NYT

Few periods pose as great a challenge to historians as the Protestant Reformation. It features a vast canvas of people, texts, conclaves, and political and intellectual developments, including the birth of printing, the rise of humanism, Wycliffe and Hus, the 95 Theses, the Diet of Worms, Leo X, Charles V, Henry VIII’s divorce, Thomas More’s execution, the Anabaptists, the Puritans, the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, the King James Bible and a series of epic conflicts, culminating in the Thirty Years’ War — a horrific bloodletting that itself has generated a shelf-ful of studies. Historians must also address the Reformation’s consequences, apparent in everything from Pope Francis’ ­efforts to reform the Roman Curia to the prominence of the Bible in American life.

In the face of such complexity, it’s easy for a chronicler to get bogged down. The risk is especially great when writing for the general reader, who wants enlightenment without being overwhelmed.

This is precisely the type of reader Carlos M. N. Eire is seeking with “Reformations.” His book, he writes in his preface, “is a narrative for beginners and nonspecialists” — an “introduction and a survey” that aims “to make the past come alive” and “make the reader thirst for more,” with “an eye firmly fixed on present-day concerns.” Throughout, Eire was guided by the conviction that “we cannot begin to comprehend who we are now as Westerners without first understanding the changes wrought by the Reformations of the early modern era.” The plural, he explains, reflects recent changes in how historians view the period, with the Protestant Reformation considered just one of “multiple Reformations” that occurred in the 16th and 17th centuries.