A Religious Revolution: The Protestant Reformation
is the fourth installment in Henri Daniel-Rops' magnificent
History of the Church of Christ
. This volume includes the first four chapters of that work, examining the triple crisis in the Church-of authority, as the scandal of the antipopes leads to the Great Western Schism; of unity, as the Hundred Years War, the chaos of famine and plague, and the fall of Byzantium spell the disintegration of Christendom; and of spirit, as moral decay and intellectual decline find no effective remedy in erratic reforms-and the dazzling duality of the Renaissance: glorious genius of artistic, literary, and scientific achievement alongside exuberant sensuality verging upon debauchery. In this grand tapestry stand the figures of Sts. Catherine of Siena and Joan of Arc; John Wycliffe and John Huss; St. Colette and Savonarola; and the Renaissance popes: Nicholas V, Alexander VI, and Leo X.
A superb presentation of the tumultuous years of 1350-1564,
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."