Oxford Illustrated History of the Reformation

To imagine late medieval Christianity is to enter a world bewildering in diversity of belief and practice, complex in theology, and populated by angels, demons, saints and heretics, nepotistic popes, and Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. The faithful believed that the Son of God was present in the upraised hands of the priest. They knew that death led a dance with emperor and peasant alike. Wealthy bankers and merchants, mindful of usurious lives, dispensed their wealth in the hope of being remembered by those who remained in the world while they suffered in the flames of Purgatory. The monks of the Antonine monastery near Colmar treated victims of plague and prayed before Grünewald’s crucified Christ, whose sore-infested skin revealed a God who suffered with the afflicted. The Florentine prophet Savonarola perished in flames in the Piazza della Signoria in 1498, repudiated by the people he had once roused to a different conflagration, a bonfire of the vanities. In Rome, meanwhile, the master of ceremonies in the papal palace wrote of a banquet with chestnuts and prostitutes attended by Pope Alexander VI.

 

The Church in the world, Christ’s bride, was everything her contemporary advocates and critics claimed—fervent in worship, devout in prayer, rich in sacramental reverence, fearful of the afterlife, and zealous in pious works and gifts. At times, the Church was poisoned by corruption and venality in her highest offices and drained of life by indolence in her lowest. For aspirational temporal rulers, whether emperors, princes, or civic magistrates, the wealth and lands of churches were the stones of Ophir, and like Solomon they would have them. Noble families understood all too well the material rewards of spiritual authority and wisely invested in the cardinal’s hat, the bishop’s crozier, and the abbess’s staff of office for their offspring. Yet from the chaos and confusion depicted in Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (c.1500), where Heaven and Hell meet in the present, rose a profession of faith in a Church ‘One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic’.

 

Peter Marshall, Editor

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. – 328 pp.

ISBN 978-0-19-959548-8