The Social Background of the Reformation [antikvár]

I' ) ; ! . t; Foreword « ' < I ' Preserved Smith was consciously writing of an age rather i than of a religion when he wrote and titled The Age of the •, ' Reformation-, for him the religious revolution was only one 'f of its characteristics. The Collier Books edition of this nearly classic work, dividing it into two parts for the convenience of the reader, follows exactly the author's original. Thus this second volume, The Social Background of the Reformation, is Smith's brilliant study of the institutions, the life of the people, and the developing intellectual climate of absorbing times. Few historians have had a greater gift for synthesis. While the revolution of thought, theology, and torment which was the Reformation took seed and sprouted, life in the countries of western Europe went on. The middle ages, Smith summarizes succinctly, had no wealth, but only degrees of poverty. Then a steadily increasing commerce, a money economy, and the resources of a new world combined in a cataclysmic change. As the control of the church slackened, monarchy and nationalism were waiting in the wings. Cruelty was perhaps the dominant fact of life: the cruelty of parents to children, of upper class to servant, of state to prisoner, of all society to the lunatic; in a word, of man to man. Yet Bayard and Sidney became bywords of chivalry, and Castiglione put the ideal of courtesy into print. Education, particularly under the impetus of printing, broke out from religious monopoly; and if the vernacular drove the classics from the field, still it opened the world of the intellect to increasing numbers. Modern tolerance arose not only from the ashes of Renaissance rationalism but from the mutual exhaustion of mass persecutions. The heights of art in Italy or literature in England; the imagination that crossed uncharted seas; the science of Leonardo and Vives and Copernicus that remade reality— all these indicated an age as sublime as it was crude; and its aspirations won out over its fears. The final section of Smith's history is a classification of 7