One of the points he raises is that the Counter Reformation can be considered the first world-wide cultural movement. Reading I had the not entirely delightful sense that my ignorance was increasing - what one learns from books heightens the awareness of what you don't know. This book is two hundred pages in large print, richly illustrated, so maybe a third or less the length of his book on the English reformation, yet covers a longer time period and a larger geographic area. The eventual outcomes are also alike – the top down imposition of a renewed religious culture, more defined, more ordered, with a strong emphasis on training and maintaining parish clergy.ĭickens again takes a chronological approach to the subject.
We get a broadly similar picture of a Church at the beginning of the sixteenth century, if not quite so hollowed out due to the leadership being geared towards government service, but which was structurally weak in a Europe with a vigorous anti-clerical culture co-existing with an equally strong tendency to popular piety.
His tolerance and sympathetic interest for the people he is discussing is the same. In hindsight it seems pretty obvious that A.G.Dickens' The Counter Reformation would share a lot in common with his book The English Reformation.
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