Dictionary of Meaning
<<Back
Please select a letter:
A |
B |
C |
D |
E |
F |
G |
H |
I |
J |
K |
L |
M |
N |
O |
P |
Q |
R |
S |
T |
U |
V |
W |
X |
Y |
Z |
0-9
Click here for Shopping
Protestant reformation
*** Shopping-Tip: Protestant reformation
: ''The word
Reformation links here. For other uses of the term, please see
Reformation (disambiguation).''
{{Christianity}}
The '''Protestant Reformation''' was a movement which emerged in the 16th century as a series of attempts to reform the
Roman Catholic Church in
Western Europe. The main front of the reformation was started by
Martin Luther and his
95 Theses promulgated. In late
October of
1517 he posted these Theses to the local bulletin board— The Church Door and in
November he mailed them to various Religious Authorities of the Day. The reformation ended in division and the establishment of new institutions, most importantly
Lutheranism, the
Reformed churches, and
Anabaptists, a radical branch whose name means "those who baptize again". It also led to the
Counter-Reformation within the Roman Catholic Church, which theological draft and background were drawn up with the Council of Trent (1548–1563), when Rome struck back against the fundamental ideas defended by the Reformers, like Luther. The rift between Catholics and Protestants would lead to the break up of large European empires into the modern nation-state system.
History and origins
{{seealso|History of Protestantism}}
Roots and precursors: 14th century and 15th century
* Anti-hierarchical movements:
Catharism,
Waldensianism, and others
*
Avignon Papacy ("Babylonian Captivity of the Church"),
Avignon,
Western Schism Great Schism,
Guelphs and Ghibellines
*
John Huss,
John Wycliffe,
William Tyndale
*
Northern Renaissance
Unrest in the Western Church and Empire culminating in the
Avignon Papacy (
1308–
1378), and the
papal schism (
1378–
1416), excited wars between princes, uprisings among the peasants, and widespread concern over corruption in the monastic system. A new
nationalism also challenged the relatively internationalist medieval world.
One of the most disruptive and radical of the new perspectives came first from
John Wycliffe at
Oxford University, then from
John Huss at the
University of Prague. The Roman Catholic Church officially concluded this debate at the
Council of Constance (
1414–
1418). The conclave condemned Jan Hus, who was executed (he had come under a promise of safe-conduct) and posthumously burned Wycliffe as a
heresy heretic.
Constance confirmed and strengthened the traditional medieval conception of church and empire. It did not address the national tensions, or the theological tensions which had been stirred up during the previous century. The council could not prevent
schism and the
Hussite Wars in
Bohemia.
Image:95Thesen.jpg thumb|300px|Luther's 95 Theses
Historical upheaval usually yields a lot of new thinking as to how society should be organized. This was the case leading up to the Protestant Reformation. Following the breakdown of monastic institutions and
scholasticism in late medieval Europe, accentuated by the ‘
Babylonian Captivity’ of the
Avignon Papacy, the
Western Schism Great Schism, and the failure of conciliar reform, the sixteenth century saw the fermenting of a great cultural debate about religious reforms and later fundamental religious values. Historians would generally assume that the failure to reform (too many vested interests, lack of coordination in the reforming coalition) would eventually lead to a greater upheaval or even revolution, since the system must eventually be adjusted or disintegrate, and the failure of the Conciliar movement led to the Protestant Reformation in the European West. These frustrated reformist movements ranged from
nominalism, modern devotion, to
humanism occurring in conjunction with economic, political and demographic forces that contributed to a growing disaffection with the wealth and power of the
elite clergy, sensitizing the population to the financial and moral corruption of the secular
Renaissance church.
The outcome of the
Black Death encouraged a radical reorganization of the economy, and eventually of European society. In the emerging urban centers, however, the calamities of the fourteenth and early fifteenth century, and the resultant labor shortages, provided a strong impetus for economic diversification and technological innovations. Following the
Black Death, the initial loss of life due to famine, plague, and pestilence contributed to an intensification of capital accumulation in the urban areas, and thus a stimulus to trade, industry, and burgeoning urban growth in fields as diverse as banking (the
Fugger banking family in
Augsburg and the
Medici family of
Florence being the most prominent); textiles,
Weapon armaments, especially stimulated by the
Hundred Years War, and mining of iron ore due, in large part, to the booming armaments industry. Accumulation of surplus, competitive
overproduction, and heightened competition to maximize economic advantage, contributed to civil war, aggressive
militarism, and thus to centralization. As a direct result of the move toward centralization, leaders like
Louis XI of France (1461-1483), the “spider king,� sought to remove all constitutional restrictions on the exercise of their authority. In
England,
France, and
Spain the move toward centralization begun in the thirteenth century was carried to a successful conclusion.
But as recovery and prosperity progressed, enabling the population to reach its former levels in the late '''fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,''' the combination of both a newly-abundant labor supply as well as improved productivity, were 'mixed blessings' for many segments of Western European society. Despite tradition, landlords started the move to exclude
peasants from '
common lands'. With trade stimulated, landowners increasingly moved away from the
Manorialism manorial economy. Woolen manufacturing greatly expanded in
France,
Germany, and the
Netherlands and new textile industries began to develop.
The 'humanism' of the
Renaissance period stimulated unprecedented academic ferment, and a concern for
academic freedom. Ongoing, earnest theoretical debates occurred in the universities about the nature of the church, and the source and extent of the authority of the papacy, of councils, and of princes.
16th century
*
Martin Luther,
Johann Tetzel,
Philipp Melanchthon,
Indulgences, ''
95 Theses'',
Nicolaus Von Amsdorf
*''
Exsurge Domine'',
Diet of Worms (
1521),
Peasants' War
*
Huldrych Zwingli and
Zürich
*
John Calvin and
Geneva
*
John Knox and
Scotland
*Radical Reformers —
Thomas Muentzer Müntzer,
Anabaptists,
Menno Simons
*Reformation in
France —
Huguenots,
Pierre Viret
Image:Luther_with_tonsure.gif thumb|right|Martin Luther
Protestants generally trace their separation from the Roman Catholic Church to the
16th century, which is sometimes called the ''magisterial Reformation'' because the movement received support from the magistrates, the ruling authorities (as opposed to the ''radical Reformation'', which had no state sponsorship). The protest erupted suddenly, in many places at once but particularly in Germany, during a time of threatened
Islamic invasion
#Footnotes ¹ which distracted German princes in particular. To some degree, the protest can be explained by the events of the previous two centuries in Western Europe.
The protest began in earnest when
Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk and professor at the University of
Wittenberg, called in
1517 for reopening of debate on the sale of
indulgences. Tradition holds that he nailed his
95 theses to the door of the Wittenberg Castle's Church, which served as a pin board for university-related announcements. Luther's dissent marked a sudden outbreak with new and irresistible force of discontent which had been pushed underground but not resolved; the quick spread of discontent occurred to a large degree because of the
printing press and the resulting swift movement of both ideas and documents (such as the 95 Theses).
The Reformation foundations engaged with Augustinianism. Both Luther and Calvin thought along lines linked with the theological teachings of
Augustine of Hippo. The Augustinianism of the Reformers struggled against
Pelagianism, a heresy which they thought they perceived in the Catholic church of their day.
image:Ulrich_Zwingli.jpg thumb|left|Ulrich Zwingli
Parallel to events in Germany, a movement began in Switzerland under the leadership of
Huldrych Zwingli. These two movements quickly agreed on most issues, as the recently introduced
printing press spread ideas rapidly from place to place, but some unresolved differences kept them separate. Some followers of Zwingli believed that the Reformation was too conservative, and moved independently toward more radical positions, some of which survive among modern day
Anabaptists. Other Protestant movements grew up along lines of mysticism or humanism (
cf. Erasmus), sometimes breaking from Rome or from the Protestants, or forming outside of the churches.
After this first stage of the Reformation, following the
excommunication of Luther and condemnation of the Reformation by the Pope, the work and writings of
John Calvin were influential in establishing a loose consensus among various groups in Switzerland, Scotland, Hungary, Germany and elsewhere. The separation of the
Church of England from Rome under
Henry VIII of England Henry VIII, beginning in
1529 and completed in
1536, brought England alongside this broad Reformed movement. However, religious changes in the English national church proceeded more conservatively than elsewhere in Europe. Reformers in the Church of England alternated, for centuries, between sympathies for catholic traditions and Protestantism, progressively forging a stable compromise between adherence to ancient tradition and Protestantism, which is now sometimes called the
via media, and which was in effect abandoned at the decision in the 1990s to ordain women.
Humanism to Protestantism
The frustrated reformism of the humanists, ushered in by the
Renaissance, contributed to a growing impatience among reformers.
Erasmus and later figures like
Martin Luther Luther and
Zwingli would emerge from this debate and eventually contribute to the second major schism of Christendom. Unfortunately for the church, the crisis of theology beginning with
William of Ockham in the fourteenth century was occurring in conjunction with the new
burgher discontent. Since the breakdown of the
philosophy philosophical foundations of
scholasticism, the new
nominalism did not bode well for an institutional church legitimized as an intermediary between man and God. New thinking favored the notion that no religious
doctrine can be supported by philosophical arguments, eroding the old alliance between
reason and
faith of the medieval period laid out by
Thomas Aquinas.
image: Hans Holbein d. J. 047.jpg thumb|right|Erasmus
The major individualistic reform movements that revolted against medieval scholasticism and the institutions that underpinned it were:
humanism,
devotionalism, and the observatine tradition. In
Germany, “the modern way� or devotionalism caught on in the universities, requiring a redefinition of God, who was no longer a rational governing principle but an arbitrary, unknowable will that cannot be limited. God was now an unknowable absolute ruler, and religion would be more fervent and emotional. Thus, the ensuing revival of
Augustinian theology, stating that man cannot be saved by his own efforts but only by the grace of God, would erode the legitimacy of the rigid institutions of the church meant to provide a channel for man to do good works and get into
heaven. Humanism, however, was more of an educational reform movement with origins in the
Renaissance's revival of
classical education classical learning and thought. A revolt against
Aristotle Aristotelian logic, it placed great emphasis on reforming individuals through eloquence as opposed to reason. The European Renaissance laid the foundation for the Northern humanists in its reinforcement of the traditional use of
Latin as the great unifying
cultural language.
The polarization the scholarly community in Germany over the
Johannes Reuchlin Reuchlin (1455-1522) affair, attacked by the elite clergy for his study of
Biblical Hebrew language Hebrew and Jewish texts, brought Luther fully in line with the humanist educational reforms who favored
academic freedom. At the same time, the impact of the Renaissance would soon backfire against Southern Europe, also ushering in an age of reform and a repudiation of much of medieval Latin tradition. Led by Erasmus, the humanists condemned various forms of corruption within the Church, forms of corruption that might not have been any more prevalent than during the medieval zenith of the church.
Erasmus held that true religion was a matter of inward devotion rather than an outward symbol of ceremony and ritual. Going back to ancient texts, scriptures, from this viewpoint the greatest culmination of the ancient tradition, are the guides to life. Favoring
morality moral reforms and de-emphasizing
didactic literature didactic ritual, Erasmus laid the groundwork for Luther.
Humanism's intellectual
anti-clericalism would profoundly influence Luther. The increasingly well-educated
middle class middle sectors of Northern Germany, namely the educated community and city dwellers would turn to Luther's rethinking of religion to conceptualize their discontent according to the cultural medium of the era. The great rise of the burghers, the desire to run their new businesses free of institutional barriers or outmoded cultural practices, contributed to the appeal of humanist
individualism. To many,
pope papal institutions were rigid, especially regarding their views on just price and
usury. In the North burghers and monarchs were united in their frustration for not paying any
tax taxes to the nation, but collecting taxes from
Citizenship subjects and sending the revenues disproportionately to the Pope in
Italy.
These trends heightened demands for significant reform and revitalization along with anticlericalism. New thinkers began noticing the divide between the priests and the flock. The clergy, for instance, were not always well-educated. Parish priests often did not know
Latin and rural parishes often did not have great opportunities for theological education for many at the time. Due to its large landholdings and institutional rigidity, a rigidity to which the excessively large ranks of the clergy contributed, many
bishops studied
law, not theology, being relegated to the role of property managers trained in administration. While priests emphasized works of religiosity, the respectability of the church began diminishing, especially among well educated
urbanites, and especially considering the recent strings of political humiliation, such as the apprehension of
Pope Boniface VIII by
Philip IV of France, the “Babylonian Captivity,� the
Western Schism Great Schism, and the failure of Conciliar reformism. In a sense, the campaign by
Pope Leo X to raise funds to rebuild the
Saint Peter's Basilica St. Peter's Basilica was too much of an excess by the secular
Renaissance church, prompting the high-pressure sale of
indulgences that rendered the clerical establishments even more disliked in the cities.
Luther, taking the revival of the
Augustinian notion of
salvation by faith alone to new levels, borrowed from the humanists the sense of individualism, that each man can be his own priest (an attitude likely to find popular support considering the rapid rise of an educated urban middle class in the North), and that the only true authority is the
Bible, echoing the reformist zeal of the
Conciliar movement and opening up the debate once again on limiting the authority of the Pope. While his ideas called for the sharp redefinition of the dividing lines between the
laity and the clergy, his ideas were still, by this point, reformist in nature. Luther's contention that the human will was incapable of following good, however, resulted in his rift with Erasmus finally distinguishing Lutheran reformism from
humanism.
Religious influences for the Reformation
While there were some parallels between certain movements within humanism and teachings later common among the Reformers, the Reformation's principal arguments were based on "direct" Biblical interpretation. The Roman Catholic Church had for several centuries been the main purveyor in
Europe of non-secular humanism: the neo-Platonism of the scholastics and the neo-Aristotelianism of Thomas Aquinas and his followers had made humanism a part of Church
dogma. This was of course due to the Catholic Church's use of historic, religious tradition (including the
Canonization of
Saints) in the forming of its
liturgy. Thus, when Luther and the other reformers adopted the standard of ''sola scriptura'', making the Bible the sole measure of theology, that made the Reformation a reaction against the humanism of that time. Previously, the Scriptures had been seen as the pinnacle of a hierarchy of sacred texts.
Luther himself had been trained as a professor of the Bible and was teaching Bible at the
University of Wittenberg when the Bible changed him. He later lamented that he wished he had learned the Bible earlier instead of spending so much time studying classical humanistic authors such as
Plato and
Aristotle. It appears that he was not familiar with the writings of earlier people who called for reformation, for example, he did not know the teachings of
Jan Hus until he was introduced to them by a taunt from
Johann Eck that he was teaching the same doctrines.
The Protestants emphasized such concepts as Justification by "faith alone" (not faith and good works or infused righteousness), "Scripture alone" (the Bible as the sole rule of faith, rather than the Bible plus Tradition), "the priesthood of all believers" (eschewing the special authority and power of the Roman Catholic sacramental priesthood), that all people are individually responsible for their status before God such that talk of mediation through any but Christ alone is unbiblical. Because they saw these teachings as stemming from the Bible, they encouraged publication of the Bible in the common language and universal
education, for how can people avail themselves of the knowledge of their salvation without the ability to read the Bible?
Part of the revolt was an
Iconoclasm#Reformation iconoclasm iconoclasm, seen in John Calvin and Huldrych Zwingli, but particularly amongst the radical reformers. Iconoclastic riots took place in Zürich (in 1523), Copenhagen (1530), Münster (1534), Geneva (1535), Augsburg (1537) and Scotland (1559).
The Reformation did not happen in a vacuum, as there were movements for centuries calling for a return to Biblical teachings, the most famous being from Wyclif and Jan Hus. It is no surprise that their teachings were later found in the Reformation, as they imbibed from the same source.
While it is true that there were calls for religious and doctrinal and moral reformation within and without the institutional church for centuries, apparently it was the invention of the
printing press which allowed quick broadcasting of ideas, the rise in nationalistic fervor, the increasing availability of the Bible to the public, and popular discontent at the moral corruption in the church to coalesce in support for a reformation as never before. But the spark that started the Reformation and keeps it going even today is the doctrinal issues brought up by the Holy Bible.
The Radical Reformation
{{Main|Radical Reformation}}
Unskilled laborers and peasants recently squeezed from the countryside embraced the most radical theological options opened up by the religious revolution. Peasants and new migrants to the cities had little understanding of
economics, so they had no understanding of the increasingly discredited
just price concept and the influence of
capitalism and
mercantilist mercantilism. They believed that higher prices were the result of unjust, parasitic, and immoral behavior.
Discontented and morally righteous, the lower classes were ready to follow leaders, who urged them to band together against immorality and decadence. They preached against landowners who took control of increasing areas, kings centralizing control and princes looking for increased tax revenues to fund their growing states.
The disadvantaged peasantry turned to radical leaders, to people like the
Drummer of Niklashausen and later the
Anabaptist preachers. Many of the Anabaptist preachers belonged to the peasant and laboring class.
The Anabaptists and other radical leaders were condemned by the Lutherans and nationalistic Germans. Nearly every country in Europe saw a flare up of failed peasant revolts motivated by religious concerns and executed according to religious doctrine. The Hungarian Peasants' War(1514), the revolt against
Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in
Spain (
1520), the discontent of the lower classes in
France with the excessive taxes levied by
Louis XI of France Louis XI, and the secret associations which prepared the way for the great
Peasants' War of the lower classes in Germany (1524), show that discontent was not confined to any one country in Europe.
Lutheranism adopted by the German territorial princes
Luther, like Erasmus, in the beginning favored maintaining the bishops as an elite class for administrative purposes, though he denied that their succession from the Apostles gave their consecration any special sacramental value. And while Luther rejected many of the Catholic
sacraments, as well as salvation by grace alone through both faith and good works (as opposed to the Protestant "faith alone") and indulgences, he firmly upheld the sacraments of
Baptism and the
Eucharist. Luther favored a reformed theology of the
Eucharist called
consubstantiation, a doctrine of the presence of Christ in the Eucharist which depended on the faith of the congregation. Traditionally, the consecrated bread and wine were held to become, substantially, the body and blood of Christ (
transubstantiation). Transubstantiation was most fully spelled out by the medieval scholastics, who agreed that the elements, once consecrated, remained the body and blood of Christ and could be worshipped as such. According to the doctrine of consubstantiation, the substances of the body and the blood of Christ and of the bread and the wine were held to coexist together in the consecrated Host during the communion service. However, any consecrated bread or wine left over would revert to its former state the moment the service ended.
Luther, along with his colleague
Philipp Melanchthon, emphasized this point in his plea for the Reformation at the ''
Reichstag (institution) Reichstag'' in
1529 amid charges of
heresy. But the changes he proposed were of such a fundamental nature that by their own logic they would automatically overthrow the old order; neither the Emperor nor the Church could possibly accept them, as Luther well knew. As was only to be expected, the edict by the
Diet of Worms (1521) prohibited all innovations. Meanwhile, in these efforts to retain the guise of a Catholic reformer as opposed to a heretical revolutionary, and to appeal to German princes with his religious condemnation of the peasant revolts backed up by the
Doctrine of the Two Kingdoms, Luther's growing conservatism would provoke more radical reformers.
At a religious conference with the Zwinglians in
1529, Melanchthon joined with Luther in opposing a union with
Zwingli. There would finally be a schism in the reform movement due to Luther's belief in
consubstantiation—the real (as opposed to symbolic) presence of Christ at the Eucharist. His original intention was not schism, but with the ''
Reichstag (institution) Reichstag'' of Augsburg (1530) a separate Lutheran church finally emerged. In a sense, Luther would take theology further in its deviation from established Catholic dogma, forcing a rift between the humanist Erasmus and Luther. Similarly, Zwingli would further repudiate ritualism, and break with the increasingly conservative Luther.
While it would be an understatement to state that
Erasmus,
Martin Luther Luther,
Zwingli, and
Melanchthon regarded the fundamental theological questions quite seriously, their followers tended to split along socio-economic lines. Luther found great support from the new bourgeoisie in Germany's urban centers to overthrow the power of the landowning aristocracy and the Latin clergy, rooted in their control of land and peasant labor, which were the central means of production of the time. And up-and-coming merchants, not yet part of the ruling elite, rallied to Luther's cause. Zwingli, however, appealed to poorer segments of society who lacked the stake in German proto-nationalism among the ambitious, consolidating princes and the new bourgeoisie.
Aside from the enclosing of the lower classes, the middle sectors of Northern Germany, namely the educated community and city dwellers, would turn to religion to conceptualize their discontent according to the cultural medium of the era. The great rise of the burghers, the desire to run their new businesses free of institutional barriers or outmoded cultural practices contributed to the appeal of individualism. To many, papal institutions were rigid, especially regarding their views on just price and
usury. In the North, burghers and monarchs were united in their frustration for not paying any taxes to the nation, but collecting taxes from subjects and sending the revenues disproportionately to Italy. In Northern Europe Luther appealed to the growing national consciousness of the German states because he denounced the Pope for involvement in politics as well as religion. Moreover, he backed the nobility, which was now justified to crush the Great Peasant Revolt of
1525 and to confiscate church property by Luther's
Doctrine of the Two Kingdoms. This explains the attraction of some territorial princes to Lutheranism, especially its Doctrine of the Two Kingdoms. However, the Elector of Brandenburg, Joachim I, blamed Lutheranism for the revolt and so did others. In Brandenburg, it was only under his successor Joachim II that Lutheranism was established, and the old religion was not formally extinct in Brandenburg until the death of the last Catholic bishop there, Georg
von Blumenthal, who was Bishop of Lebus and sovereign Prince-Bishop of Ratzeburg.
With the church subordinate to and the agent of civil authority and peasant rebellions condemned on strict religious terms, Lutheranism and German nationalist sentiment were ideally suited to coincide.
Though
Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V fought the reformation, it is no coincidence either that the reign of his nationalistic predecessor
Maximilian I saw the beginning of the Reformation. While the centralized states of western Europe had reached accords with the Vatican permitting them to draw on the rich property of the church for government expenditures, enabling them to form state churches that were greatly autonomous of Rome, similar moves on behalf of the Reich were unsuccessful so long as princes and prince bishops fought reforms to drop the pretension of the secular universal empire.
English Reformation
{{main|English Reformation}}
Political Reformation
The course of the Reformation was different in England. There had long been a strong strain of anti-clericalism, and England had already given rise to the
Lollardy Lollard movement, which had inspired the
Hussites in
Bohemia. By the 1520s, however, the Lollards were not an active force, or, at least, certainly not a mass movement. The different character of the English Reformation came rather from the fact that it was driven initially by the political necessities of
Henry VIII of England Henry VIII. Henry had once been a sincere Catholic and had even authored a book strongly criticizing Luther, but he later found it expedient and profitable to break with the Papacy. In
1534 '''The
Act of Supremacy''' made Henry Supreme Head of the Church of England. Between
1535 and
1540, under
Thomas Cromwell, the policy known as the
Dissolution of the Monasteries was put into effect. The veneration of
Saints, pilgrimages and pilgrim shrines were also attacked. Huge amounts of church land and property passed into the hands of the crown and ultimately into those of the nobility and gentry. The vested interest thus created made for a powerful force in support of the dissolutions.
There were many notable opponents to the
Henrician Reformation, such as
Thomas More and Bishop
John Fisher, who were executed for their opposition. But there was also a growing party of Protestants who were imbued with the Zwinglian and Calvinistic doctrines now current on the Continent. When Henry died he was succeeded by his Protestant son
Edward VI, who ordered the destruction of images in churches, and the closing of the
chantry chantries. Following a brief Roman Catholic reaction during the reign of
Mary I of England Mary 1553-
1558, a loose consensus developed during the reign of
Elizabeth I of England Elizabeth I, though this point is one of considerable debate among historians. Yet it is the so-called
Elizabethan Religious Settlement to which the origins of
Anglicanism are traditionally ascribed. The compromise was uneasy and was capable of veering between extreme
Calvinism on the one hand and
Arminianism on the other, but compared to the bloody and chaotic state of affairs in contemporary France, it was relatively successful until the Puritan Revolution or
English Civil War in the seventeenth century.
The success of the
Counter-Reformation on the Continent and the growth of a
Puritan party dedicated to further Protestant reform polarised the
Elizabethan Age, although it was not until the
1640s that England underwent religious strife comparable to that which her neighbours had suffered some generations before.
Early Puritan movement
{{main articles|
Puritan and
English Civil War}}
The early ''Puritan movement'' (late 16th century-17th century) was
Reformed or
Calvinism Calvinist and was a movement for reform in the
Church of England. Its origins lay in the discontent with the
Elizabethan Religious Settlement. The desire was for the Church of England to resemble more closely the Protestant churches of Europe, especially
Geneva. The Puritans objected to ornaments and ritual in the churches as
idolatry idolatrous (vestments, surplices, organs, genuflection), which they castigated as "
popish pomp and rags." (See
Vestments controversy.) They also objected to ecclesiastical courts. They refused to endorse completely all of the ritual directions and formulas of the ''
Book of Common Prayer''; the imposition of its liturgical order by legal force and inspection sharpened Puritanism into a definite opposition movement.
The later Puritan movement were often referred to as
Dissenters and
Nonconformists and eventually led to the formation of various
reformed Christian denomination denominations.
Resources
Scholarly secondary resources
*
Hilaire Belloc Belloc, Hilaire (1928), ''How the Reformation Happened'', Tan Books & Publishing. ISBN 0-89555-465-8 (a Roman Catholic Perspective)
*
Carl Braaten Braaten, Carl E. and Robert W. Jenson. ''The Catholicity of the Reformation.'' Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996. ISBN 0-8028-4220-8
-
''The Cambridge Modern History''. Vol 2: The Reformation (1903)
*Cameron, Euan. ''The European Reformation.'' Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991. (A standard textbook).
*Estep, William R. ''Renaissance & Reformaton.'' Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986. ISBN 0-8028-0050-5
*Gonzales, Justo. ''The Story of Christianity, Vol. 2: The Reformation to the Present Day''. San Francisco: Harper, 1985. ISBN 0060633166
-
Kirsch, J.P. "The Reformation," ''The Catholic Encyclopedia'' (1911) Catholic view
*Pelikan, Jaroslav. ''Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300-1700).'' Chicago: U Chicago Press, 1984 (focuses on religious teachings)
*Kolb, Robert. ''Confessing the Faith: Reformers Define the Church, 1530-1580.'' St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1991. ISBN 0-570-04556-8
*MacCulloch, Diarmaid. ''The Reformation: A History.'' New York: Penguin 2003. Most important recent synthesis
*Spitz, Lewis W. ''The Renaissance and Reformation Movements: Volume I, The Renaissance.'' Revised Edition. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1987. ISBN 0-570-03818-9
*Spitz, Lewis W. ''The Renaissance and Reformation Movements: Volume II, The Reformation.'' Revised Edition. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1987. ISBN 0-570-03819-7
Primary sources in translation
*Spitz, Lewis W. ''The Protestant Reformation: Major Documents.'' St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1997. ISBN 0-570-04993-8
Online resources
=Historical materials
=
*Timelines
**
Detailed Christian timeline#Renaissance and Reformation Renaissance & Reformation
**
Timeline of the Protestant Reformation in England Protestant Reformation in England
*
History of Protestantism
*
Middle Ages in history
*A list of
Protestant reformers
=Primary materials
=
-
Martin Luther's Ninety-five Theses
*
Book of Common Prayer The Book of Common Prayer
*
The Book of Concord
-
John Calvin's ''Institutes of the Christian Religion''
=External links
=
-
Internet Archive of Related Texts and Documents
-
A summary of the Reformation
-
An Overview of the Protestant Reformation
Category:Protestantism
Category:History of Europe
Category:Reformation
{{Link FA|vi}}
ca:Reforma Protestant
cs:Reformace
da:Reformationen
de:Reformation
es:Reforma protestante
eo:Reformacio
fr:Réforme
ga:Athleasú Creidimh
ko:종� 개�
id:Reformasi Protestan
it:Riforma protestante
he:הרפורמציה ×”×¤×¨×•×˜×¡×˜× ×˜×™×ª
lt:Reformacija
lb:Reformatioun
hu:Reformáció
mk:ПротеÑ?тантÑ?ка реформација
nl:Reformatie
nds:Reformatschoon
ja:宗教改�
no:Reformasjonen
pl:Reformacja
pt:Reforma Protestante
ro:Reforma Protestantă
sl:Reformacija
fi:Uskonpuhdistus
sv:Reformationen
vi:Cải cách Kháng Cách
tr:Reform
zh:宗教改é?©èˆ‡æ›´æ£æ•™
see
Protestant Reformation
*** Shopping-Tip: Protestant reformation
