Diarmaid MacCulloch’s magnificent new history is the most authoritative and wide-ranging account of these epochal and often bloody events. He brilliantly describes the changing late medieval world into which Luther, Calvin and the other reformers erupted. He proposes an original new understanding of the often confusing origins of the exceptionally violent disagreements that divided men and women of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – disagreements for which they were prepared to kill and be killed. He examines the personalities of the leading Reformers and their opponents, and the mix of ideas, prejudices and accidents that shaped the various versions of Protestantism and Catholicism. He illuminates the complex battles between religious and secular powers, and shows how the resolution of these conflicts eventually redrew the map of Europe. He ends with the Enlightenment: a movement that would not have been possible without the Reformation, but which denied many of its most dearly held assumptions.