A Religious Revolution: The Protestant Reformation: Volume 1

A Religious Revolution: The Protestant Reformation is the fourth installment in Henri Daniel-Rops’ magnificent History of the Church of Christ. This volume includes the first four chapters of that work, examining the triple crisis in the Church—of authority, as the scandal of the antipopes leads to the Great Western Schism; of unity, as the Hundred Years War, the chaos of famine and plague, and the fall of Byzantium spell the disintegration of Christendom; and of spirit, as moral decay and intellectual decline find no effective remedy in erratic reforms—and the dazzling duality of the Renaissance: glorious genius of artistic, literary, and scientific achievement alongside exuberant sensuality verging upon debauchery. In this grand tapestry stand the figures of Sts. Catherine of Siena and Joan of Arc; John Wycliffe and John Huss; St. Colette and Savonarola; and the Renaissance popes: Nicholas V, Alexander VI, and Leo X.
A superb presentation of the tumultuous years of 1350–1564, A Religious Revolution: The Protestant Reformation brings to life an epoch in which “everything everywhere was changing and falling apart; systems opposed systems, new dogmatisms clash with old; rigid formulae only half conceal uncertainty and anguish; the whole of human activity held increasingly fast in the grip of an indefinable kind of agonizing fermentation.”