C raig H arline . A World Ablaze

Historical scholarship can pride itself that it keeps pouring out books about topics that interest a wider public and that are written in a language and have a makeup that will be accessible and a good read for the layperson outside academia just as well as for the specialist. Both volumes in question—Craig Harline’s A World Ablaze and Richard Rex’s The Making of Martin Luther—serve that goal, no matter what individual points of critique are contained in this review. They also address a fundamental question, and at least indirectly respond to it in a revisionist way: Was there a long-term process of reform and reformation—to which Luther, Calvin, and many others surely decisively contributed—but that would have happened in some fashion anyway and was long under way when they contributed? Or did Luther, by reshaping during a crucial moment the reform debate with his “revolutionary new vision” (Rex, ix), transform existing rumblings and thus set the “world ablaze” (as Harline’s evocative title suggests)? The emphasis of both books is on the latter notion. Read in conjunction, they should become indispensable in undergraduate teaching and, to an extent, graduate reflection.

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