made Jews useful to Christian rulers, yet constantly vulnerable to debtors turning on them: the consequences could be very serious for them if the ruler himself was a bad debtor, or saw a way of courting cheap popularity from his subjects. Hence the Jews' expulsion by Edward I of England, which was followed by similar action from the king of France in 1394.

Other rulers, including the Pope, were more steadfast observers of Augustine's rules in protecting the Jewish community, but there were constant outbursts of anti-Jewish feeling among Christians, often encouraged by local Church authorities. The most serious consequence was the growth in the twelfth century of an anti-Jewish 'blood-libel': a legend that from time to time groups of Jews kidnapped Christian children (usually male) and sadistically murdered them for use in their rituals; characteristically crucifixion was involved. Probably these stories reflected real incidents in which someone had indeed abused and murdered a child: when a local community could not face the horror of what had happened, they deflected the guilt on to the alien community in their midst. Sometimes the Church patently tried to profit from such incidents: the Benedictine monks of Norwich Cathedral in England, encouraged by their bishop, were pioneers in the blood-libel business when in the 1140s they tried to foster in their own church a cult of an alleged young victim of the Jews called William. Unfortunately for the monks, the good folk of Norwich loathed their cathedral more than they did the Jews, and the pilgrimage to little St William never amounted to much. Other cults were more successful, and the blood-libel has remained a recurring motif in the worst atrocities against the Jews.

Other Christian developments added to Jewish troubles. Francis of Assisi, that generous-hearted and anarchic preacher of God's love, started a great renewal movement in the thirteenth-century Church; in part it was institutionalised as the Franciscan Order of Friars, who did much to revive preaching in the western Church. Franciscan preachers urged the crowds who came to hear them to meditate devotionally on the earthly life of Christ. That had the logical consequence of making the faithful also think about the death of Christ on the Cross, and often this led directly to deep hatred of Jews. Franciscans thus ironically became major exponents of anti-Semitism in medieval western Europe and were deeply involved in some of the worst violence against Jewish communities; their fellow friars and rivals, the Dominicans, were not far behind. Not surprisingly, Jews tended to live together for safety, a trend which Christian rulers increasingly turned into an obligation: this developed early in Italy and the word 'ghetto' to describe such enclosed areas is of Italian origin, although there is more than one explanation of what it might originally have meant. Jewish physical isolation made matters worse, and bred new legends among a suspicious population: that the Jews were ready to poison Christian wells, for instance, steal consecrated eucharistic wafers to do them terrible indignities, or collaborate with the Muslim powers which threatened the borders of Christendom.

Already the meeting of art, drama, human fears and hopes in the unpretentious village churches of Preston Bissett and Wenhaston has sent us many hundreds of miles across Europe. That may help us understand the power and European-wide scope of the organization which tore itself apart in the sixteenth-century Reformation. Nicholas Ridley, one of the talented scholarly clergy who rebelled in England against the old Church, wrote about this to one of his fellow rebels John Bradford in 1554, while they both lay in prisons waiting for the old Church to burn them for heresy. As Bishop Ridley reflected on the strength of their deadly enemy, which now he saw as the power of the devil himself, he said that Satan's old world of false religion stood on two 'most massy posts and mighty pillars ... These two, sir, are they in my judgement: the one his false doctrine and idolatrical use of the Lord's supper; and the other, the wicked and abominable usurpation of the primacy of the see of Rome.' So just as Preston Bissett's chancel arch was supported by its two grotesque stone figures, the whole system of the medieval western Church was built on the Mass and on the central role of the Pope. Without the Mass, indeed, the Pope in Rome and the clergy of the Western Church would have had no power for the Protestant reformers to challenge, for the Mass was the centerpiece around which all the complex devotional life of the Church revolved. We must examine its significance at length, and in particular the doctrine of Purgatory; for Ridley, this would have been at the heart of the 'false doctrine' which distorted the Mass from its origins in the eucharistic meal.