The Reformation: A History

The Reformation: A History by Patrick Collinson (Modern Library, 238 pp., $21.95). In his preface to this pocket-size history, Cambridge professor Patrick Collinson announces his audience as "the general reader who may know very little about the Reformation." As a brief survey for laymen, this book covers the essentials of its subject, including those unfamiliar to many college graduates. The Reformation is organized into chapters with textbook topics: Luther, Calvin, the English Reformation, the Radical Reformers, the Catholic Reformation, etc. Though this format is the standard one, Collinson effectively presents it as living history--aiming "to make issues that are remote from today's thinking and concerns as accessible as possible."

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Though Collinson highlights Luther's "discovery of the Gospel," he has no unifying thesis. Nor should we expect one. As an introductory survey, his book concentrates on the basics. Collinson emphasizes as central to the Reformation the great Christian theme of renewal. On this point he asks the crucial historiographical question: Was the Reformation "a kind of midwife to the modern world?" He is best when he considers such sweeping questions, and Collinson argues well for the Reformation as a single, definitive leap toward modernity.

Though Collinson deserves praise for this helpful survey, he makes an unfortunate misstep. The organization of his book--into progressive reformers, radicals, and Catholic reactionaries--seems anachronistic. It skews our perspective to map the divisions of the Reformation according to twentieth-century politics. "Conservative" and "liberal" hardly fit disputes about how men perceive their relationship to God and salvation. Collinson's descriptions of Calvin as Marx-like and his Geneva as a sixteenth-century Moscow do not help us understand anything. It is not their issues we thus access, but our own.

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