The Early Reformation on the Continent

Reviews / Votes

This is a most enjoyable book. Owen Chadwick, always a generous writer and expansive historian, gives a highly personal and wonderfully ample account of the continental Reformation in its formative period. * English Historical Review * ... there is a freshness and spontaneity greatly helped by Chadwick's plain, no-nonsense language and succinct sentences ... The book is often quirky, sometimes slyly humorous, gentle in its cricitism, always humane. Footnoting is sporadic but helpful. * English Historical Review * The Early Reformation on the Continent is a book for the inquisitive and patient reader ... one grateful to attend to a learned and genial guide as he explains on the fullness of things that shaped a historical period. * English Historical Review * This is a well-written and engaging book, full of detail from a wide variety of sources and geographical locales ... it does provide a wealth of information and the individual chapters could serve as guideposts for student research projects. * Sixteenth Century Journal * ... even on those issues in which a scholar familar with the literature might expect to learn nothing new, Chadwick offers material that enlightens ... the topical approach has the added benefit of providing even the advanced scholar with material far outside traditional fields of research or teaching. * Sixteenth Century Journal * This is a very useful, if somewhat idiosyncratic survey of the first fifty years or so of Protestantism ... Chadwick takes a topical approach, and in the process he gives a wealth of information, much of it of value, and much of it unfamiliar to scholars who work primarily in the German Reformation. * Sixteenth Century Journal * This absorbing and richly informative panorama ... The style has the author's usual tanginess ... There are some marvellous pen-portratis of individuals ... Chadwick is wonderfully wide-ranging in his survey ... a great monument of scholarship. * Journal of Ecclesiastical History * A fascinating book. The detail can be entrancing and there are many magnificent insights which reflect the distilled wisdom of half a century of study of ecclesiastical history in general and the Reformation in particular. * The Expository Times * A deeply reflective discussion of a wide variety of topics ... Professor Chadwick is a past master of the interesting anecdote and the unusual case study and employs his skill to add a depth of colour and contrast to the picture he paints. * The Expository Times * The book is also fascinating for what it reveals about Chadwick himself. He took on the commission when a well-known scholar who had failed to deliver for many years finally defaulted, and has brought it off splendidly; the good news is that, unlike the old soldiers, Owen neither dies nor fades away. * Huguenot Society Proceedings * Chadwick more than any other British historian of the modern church, has an encyclopaedic knowledge of what choices were actually made in the Bible and early church as distinct from those which appeared likely to the scholars and polemicists of the 16th century. * Huguenot Society Proceedings * A marvellous entertainment, for the book is one of the most continuously interesting and amusing that even Owen Chadwick has ever written ... a book which, beneath the wit and fun, is seriously and in a very personal way addressed to the problems of conscience arising from religious disagreement. * Huguenot Society Proceedings * Unfailingly thoughtful ... It is full of extraordinary, fascinating and obscure details, handled with flair and erudition. It would be a rare historian who could not learn something new from it, or who could fail to re-examine previously accepted views after reading it. * Church Times * Owen Chadwick offers an elegant and well-informed overview of this remarkable movement, making good use of the most recent research ... The work is to be welcomed as a broad and comprehensive account of the development and lasting impact of the Reformation. Chadwick's eirenic and judicious evaluation of the controversies allows his readers to gain a balanced understanding of what were often ferocious disputes. * Alister McGrath, Times Literary Supplement * It is becoming increasingly difficult to write a good book on the Reformation. The historical debate is now so sophisticated, and the body of work so vast, that any work of synthesis requires impressive courage as well as scholarship. Owen Chadwick, formerly Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, clearly has both. * Lucy Wooding, The Tablet * Engaging, idiosyncratic, fascinating and occasionally infuriating ... a provocative and invigorating read. * Lucy Wooding, The Tablet * Chadwick's style is stimulating, often syncopated, frequently lyrical and sometimes cryptic ... It is a superb work, full of ideas, devoid of dogmatism, rich in astonishing detail, and immensely interesting. * Lucy Wooding, The Tablet28/05/2002 *