Writings on the Reformation

All Things Made New

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, and has remained one of the most contested. In this dazzling book, Diarmaid MacCulloch explores a turbulent and endlessly fascinating era. 
 
'A masterly take on the Reformation ... absorbing and compelling, full of insights' Linda Hogan, Irish Times 
 
'One of our very best public historians ... as this collection triumphantly confirms, MacCulloch writes authoritatively and engagingly on a remarkably diverse range of topics in the history of Christian culture' Peter Marshall, Literary Review 
 
'Written with elegance and sometimes donnish wit ... he wears his learning lightly' Robert Tombs, The Times 
 
'Dazzling ... prodigiously learned ... MacCulloch has a gift for explaining complicated things simply' Jack Scarisbrick, Catholic Herald

MacCulloch not only brings a lifetime's learning to bear on his subject, but writes with vigour, empathy and wit ... about identity and memory, about the importance of myths and why historians need to challenge them.

All Things Made New is a serious book on a serious subject. It is written with elegance and sometimes donnish wit

MacCulloch is ... able to write authoritatively and engagingly on a remarkably diverse range of topics in the history of Christian culture and thought.

Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation

Tudor Church Militant

Edward VI died a teenager in 1553, yet his brief reign would shape the future of the nation, unleashing a Protestant revolution that propelled England into the heart of the Reformation. This dramatic account takes a fresh look at one of the most significant and turbulent periods in English history. 
 
'A challenging, elegant and persuasive biography of an unjustly neglected king' Jerry Brotton, author of This Orient Isle 
 
'MacCulloch puts the young Edward at the centre of the action ... as this excellent and lively study shows, his ghost continues to haunt the history of Anglicanism' Sunday Times 
 
'This is Reformation history as it should be written, not least because it resembles its subject matter: learned, argumentative, and, even when mistaken, never dull' Eamon Duffy, author of The Stripping of the Altars 
 
'One of the best historians writing in English today' Sunday Telegraph

A Christian History

Silence

This book unravels a polyphony of silences from the history of Christianity and beyond. MacCulloch considers Judaeo-Christian borrowings from Greek explorations of the divine, and the silences which were a feature of Jesus's brief ministry. Besides prayer and contemplation, there are shame and evasion; careless and purposeful forgetting. 
 
Many deliberate silences are revealed: the forgetting of histories inconvenient to later Church authorities, and Christianity's problems in dealing honestly with sexuality. Behind all this is the silence of God. In a deeply personal conclusion, MacCulloch brings a message of optimism for those still seeking God beyond the clamour of over-confident certainties.

The First Three Thousand Years

A History of Christianity

Christianity, one of the world's great religions, has had an incalculable impact on human history. This book, now the most comprehensive and up to date single volume work in English, describes not only the main ideas and personalities of Christian history, its organisation and spirituality, but how it has changed politics, sex, and human society. 
 
Diarmaid MacCulloch ranges from Palestine in the first century to India in the third, from Damascus to China in the seventh century and from San Francisco to Korea in the twentieth. He is one of the most widely travelled of Christian historians and conveys a sense of place as arrestingly as he does the power of ideas. He presents the development of Christian history differently from any of his predecessors. He shows how, after a semblance of unity in its earliest centuries, the Christian church divided during the next 1400 years into three increasingly distanced parts, of which the western Church was by no means always the most important: he observes that at the end of the first eight centuries of Christian history, Baghdad might have seemed a more likely capital for worldwide Christianity than Rome. This is the first truly global history of Christianity.

Diarmaid MacCulloch's epic, acclaimed history A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years follows the story of Christianity around the globe, from ancient Palestine to contemporary China. 
 
 How did an obscure personality cult come to be the world's biggest religion, with a third of humanity its followers? This book, now the most comprehensive and up to date single volume work in English, describes not only the main facts, ideas and personalities of Christian history, its organization and spirituality, but how it has changed politics, sex, and human society. 
 
 Taking in wars, empires, reformers, apostles, sects, churches and crusaders, Diarmaid MacCulloch shows how Christianity has brought humanity to the most terrible acts of cruelty - and inspired its most sublime accomplishments. 
 
 'A stunning tour de force' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Simon Sebag Montefiore, Sunday Telegraph Books of the Year 
 
 'A landmark in its field, astonishing in its range, compulsively readable, full of insight ... It will have few, if any, rivals in the English language' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, Guardian 
 
 'A prodigious, thrilling, masterclass of a history book' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;John Cornwell, Financial Times 
 
 'Essential reading for those enthralled by Christianity and for those enraged by it' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Melvyn Bragg, Observer, Books of the Year 
 
 'Magnificent ... a sumptuous portrait, alive with detail and generous in judgement' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Richard Holloway, The Times 
 
 Diarmaid MacCulloch is Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University. His Thomas Cranmer won the Whitbread Biography Prize, the James Tait Black Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize. He is the author most recently of Reformation: Europe's House Divided 1490 - 1700, which won the Wolfson Prize for History and the British Academy Prize.

Europe's House Divided 1490-1700

Reformation

The Reformation was the seismic event in European history over the past 1000 years, and one which tore the medieval world apart. Not just European religion, but thought, culture, society, state systems, personal relations - everything - was turned upside down. Just about everything which followed in European history can be traced back in some way to the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation which it provoked. The Reformation is where the modern world painfully and dramatically began, and MacCulloch's great history of it is recognised as the best modern account.

The definitive history of the most important event in European history between the fall of the Roman Empire and the French Revolution is coming in paperback.

'A masterpiece ... In its field it is the best book ever' Guardian 
 
Winner of the Wolfson Prize for history, Reformation: Europe's House Divided 1490-1700 charts a seismic shift in European culture that marked the beginning of the modern world. 
 
 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 Martin Luther nailing his Theses to the door of a Wittenburg church to the radical Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order; from Thomas Cranmer, martyred for his reforms, to the ambitious Philip II, unwavering in his campaign against Europe's 'heretics'. 
 
 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. 
 
 'Magisterial and eloquent' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;David Starkey 
 
 'A triumph of human sympathy' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;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' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Noel Malcolm, Sunday Telegraph Books of the Year 
 
 'Monumental ... Reformation is set to become a landmark' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Lisa Jardine, Observer 
 
 Diarmaid MacCulloch is Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University. His Thomas Cranmer won the Whitbread Biography Prize, the James Tait Black Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize. He is also the author of A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years.

A History

Sex and the Church

Diarmaid MacCulloch

A Life

A SUNDAY TIMES, THE TIMES, DAILY TELEGRAPH, SPECTATOR, FINANCIAL TIMES, GUARDIAN, BBC HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR 
 
'This is the biography we have been awaiting for 400 years' Hilary Mantel 
'A masterpiece' Dan Jones, Sunday Times 
 
Thomas Cromwell is one of the most famous - or notorious - figures in English history. Born in obscurity in Putney, he became a fixer for Cardinal Wolsey in the 1520s. After Wolsey's fall, Henry VIII promoted him to a series of ever greater offices, and by the end of the 1530s he was effectively running the country for the King. That decade was one of the most momentous in English history: it saw a religious break with the Pope, unprecedented use of parliament, the dissolution of all monasteries. Cromwell was central to all this, but establishing his role with precision, at a distance of nearly five centuries and after the destruction of many of his papers at his own fall, has been notoriously difficult. 
 
Diarmaid MacCulloch's biography is much the most complete and persuasive life ever written of this elusive figure, a masterclass in historical detective work, making connections not previously seen. It overturns many received interpretations, for example that Cromwell was a cynical, 'secular' politician without deep-felt religious commitment, or that he and Anne Boleyn were allies because of their common religious sympathies - in fact he destroyed her. It introduces the many different personalities of these foundational years, all conscious of the 'terrifyingly unpredictable' Henry VIII. MacCulloch allows readers to feel that they are immersed in all this, that it is going on around them. 
 
For a time, the self-made 'ruffian' (as he described himself) - ruthless, adept in the exercise of power, quietly determined in religious revolution - was master of events. MacCulloch's biography for the first time reveals his true place in the making of modern England and Ireland, for good and ill.

Diarmaid MacCulloch

Thomas Cromwell

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