Alec Ryrie

Long before philosophers started making the case for atheism, powerful, affectively laden cultural currents were sowing doubt in Europe. Alec Ryrie looks to the history of the Reformation and argues that emotions—anger at priestly corruption and anxieties attending the erosion of time-honored certainties—were the handmaidens of atheism.

An Emotional History of Doubt

Unbelievers

On the 500th anniversary of Luther's theses, a landmark history of the revolutionary faith that shaped the modern world. "Ryrie writes that his aim 'is to persuade you that we cannot understand the modern age without understanding the dynamic history of Protestant Christianity.' To which I reply: Mission accomplished." -Jon Meacham, author of American Lion and Thomas Jefferson Five hundred years ago a stubborn German monk challenged the Pope with a radical vision of what Christianity could be. The revolution he set in motion toppled governments, upended social norms and transformed millions of people's understanding of their relationship with God. In this dazzling history, Alec Ryrie makes the case that we owe many of the rights and freedoms we have cause to take for granted--from free speech to limited government--to our Protestant roots. Fired up by their faith, Protestants have embarked on courageous journeys into the unknown like many rebels and refugees who made their way to our shores. Protestants created America and defined its special brand of entrepreneurial diligence. Some turned to their bibles to justify bold acts of political opposition, others to spurn orthodoxies and insight on their God-given rights. Above all Protestants have fought for their beliefs, establishing a tradition of principled opposition and civil disobedience that is as alive today as it was 500 years ago. In this engrossing and magisterial work, Alec Ryrie makes the case that whether or not you are yourself a Protestant, you live in a world shaped by Protestants.

The Faith that Made the Modern World

Protestants

Provides a comprehensive account of what it meant to live a Protestant life in England and Scotland between 1530 and 1640.

Being Protestant in Reformation Britain

Marc Föcking

Marlene Dirschauer

Rogier Gerrits

Situated at the intersection of theology, history, literature, and the arts, this edited volume introduces the concept of spiritual intermediality and highlights its central role in early modern piety across various Christian denominations. The case studies present a diverse array of perspectives that explore different forms and functions of intermediality in devotional practices of 16th- and 17th-century Europe, thereby enhancing our understanding of the medial conditions and intermedial aspects of devotion during one of the most fruitful periods of devotional arts and practices in Europe. By arguing that early modern devotion often relied on intermedial forms of expression to unfold its full semantic and performative potential, the volume sheds new light on the rich web of media that shaped early modern Christian culture. Contributors include: Wietse de Boer, Marlene Dirschauer, Marc Föcking, Rogier Gerrits, Tara Hamling, Jenny Körber, Judith Lipperheide, Cosima Macco, Alec Ryrie, Franziska Schreiber, James Simpson, Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Stephanie Wodianka, and Katharina Worms.

Spiritual Intermediality and Devotion in Early Modern Europe

Practising Piety

Professor of the History of Christianity Alec Ryrie

The first comprehensive account of what it actually meant to live a Protestant life in England and Scotland between 1530 and 1640. The focus is on material reality and the real experience of actual believers, drawn from diaries and other direct testimonies.

This brief historical introduction to the English Reformation explores the social, political and religious factors that formed the original context in which it emerged, and the major thinkers and writings to which it gave birth. What was its impact on the world at the time and what were the key ideas and values connected with it?

A Very Brief History

The English Reformation

On the 500th anniversary of Luther's rebellion, this spectacular global history traces the revolutionary faith that shaped the modern world. Five hundred years ago Protestant Christianity began with one stubborn monk. Today, it includes a billion people across the globe. The upheaval Martin Luther triggered inspired one of the most creative and destructive movements in human history. Protestants is the story of the men and women who made and remade this quarrelsome faith. Fired by life-changing encounters with their God, they set out for every corner of the world, demanded alarming new freedoms and experimented in new systems of government. Inspired by their newly accessible Bibles, they transformed their inner lives, a transformation that spilled over into social upheavals and political revolutions. In the process, they have played decisive roles on both sides of the great ideological battles of modern times. Protestants have been both for and against liberalism, imperialism, slavery, Nazism, communism, apartheid and women's rights. Yet beneath it all is a shared passion for God, a vital belief in the principle of self-determination and a readiness to fight for their beliefs. Protestantism's global story is still only just beginning. As this ever-changing faith puts down deep roots across contemporary China, Africa, and Latin America, Alec Ryrie's dazzling history explores how its restless energy made and is still making the modern world.

A Revolution in Progress

Scholars increasingly recognise that understanding the history of religion means understanding worship and devotion as well as doctrines and polemics. Early modern Christianity consisted of its lived experience. This collection and its companion volume (Worship and the Parish Church in Early Modern Britain, ed. Natalie Mears and Alec Ryrie) bring together an interdisciplinary range of scholars to discuss what that lived experience comprised, and what it meant. Private and domestic devotion - how early modern men and women practised their religion when they were not in church - is a vital and largely hidden subject. Here, historical, literary and theological scholars examine piety of conformist, non-conformist and Catholic early modern Christians, in a range of private and domestic settings, in both England and Scotland. The subjects under analysis include Bible-reading, the composition of prayers, the use of the psalms, the use of physical props for prayers, the pious interpretation of dreams, and the troubling question of what counted as religious solitude. The collection as a whole broadens and deepens our understanding of the patterns of early modern devotion, and of their meanings for early modern culture as a whole.

Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain

The Age of Reformation charts how religion, politics and social change were always intimately interlinked in the sixteenth century, from the murderous politics of the Tudor court to the building and fragmentation of new religious and social identities in the parishes. In this book, Alec Ryrie provides an authoritative overview of the religious and political reformations of the sixteenth century. This turbulent century saw Protestantism come to England, Scotland and even Ireland, while the Tudor and Stewart monarchs made their authority felt within and beyond their kingdoms more than any of their predecessors. This book demonstrates how this age of reformations produced not only a new religion, but a new politics – absolutist, yet pluralist, populist yet bound by law. This new edition has been fully revised and updated and includes expanded sections on Lollardy and anticlericalism, on Henry VIII’s early religious views, on several of the rebellions which convulsed Tudor England and on unofficial religion, ranging from Elizabethan Catholicism to incipient atheism. Drawing on the most recent research, Alec Ryrie explains why these events took the course they did – and why that course was so often an unexpected and unlikely one. It is essential reading for students of early modern British history and the history of the reformation.

The Tudor and Stewart Realms 1485-1603

The Age of Reformation

In The Sorcerer's Tale, Alec Ryrie uses previously unknown documents to reconstruct the extraordinary life and world of Gregory Wisdom, physician, magician, and consummate con-man at work in sixteenth-century London. The journey takes us through the cut-throat business of early modern medicine, down to Tudor London's gangland of fraud and organized crime; from the world of Renaissance magi and Kabbalistic conjurers to street-corner wizards; and into thechaotic, exhilarating religious upheavals of the Reformation.

Faith and Fraud in Tudor England

The Sorcerer's Tale

In 2017 is het precies vijfhonderd jaar geleden dat Maarten Luther, een relatief onbekende professor aan een obscure Duitse universiteit, zich uitsprak tegen de corruptie van de lokale geestelijken. Die confrontatie mondde tot ieders verbazing uit in een compleet nieuwe christelijke stroming: het protestantisme. In Protestanten beschrijft professor Alec Ryrie de geschiedenis van deze religie, die volgens historici de basis was voor veel van de grote veranderingen van de afgelopen eeuwen: het liberalisme, de industriële revolutie, de wetenschappelijke revolutie, tolerantie, intolerantie, kapitalisme, imperialisme, democratie en fundamentalisme. Ryrie voert de lezer in zijn omvangrijke boek door de geschiedenis van de protestanten: vanaf het fragiele begin in Centraal-Europa tot haar gewelddadige vestiging als staatsreligie op de rest van het continent; van haar rol in de revoluties tot in de moderne wereld. Het verhaal van de protestanten, toont Ryrie, is het verhaal van de moderne wereld.

Alec Ryrie

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