Author Description

The Catholic Reformation unleashed bursts of creativity that changed the spiritual and, indeed, sensory experience of everywhere it touched. While on the one hand it offered a universality of experience, differences in interpretation and implementation as it adapted to cultural circumstance, particularly on its furthest geographical edges, created a two-way relationship between the Catholic world's traditional centres and its new peripheries. The Catholic Reformation: A Very Short Introduction places this movement within its global context. It considers the expected, such as spiritual and religious matters, and how they entwined with the political, but also covers the full gamut of experience of the Catholic Reformation, particularly its deliberately sensory approach in terms of art, architecture, and music. The book traces the Catholic Reformation from its beginnings in the first half of the sixteenth century, predating the Council of Trent which is frequently viewed as its starting point, through the years of unrest in Europe, to its global expansion in the Americas, Asia, and Africa, and its continued influence and legacy into the twentieth century. This book not only introduces the reader to the breadth of the Catholic Reformation experience in concise form, but it also sets it within important recent debates within the scholarship, thus presenting a provocative discussion of the topic's central issues. Combining broad overviews and focused examples, The Catholic Reformation: A Very Short Introduction offers a concise introduction to a global movement-- provided by publisher.