The Reformation Audiobook By Diarmaid MacCulloch cover art

The Reformation

A History

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The Reformation

By: Diarmaid MacCulloch
Narrated by: Anne Flosnik
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At a time when men and women were prepared to kill - and be killed - for their faith, the Protestant Reformation tore the Western world apart. Acclaimed as the definitive account of these epochal events, Diarmaid MacCulloch's award-winning history brilliantly recreates the religious battles of priests, monarchs, scholars, and politicians - from the zealous Martin Luther and his 95 Theses to the polemical John Calvin to the radical Igantius Loyola, from the tortured Thomas Cranmer to the ambitious Philip II.

Drawing together the many strands of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and ranging widely across Europe and the New World, MacCulloch reveals as never before how these dramatic upheavals affected everyday lives - overturning ideas of love, sex, death, and the supernatural, and shaping the modern age.

©2003 Diarmaid MacCulloch (P)2017 Tantor Christianity Europe History Middle Ages Royalty Imperialism Latin America

Critic reviews

"Superb...An essential work of religious history." ( Kirkus)
Comprehensive History • Scholarly Research • Skilled Narration • International Perspective • Accessible Content
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Best book I’ve read in years. Political, scientific, and military history of Europe require this *detailed* understanding of religion. Also illuminates today, our schisms, our end-of-the-world obsessions, our 'morals', our weaponizing of thought.
Also illuminates many of the great things of today - our tolerance, our pursuit of scientific truth, our desire to make a better world and be better people, our ability to sacrifice and persevere for beliefs, our ability to change, to adapt, and to strike out on our own if needed.
Highly recommended.

An essential piece of history to understand the modern world

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Narrator can't pronounce Isaiah and other simple words from religion/history/geography. Super distracting. Returned audiobook of The Reformation and ordered the physical book. MacCulloch the author is amazing!

Narrator unqualified

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Was a too academic for just a casual reader. There certainly many areas of European history that I knew nothing about. What was striking was how mobile people were - ethnic cleansing is not new.

Very academic

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In terms of depth and breadth (geographically and chronologically), this is definitely the best history of the Reformation on Audible and maybe in print. I was shocked by how many regions this book covered and by the great scope of time it covered. It is a scholarly work, not a textbook or popular work, but it will hold your attention as well as any popular history.

The author, Diarmaid MacCulloch, is a leading historian of the Reformation period. Though he claims to be non-biased, this is nonsense and is definitely one of the biggest defects in this book. At the time of writing this, he was non-religious, having parted with the Church of England and, as he says, "lost his faith," over their teachings on sexual mores. He is famous for being a staunch opponent of the Catholic revisionist histories of the reformation period one finds in the works of Eamon Duffy (and more popularly G. J. Meyer's history of the Tudors). The result of MacCulloch's philosophical perspective is a strong bias in this narrative toward non-institutional religious movements and figures—familiarists, anabaptists, etc.—and against institutional religion, whether Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed. MacCulloch also, for some reason, extends his narrative all the way up to John Paul II, claiming he is some return to the dark ages... This book is great, but some things in it just deserve to go in one ear and out the other.

I would recommend that anyone looking to learn about the reformation read this book, but also balance it out with the very different (much more balanced) perspective one gets from Catholic authors like Carlos Eire (Reformations) or Eamon Duffy (Reformation Divided; Stripping of the Altars) (also on Audible).

The narration is absolutely perfect in my opinion.

Very biased, but vast

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I will have to re-read (listen) many times. It opened my mind to the pure & destructive power this subject was on the " Commoner's" lives. Highly Recommend! Well done

Research Supreme

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So much information packed into this book... Connects the dots to other things about Christianity I learned elsewhere....

MacCulloch did good with this one...

Worth listening to at least thrice....

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...it's going to be a bumpy ride!

I read more than a few reviews of this title complaining about the narrator. To be honest, at first I was a little put off by the narration, but I thought -- you know, she kinda sounds like Sister Wendy Beckett. Somehow, making that association clinched it for me.

As for the book itself, it's a treasure trove of research, masterfully laid out. It covers about 150 years of history but also dips further back into early Church history. It is mostly centered around Europe but goes into detail within each country/principality. In addition to religious history, it also touches on political and dynastic changes. The book is scholarly in its depth and breadth but totally accessible to regular readers with an interest in history and religion.

Fasten your seatbelts...

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This is a great book, a thorough history of the Protestant Reformation (from a secular perspective). It is extremely detailed and very well-written.

I read the book while following along with the audiobook (just to keep my mind from wandering), and I'm glad I did--the audiobook reading is badly flawed. It has far too many errors for something that got published. Here's a sample of some of the errors:

the year "1190" is read for "1290" (p. 7)
"in disgrace" is read for "in prison" (p. 96)
"highly" is read for "hugely" (p. 99)
"literature" is read for "liturgy" (p. 103)
"King Charles VII" is read for "King Charles VIII" (p. 106)

et cetera.

There are also omissions. An 8-word phrase ("in any century in which he was born") is just dropped from p. 115. A whole 3-line sentence is skipped over on p. 117.

I don't understand how the reader could have made so many mistakes and then just called it good rather than re-recording to fix it. Obviously some of them are almost inconsequential, while others (getting a year wrong by 100 years) matter a lot more. But the standard for accurately reading what's on the page should be pretty high.

Other reviews took issue with the cadence and/or voice of the performer. I had no issues, but I also listened at 2x speed, so YMMV.

Great book, inaccurate and error-prone reading

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Excellent survey of the reformation and counter reformation across Europe. So much more than Luther.

Grand survey of a historic phenomenon

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Well read. The author is definitely engaged. Really long, but thoughtful research. Different pov sometimes had me thinking it had rewound.

Interesting perspective and stupendous white noise

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