The Reformation Quotes

“Nationalism is a phenomenon of the world after the 1789 French Revolution; it implies a common consciousness created within a consolidated territory, usually involving a single language and shared culture, producing a public rhetoric of a single national will, and with the agenda of creating or reinforcing a unitary state.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation

“The end of toleration in 1685 left a legacy of bitterness and instability in France, for it failed to destroy the Huguenots, while encouraging an arrogance and exclusiveness within the established Catholic Church. In the great French. Revolution after 1789 this divide was one of the forces encouraging the extraordinary degree of revulsion against Catholic Church institutions, clergy and religious that produced the atrocities of the 1790s; beyond that it created the anticlericalism which has been so characteristic of the left in the politics of modern southern Europe. In the history of modern France, it is striking how the areas in the south that after 1572 formed the Protestant heartlands continued to form the backbone of anti-clerical, anti-monarchical voters for successive Republics, and even in the late twentieth century they were still delivering a reliable vote for French Socialism.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation

“Calvin had a talent for inventing abusive nicknames and he styled this amorphous opposition ‘Libertines’, which had a conveniently scandalous resonance, while also reflecting the undoubted fact that his opponents sought a freedom for which he saw no need.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation

“One should nevertheless not fall into the old stereotype of an organization that kept its place in Spanish society by sheer terror. Certainly the Inquisition used torture and executed some of its victims, but so did nearly all legal systems in Europe at the time, and it is possible to argue that the Spanish Inquisition was less bloodthirsty than most – as we will see, it showed a healthy scepticism about witches and put a stop to witch-persecution where it could”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation

“In Italy, the Index’s ban was enforced. Bibles were publicly and ceremonially burned, like heretics; even literary versions of scriptural stories in drama or poetry were frowned on. As a result, between 1567 and 1773, not a single edition of an Italian-language Bible was printed anywhere in the Italian peninsula.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation

“Sometimes the Church patently tried to profit from such incidents: the Benedictine monks of Norwich Cathedral in England, encouraged by their bishop, were pioneers in the blood-libel business when in the 1140s they tried to foster in their own church a cult of an alleged young victim of the Jews called William. Unfortunately for the monks, the good folk of Norwich loathed their cathedral more than they did the Jews, and the pilgrimage to little St William never amounted to much. Other cults were more successful (see chapter 2, p. 59), and the blood-libel has remained a recurring motif in the worst atrocities against the Jews.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation

“Yet so much of the story so far has not been about unbelief at all, but sincere and troubled belief. When children of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and the children of the Jewish Diaspora turned on the religions which had bred them, they mostly sought not to abolish God but to see him in a clearer light. ( p698)”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History

“There is in all these connections a prehistory of the Enlightenment. What were the intentions of those who were proud to give themselves the ‘Enlightenment’ label? In one form, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment did indeed set itself against Christianity, proclaiming itself the enemy of mystery and the emancipator of humankind from the chains of revealed religion. Much of this started as being anti-Catholic rather than anti-Christian: a powerful consideration was the memory of the arch-Catholic Louis XIV of France’s great betrayal of trust in revoking the Edict of Nantes. Often doubt, scepticism or hatred of the Church then moved on to become what we would define as atheism. So an anti-Christian Enlightenment encompassed the anger of Voltaire against clerical stupidity, David Hume’s serene indifference to any hope of life after death that so shocked the diarist James Boswell, Maximilien Robespierre’s cold hatred of Catholicism and the French Revolution’s replacement of the Catholic Church with the goddess of reason. The authors of The treatise of the three impostors would have been delighted by all that, and they should also have been humbled by the quality of some of the minds which they had recruited by their clumsy diatribe.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation

“when John Locke published his celebrated Letters concerning toleration in the aftermath of England’s Glorious Revolution, he still excluded Roman Catholics and atheists from his proposals, on the grounds that they were enemies to the English state.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation

“There is now general agreement among historians that between 1400 and 1800, between forty and fifty thousand people died in Europe and colonial north America on charges of witchcraft”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation

“The Catholic struggle to hold the line against Protestantism brought thirty years of misery to millions of Europeans: opinions vary, but within the German lands one modern estimate is that 40 per cent of the population met an early death through the fighting or the accompanying famine and disease, and even the most cautious reassessment of the evidence comes up with a figure of 15-20 per cent.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation

“After a period of undoubted severity in the crisis decades around 1500, soon after its foundation, the Inquisition’s execution rate between 1540 and 1700 was around 2 or 3 per cent per year for those brought before its various tribunals. That was lower than virtually any contemporary secular court of justice in Iberia or elsewhere (admittedly, that might not have been much consolation to those burned at the stake).”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation

“The city of Granada, so gloriously provided with architectural reminders of its Islamic heritage, was particularly anxious to show that it was a more ancient and distinguished Christian centre than Toledo or Santiago de Compostela, and it also wanted to outface the upstart royal capital Madrid. These aims were much assisted by the ‘discovery’ from 1588 onwards of a series of forged early Christian relics (plomos, or lead books) hidden in the minaret of the former main Granadan mosque and in various nearby caves.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation

“Aurispa”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation

“The first book printed in Lithuanian was an edition of Luther’s Short Catechism, published in (Polish) Ducal Prussia at Königsberg in 1547; the Luther Catechism was the second published work in the related language of Lettic, at Königsberg in 1586.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation

“These Reformation wars involved the biggest population movements in Europe between the ‘barbarian’ upheavals which dismantled the western Roman Empire and the twentieth century’s First and Second World Wars. Hundreds of thousands of people decided to follow the example of the English, quit Europe and brave the terrors of the Atlantic to find a new life in north America. As early as 1662 some of the Duke of Savoy’s Waldensian victims in the Alpine valleys took ship for a sympathetic Dutch Reformed colony; they found a new safe home on Stateri Island, amid the great natural haven which would become New York.3”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation

“The venture in New England was more than wilderness or garden: it was (in the words of Governor Winthrop as his party prepared to sail out from Southampton) ‘a city upon a hill’. This quotation from Matthew 5:14 has become a famous phrase in American self-identity, but Winthrop did not intend to convey any sense of a particular special destiny for the new colony: he meant that like every other venture of the godly, and as in the quotation’s context in Matthew’s Gospel, Massachusetts was to be visible for all the world to learn from it.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation

“The most highly promoted of all was William Laud, who directed Church affairs as Bishop of London from 1628, although he had to wait for Canterbury until Archbishop Abbot had the good taste to die, in 1633. Laud was prominent in a royal regime which after 1629 ceased to trouble itself with meeting Parliament and instead tried to sort out England’s problems with royal proclamations, Privy Council orders and the decisions of law courts. Its enemies sarcastically named the period ‘Thorough’, and looked back on it as the ‘Eleven Years’ Tyranny”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation

“Meanwhile, in a final insult of fate, the Queen and Cardinal Pole died on the same day in November 1558, Pole the victim of an exceptionally vicious influenza epidemic.”
― Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation