And Routledge has recently launched The Reformation, a four-volume set of 72 reprinted essays. In 1996 the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation came out of New York in four volumes: 2004 pages, 1226 articles by 472 scholars in 24 countries, none of them writing about Ch’eng I and Ch’enga Hao. Substantial books carrying ‘The Reformation’ in their titles are still being published. But it is not going to be seen off so easily. A recent American textbook goes further, telling its readers that the Reformation, far from being uniquely Western, resembles what happened in China in the 11th century, when the brothers Ch’eng I and Ch’eng Hao revived the Confucian philosophy, and the reconstruction of Islam by Muhammad ibn ‘Abd-al-Wahhab in the 18th century.īy this time it might seem sensible to ditch the Reformation, at least as the unique watershed it once was.

As for English historians, they have begun to talk about ‘the Long Reformation’, which was still happening into the 19th century. German historians identify a ‘Second Reformation’, two or three generations after the first, associated especially with Calvinism, or the ‘Reformed’ tradition.

Other historians, less ambitious, have found that many features of the Protestant Reformation were replicated in the Church which remained Roman Catholic, so that we can speak of the ‘Catholic Reformation’. For Felipe Fernández-Armesto, whose Reformation was published in 1996, it was not so much an event in the 16th century, or even an extended process, as a constant manifestation of the spirit of Christianity, at least from 1500 to the present day, ‘a continuing story, embracing the common religious experiences of Christians of different traditions worldwide’. What should we mean by ‘Reformation’? Was it a ‘paradigm shift’ of the kind proposed by Thomas Kuhn, a new set of answers to old questions, a Darwinian moment? Perhaps.

The Counter-Reformation by A.G. Dickens