A fully revised and updated version of this authoritative account of the birth of the Protestant traditions in sixteenth-century Europe, providing a clear and comprehensive narrative of these complex and many-stranded events.

• Introduction: The Reformation and Europe


• Part I: The Background


• 1: The Religion of the People of Europe


• 2: The Vulnerability of the Church


• 3: 'Reform' from Within and its Limits


• 4: Challenges from Outside and their Limits


• 5: Heresy: An Alternative Church?


• 6: The Church and the Christian Soul


• Part II: The Reformers and Their Message


• 7: The 'Luther-Affair' and its Context


• 8: The Conversions of the Reformers


• 9: Rejections of Reform


• 10: The Reformers' Message: Salvation


• 11: The Reformers' Message: Scripture


• 12: The Reformers' Message: The Church


• 13: The Reformers' Message: Sacraments


• Part III: Establishing the Reformed Churches


• 14: Unsuccessful 'Affiliations' to the Reformed Cause


• 15: Self-Governing Towns and Cities


• 16: Principalities and Kingdoms


• 17: Motives for Establishing the Reformation?


• Part IV: Beyond the 'Reformation Moment': from Temporary Coalitions to Growing Communities


• 18: Voluntary, Gathered Movements Reject the 'Coalition'


• 19: Crisis, Survival, and Compromise in Politics


• 20: Reformers at Odds: The 'Confessional' Reformation


• 21: Reformers and Laypeople: Building a Religious Culture


• 22: Conclusion


• Abbreviations Used in the Notes


• Notes


• Suggestions for Further Reading


• Index

Euan Cameron is Henry Luce III Professor of Reformation Church History, Union Theological Seminary, New York, and has taught previously at the University of Oxford and the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He is the author of a number of other works on late medieval and early modern religious history, including The Reformation of the Heretics (1984), Waldenses: Rejections of Holy Church in Medieval Europe (2000), and Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason and Religion 1250-1750 (2010). He is the editor of Early Modern Europe: An Oxford History (1999) and the sixteenth century volume in the Short Oxford History of Europe series (2006).