Reformation Unbound

This is a smart book. Published as part of the ‘Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History’ series, this monograph is Karl Gunther’s first. Many first books can be (fairly or unfairly) criticised for being somewhat narrow in scope, a common consequence of the process of researching and writing a doctoral thesis on a tightly defined topic. This book is physically rather slim and unassuming, but its intellectual horizons are extremely broad, for it sets within its ambitious sights nothing less than a reinterpretation of many of the central themes and episodes which define our understanding of the English Reformation itself. Gunther manages this not by uncovering a new cache of previously unknown source material, or through interdisciplinary, methodological or theoretical innovation, but simply by inviting us to look afresh at a fairly limited corpus of texts, most of which are already extremely well known to English Reformation historians. In many ways the experience of reading Reformation Unbound is rather like staring at the famous optical illusion whereby what has resolutely up until now appeared to be a candlestick suddenly resolves itself into the silhouettes of two faces in profile, leaving you wondering what has happened to the candlestick, and whether it was ever really there in the first place

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Linguistics · Literature · Nothing · Protestantism · Reading (process · Reinterpretation · Theology · Vision · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Religious studies · Scottish History and National Identity · Religious Studies