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A World on Fire
Paperback
Medieval & Renaissance History
Publisher: E.B Cohen
Published: Aug 10 2026
Pages: 502
Weight: 1.08
Height: 1.12 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
In the autumn of 1517, an unknown professor in a small Saxon town sent a list of ninety-five objections to the sale of indulgences to his archbishop. He meant to start an academic debate. Within a fortnight his words were racing across Germany on the new printing presses; within four years he stood before the Holy Roman Emperor as a condemned outlaw, refusing to take back a single sentence; and within a lifetime the thousand-year unity of Western Christendom lay shattered forever.
E.B Cohen tells the whole story of the Reformation - not only Martin Luther's astonishing revolt, but the world that made it possible and the world it left behind. Here is the late-medieval terror of hell that gave indulgences their power; the Fugger-bank debt hidden behind the scandal; the German Bible born in a castle hideout; the peasant revolt Luther refused to lead and the radicals he could not control; the rival reformations of Zwingli and Calvin; a King of England who broke with Rome for a divorce; the Catholic Church's fierce renewal at Trent and through the Jesuits; and the century of religious war that ended only in the exhausted peace at Westphalia.
Rigorous, humane, and honest about the gulf between myth and record - the door-nailing, the ringing Here I stand, Luther's greatness and his ugly antisemitism alike - this is the definitive single-volume account of the movement that split the Christian world and, in splitting it, helped invent the modern one.
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