'A masterpiece ... In its field it is the best book ever' Guardian Winner of the Wolfson Prize for history, Reformation: Europe's House Divided 1490-1700 charts a seismic shift in European culture that marked the beginning of the modern world. At a time when men and women were prepared to kill - and be killed - for their faith, the Reformation tore the western world apart. Acclaimed as the definitive account of these epochal events, Diarmaid MacCulloch's history brilliantly re-creates the religious battles of priests, monarchs, scholars and politicians, from the zealous Martin Luther nailing...

From a prize-winning author, this book charts the course of Christianity from ancient history onwards.

This collection of essays by leading scholars and researchers in early Tudor studies provides an up-to-date discussion of the politics, policy and piety of Henry VIII's reign. It explores such areas as the reform of central and local government, foreign policy, relations between leading politicians, life at Court, Henry's first divorce and the break with Rome, literature and the government's exploitation of it, and the growth of evangelical religion in Henry's England. Particular consideration is given to the controversies which have arisen about the reign among modern historians, and there...

The English Reformation was the event which chiefly shaped English identity well into the twentieth century. It made the English kingdom a self-consciously Protestant state dominating the British Isles, and boasting an established Church which eventually developed a peculiar religious agenda, Anglicanism. Although Henry VIII triggered a break with the Pope in his eccentric quest to rid himself of an inconveniently loyal wife, the Reformation soon slipped from his control, and in the reigns of his Tudor successors, it developed a momentum which made it one of the success stories of European...

This volume introduces a polyphony of silences from the whole span of Christian history and beyond. Some are holy; some skirt the borders of evil. MacCulloch describes how the Early Church negotiated the competing claims of silence and noise, and how monasticism, a movement imported into Christianity, came to dominate Christian worship and practice.