By Henri Daniel-Rops

A Religious Revolution: The Protestant Reformation is the fourth install­ment in Henri Daniel-Rops’ magnificent History of the Church of Christ. This volume, which includes the last three chapters of that work, examines in detail the Protestant phenomenon: first, a careful study of the tragedy of Martin Luther and the eventful early days of “Lutheranism” on the theo­logical, social, and political planes; second, a vivid account of John Calvin and his horrifying success in organizing the threads of Lutheranism into a force capable of rending the garments of Christianity; and third, a meticulous synopsis of Protestantism’s development from a religious revolt, concerned with theological and doctrinal distinctions, to a fully established political institution with influence across Europe. Alongside Luther and Calvin stand Popes Clement VII and Paul III; Erasmus and King Henry VIII; and Sts. Thomas More and John Fisher.

This picture of an unedifying Papacy, a dubious hierarchy, and the faith threatened by evils of the worst kind would soon be replaced by one of a Church rejuvenated and renovated… But before this redemptive tremor could take effect a dramatic tragedy was to take place, whose prologue had just been enacted in a small German town… (Henri Daniel-Rops)

A superb presentation of the tumultuous years of 1350–1564, A Religious Revolution: The Protestant Reformation brings to life an epoch in which “everything everywhere was chang­ing and falling apart; systems opposed systems, new dogmatisms clash with old; rigid formulae only half conceal uncertainty and anguish; the whole of human activity held increasingly fast in the grip of an indefinable kind of agonizing fermentation.”

Henri Daniel-Rops (1901–1965), the nom de plume of Henri Petiot, was a French Catholic historian. His bibliography comprises seventy books—written over a span of just thirty years—and includes Sacred History, Jesus and His Times, and the monumental, ten-volume History of the Church of Christ. He also served as editor for the Twentieth Century Encyclopedia of Catholicism, which consisted of one hundred and fifty volumes.

Phenomenally successful in his own time, Daniel-Rops made religious history accessible and popular; in 1955, he was elected to the Académie française and in 1956 he received the Order of St. Gregory from Pope Pius XII.

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Paperback: 334pp.

ISBN: 978-1685952358