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Two bricks. The Reformation: A History Diarmaid MacCulloch. Covers the three hundred years of (mostly) European history where the Latin church fractured under the strain of its own theological faults and fissures. I was raised a catholic, which of course means I know almost nothing about the church and its history. I can see why they don't stress that history: it's not inherently exciting, except for the parts that are morally dubious. But the author's writing is great, and made the abstract theological issues come to life for me: now I know what a Protestant is and why they are Protestants. One of the backdrops to this story that I never really knew was the millennial fever that consumed Europe between 1500-1600: since people assumed they were living in the last days, this gave theological issues much more urgency, and really amped up the differences between people on what seem to me to be incredibly minor theological points (one result is the re-admittance of Jews into England, since the Protestants there believed in the prophesy that the second coming was preceded by the conversion of the Jews—this makes Pat Robertson slightly more intelligible to me). The differences between Rome and the Protestants came down to the question of ultimate authority: church or bible. But the manifestations of this difference were strange, particularly to a modern areligious reader: quote:Few people in modern Europe now understand how urgent these arguments were in the sixteenth century. That urgency gave rise to what has been called 'theological road rage,' and we have viewed many of the dire consequences. Europeans were prepared to burn and torture each other because they disagreed on whether, or how, bread and wine were transformed into God, or about the sense in which Jesus Christ could be both divine and human. We have no right to adopt an attitude of intellectual or emotional superiority, especially in the light of the atrocities that twentieth-century Europe produced because of its faith in newer, secular ideologies. Anxiety and a sense of imperfection seem to be basic components of being human, for those of no religion as well as the religious. Some continue to call the answer to these miseries by the name of God. God's War: A New History of the Crusades by Christopher Tyerman Something like a thousand pages covering the 500 years when some Europeans felt the need to go and fight heretics, not just in the Levant, but also Spain, the Balkans, Poland, Scandinavia, and wherever these heathens threatened the Latin church by their very existence. The author stresses that these Catholics were probably driven mostly by sincere religious piety (not just avarice and the desire for excitement), contradicting some historians who claim that crusades were driven by laterborn sons in search of land and treasure and bloodthirst. What a difference the author's writing style makes. The canvas of both of these books span centuries and continents and generations of people, but if you had to choose one whose subject alone was more likely to produce the more exciting narrative, you'd have to go with the book about the crusades, right? Knights, pilgrimages, sieges, huge battles, what could be better? Unfortunately, the author just cannot commit to a good narrative style: he insists on shooting himself in the foot by giving a summary of the upcoming action before going into the description, thereby robbing it of any suspense as to the outcome. I have no idea why he does this, but it drove me insane. Contrast that to The Reformation, a book about potentially boring poo poo that was made into a great read through the author's use of dry humor and irony and commitment to a clear narrative, even though the story itself is not based on people but ideas. This was 800 pages of people discussing antinomianism and transubstantiation and it just flew by.
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man
