The Reformation (2003); or, Religious Change in Early Modern Europe from a Safe Distance

Patrick Collinson's The Reformation (2003) was written for the audience of a new century, where a Christian heritage in which the Reformation necessarily mattered could not be taken as read. This essay explores how Collinson sought to present the Reformation as a single entity, with a Weberian emphasis on Luther as a charismatic intervention in history at its starting point. He establishes a relationship of distance between the Reformation and modernity by incorporating the historiography of the subject into our understanding of it. He also underlines the inner dynamic of relationships between ideas and the cultural and material landscape in which they took root and had meaning. It is not surprising, perhaps, given the focus of his scholarship, that it should emphasize a British exceptionalism. More surprising is how it fails to come to terms with the radical divisiveness, violence and destructiveness of the Reformation experience

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Charisma · Epistemology · Exceptionalism · Historiography · Meaning (existential · Modernity · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · History · Law · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity