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The European Reformation

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How did The European Reformation reshape our understanding of Christianity’s split into Protestant and Catholic movements across Europe?

Image courtesy of interviewee. December 6, 2024

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This video video discusses the life and thoughts of Martin Luther, highlighting his upbringing in St. Andrews, Scotland, amidst a rich historical backdrop of the Reformation. Luther's commitment to becoming a monk led him to explore the church's process of salvation, which he viewed as reliant on religious acts and personal effort to become holy. Over time, he concluded that this understanding was fundamentally flawed. Luther argued that salvation was solely an act of God's radical forgiveness and love, independent of human efforts. Instead of trying to earn holiness through works, individuals are saved by God's grace, which leads to genuine good works as a natural consequence of that salvation.

This video video highlights Luther's skill in communicating his ideas, writing in Latin for academics and accessible German for the general populace. His teachings simplified Christian life, focusing on the essentials like sharing the Gospel and observing sacraments, leading to a reduced need for hierarchical church structures.

Luther's Reformation led to communal religious life where laypeople became increasingly involved and even gained control over church matters that were traditionally handled by clergy. This video video shift caused a decline in monasticism and redefined church organization at local levels.

The author also discusses the ongoing impact of the Reformation on beliefs and practices, covering a history of prior grievances against the church leading up to Luther's criticism of clerical privileges. Despite various political and social dynamics, the reformation established a simplified religious structure centered on community engagement.

Finally, the author reflects on the evolution of scholarly perspectives on the Reformation, acknowledging a cultural shift in understanding its historical significance and the transformations it brought about in societies beyond the mere institutional changes.

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Here are five key points extracted from the video:

1. **Influence of Background**: The author reflects on growing up in St. Andrews, Scotland, a town rich in Reformation history, which fueled their interest in the topic. They discuss the historical events and significance of figures like Martin Luther, emphasizing how early experiences shaped their understanding of Reformation theology.

2. **Luther’s Understanding of Salvation**: The video highlights Martin Luther's conclusion that the traditional medieval understanding of achieving holiness through religious acts is fundamentally flawed. Luther argues that salvation is an act of God's undeserved love and radical forgiveness, which is not contingent on human efforts or good works.

3. **Simplification of Religious Life**: Luther proposed a more straightforward approach to religion, emphasizing that salvation and holiness are granted by God rather than earned through elaborate rituals and penances. This led to a significant reduction in the clerical hierarchy and religious complexity, moving towards a model where laypeople had greater involvement in church life.

4. **Shift in Church Structure**: The Reformation resulted in a reorganization of church governance, where local communities gained more autonomy, and the role of the clergy was redefined. Each parish had the right to call and dismiss its pastor, leading to a more direct relationship between the clergy and the lay community, in contrast to the previously centralized church authority.

5. **Cultural and Political Implications of the Reformation**: The author discusses the interplay between theological ideas and political structures during the Reformation. They note how, while the initial alliance between political leaders and reformers was based on the desire for a church more in line with the ordinary citizen's life, as new churches were established, clergy began to develop their own collective identity, resulting in tensions between theological and political agendas. The author also mentions a cultural shift in how people engaged with their beliefs and the supernatural, indicating that the Reformation had lasting impacts on cultural attitudes.

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Here are some key quotes extracted from the video:

1. **On Growing Up in St. Andrews:**
- "The history of the reformation is just all around you... all of this story was all around me growing up and... I just got more and more interested in it as I got older."

2. **Luther’s Theological Commitment:**
- "Luther was a theologian and an interpreter of scripture... committed to being the very best kind of Christian monk and theologian."

3. **Nature of Salvation:**
- "God as an act of pure love, undeserved, chooses to save those whom God wishes to save… God spontaneously forgives people… and therefore the way that we are saved is by this act of radical forgiveness on the part of God."

4. **Reconvideoualizing Good Works:**
- "We don’t do good works because God is trying to save us. We do good works because God has already saved us."

5. **Luther's Approach to Religious Life:**
- "It's not about going on pilgrimage... It's actually just about sharing the gospel, receiving the two biblical sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist, and about upholding the community of the faithful."

6. **Transformation of Church Structure:**
- "In the Middle Ages, there were those who said the church is basically the clergy. Now the clergy is such a smaller number of people, the lay people are much more involved."

7. **Local Control and Lay Participation:**
- "Each parish has the right to call and if need be dismiss, its pastor... the Holy Spirit is moving at local level."

8. **Political Convideo and the Church:**
- "What Luther tells them is... you can run the church. You can take it over, and that will actually make you not heretics."

9. **Cultural Change and the Reformation:**
- "What was the cultural world like at the end of the process that I've described... that is a very, very important cultural story."

10. **Impact of the Reformation on Beliefs:**
- "The language with which people address these invisible forces that they believe were at work in their world does change."

These quotes encapsulate the main themes of the video regarding Luther's evolving understanding of salvation, the simplification of religious life, the shift in church structure towards local participation, and the cultural implications of the Reformation.

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I grew up in the town of St.

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Andrews in Scotland, where the history

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of the reformation is just all around you.

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Um, there's a castle, which was besieged

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after a cardinal was murdered in it,

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who had in turn been responsible for the execution of one

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of the first of the Protestant reformers in St.

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Andrews. So all of this story was all around me growing up

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and, I I, I just got more

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and more interested in it as I got older.

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It was also to some degree, the family business

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because my father worked in church history,

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although he did things in a very different way from myself.

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Luther was a theologian and an interpreter of scripture,

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and at the beginning of his career is committed

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to being the very best kind of Christian monk

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and theologian that he can possibly be in his day.

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The way that the church understood making oneself acceptable

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to God was that there was a process which

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involved the life of the church very, very closely.

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In other words, the way that someone became holy was by

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doing a whole lot of religious stuff, so to speak.

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They would, go to confession.

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They would carry out whatever penances were given.

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They would go to shrines

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and associate themselves with holy places

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and holy people of the past.

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They might, if they were super dedicated as Luther was,

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they might take a vow to live as part

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of a religious community.

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Now, all of this, according to the medieval church, was part

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of the process by which

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gradually the person became more acceptable to God.

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Now, you could arguments, but who is driving the process?

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Is it the spirit of God acting within us,

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or is it our own effort?

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Or is it a combination of the two that

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didn't alter the fact that the process, the business

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of actually making oneself holy through religious acts

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was generally speaking greed.

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Now, what Luther concludes

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after all these years of work is

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that there's a radical misunderstanding of how God wishes

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to save human beings in all of this system.

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He concludes that God as an act of pure love,

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undeserved Erv chooses to save

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those whom God wishes to save,

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that God spontaneously forgives people, all the things that

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estranged them from God,

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all the insufficiencies, all the wrongdoing.

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And then God gives people

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a spiritual gift, which enables them

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to do good things,

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To lead a better life.

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But that better life is

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never calculated.

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It's never appraised.

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It's never measured up against some standard

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because it's never enough.

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This was the point at which Luther had started.

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He realized that all the religious stuff

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that he might do would never be enough

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because he would never do it with pure enough motives.

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He would never do it with sufficient energy and commitment.

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And what he concludes is that actually God knows that

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and God loves us anyway, and

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therefore, the way that we are saved is by this act

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of radical forgiveness on the part of God.

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And everything else that we do afterwards

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has no bearing on whether we're saved or not.

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It is the outflow, the consequence, the result

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of being saved by which God dwells within us

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and makes us lead, lead lives as better people,

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somewhat better people, not always, not all the time.

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It's in a sense, turning around the whole logic

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of salvation, saying, we don't do good works

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because God is trying to save us.

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We do good works because God has already saved us,

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and God dwells in us

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and makes those still very insufficient,

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act good acts possible.

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Luther is a brilliant self publicist.

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That's the first thing to say.

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Um, he writes his ideas in both Latin

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for the general scholarly community across Europe

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and in German for ordinary laypeople in short pamphlets,

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you know, a hundred pages or so, sometimes much less things

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that can be read very quickly

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and can be purchased very cheaply.

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But what he is in effect saying is that

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since the Christian life is really,

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is not about going on pilgrimage to this shrine

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or that holy place, it's not about depriving oneself

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of food or sexual companionship

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or all the other stuff that monks did.

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It's actually just about sharing the gospel,

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receiving the two biblical sacraments of baptism

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and the Eucharist, and about upholding the

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community of the faithful.

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So you can suddenly have a much simpler approach

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to Christian life, to Christian worship.

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And that in turn means that you don't actually need

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to have this big, elaborate international organization

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which functioned as what some people at the time called

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as a well of grace.

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You don't need to have a big global institution run from

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Rome, which is dispensing the grace of God through lots

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of religious activities, because God's doing that anyway.

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The grace of God is, is the rain that is falling all

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around us, so to speak.

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And so the religious life becomes much simpler.

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The kind of people you can have in the

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church become much simpler.

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There's no longer any room for monks

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and nuns thinking that they're making themselves more holy.

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And and Luther says, you know, our, our, our,

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our monks must be now really sort of despairing

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because they suddenly realize that the,

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the servant girls sweeping the house is actually better

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and holier than the monk

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because the servant girls doing what God wants her to do.

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Whereas the monk is doing something which God never asked

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for and never told one to do in a curious way.

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Um, the reformation that Luther sets off, which has its

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knock on effects elsewhere in Europe,

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probably reduces the number of people who are

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actively engaged in religious activities,

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the people you would call clergy,

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because the monastic orders basically dwindle away.

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And the number of priests who were employed simply to

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say religious services, often religious services on behalf

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of the departed, all of that goes.

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So what you have is you have the pastor

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and you have the parish community.

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You have the minister serving the people, preaching,

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teaching, baptizing, marrying, caring for people,

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consoling the departed, tho tho those

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who are bereaved when someone dies.

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So the religious life becomes much simpler,

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and in a sense, lay people can become involved

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in a way that means that they are fully part

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of the life of the church.

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In the Middle Ages, there were those who said

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the church is basically the clergy.

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Now the clergy is such a smaller number of people,

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the lay people are much more involved.

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And in the early thought of Luther,

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not only are laypeople more involved,

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but they are actually more in control

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because Luther says in, in, in, in his early work,

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he doesn't always remain faithful to this,

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but at the beginning he says, the,

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the priest is simply the, the person who holds the task

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of representing the personality of the religious community,

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of the lay community.

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In other words, each parish can, at one point,

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he says this in 1523, quite bluntly,

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each parish has the right to call

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and if need be dismissed, its pastor.

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Now, as I say, it becomes more complicated there,

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but the theological understanding that Luther brings

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to the life of the church is to say

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basically it's it's at local level.

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Um, as, as a bishop friend of mine says,

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the Holy Spirit is moving at local level,

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and that's what he understands.

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Now, it doesn't stay that way,

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but more for political reasons

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and even defensive reasons than anything else over time,

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what you find is that, for example, the elector

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of Saxony or the, duke of Hessa

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or you know, the Duke of the elector of Brandenburg has

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to organize their church in their territory.

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And so the church becomes defined by the local

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political unit, whether it's a free city

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or whether it's a principality,

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whether it's Nuremberg or Saxony.

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Then for their own defense,

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those different communities band together

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and they form leagues.

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And we have something like the League of Schal Calden,

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where everyone signs on to the confession of Augsburg,

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which expresses

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and encapsulates the minimum agreed ideas

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of the Lutheran churches.

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So what you end up having is a quote unquote Lutheran

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church, which wasn't actually there in the ideas

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of the reformers at the beginning,

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but it becomes necessary for, political

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and, practical reasons.

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I would argue that the story

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that I tell of how you start with religious change

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and that affects worship

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and that in turn affects the kind of political structures

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that you have in the church, that is an ideal,

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intellectual way of understanding the reformation.

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I don't claim for one moment that it is the way that

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ordinary people necessarily perceived it.

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Uh, what happens, I think, is that there are already

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before Luther, there are signs of anxiety

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about the way that the church intervenes in ordinary life.

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Um, for 70 years

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before anyone had heard of Luther, there had been series

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of statements called the grievances

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of the German nation against the church.

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People objecting not only to taxes going to Rome,

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but to the privileges of the clergy where, for example,

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a member of the clergy who committed a a a a crime

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or, was involved in some sort of civil suit,

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could not be brought before secular justice.

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And a lot of towns

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and other politics had been trying for years

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to negotiate somehow

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to make the clergy into more cooperative citizens.

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And what Luther tells them is, look, all this idea of legal

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separation and sacramental sanctity

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and preciousness doesn't actually work

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in terms of Christian teaching.

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So he says, in effect, to the,

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the people he addresses whom he calls the Christian

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nobility, who are actually the,

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the ruling elites in both cities

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and in, principalities, he says, look,

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you can run the church.

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You can take it over,

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and that will actually make you not heretics, not

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sacrilegious, people not stealing the holy things

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that belong to the church.

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This will actually be the right way to run the church.

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And so that I think, creates a political alliance

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of convenience, if you like, between many lay politicians

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and the reforming theologians.

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Now, I don't think it all lasts that way forever.

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What I've argued in, in, in my book on the Reformation is

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that the, the alliance between theological impulses

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and political ambition is a sort of temporary one.

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Once a new church is established, it's surprising

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how quickly the clergy start to think like clergy

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and start, as it were, to have their own,

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collective ethos

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and their own sense of their special role in the,

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in the life of the community.

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They don't go back to being like the old church.

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They're still citizens.

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They're good subjects of their, their polities.

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Uh, but nevertheless, their ideas don't always coincide

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with those of the,

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of the pure politicians, shall we say.

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But the alliance lasts long enough

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to make the changes happen.

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As you know, I originally published my book on the

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Reformation back in 1991,

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which seems a ridiculous long time ago now.

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Um, but I produced a rev very heavily revised edition

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in 2012.

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Now, one of the things that had happened in that process was

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that in, history

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and social history, there was a process

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that is sometimes nicknamed the cultural turn.

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Um, and what happened in that was that

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social historians

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who in the post-second World War era had been very

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preoccupied with economics, with demographics,

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with local politics.

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Perhaps suddenly they realized that culture, that the,

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the world of imagery, of vernacular, belief patterns,

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belief patterns at, at a grassroots level, all

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of those things actually matter,

269
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and they're strong motivators,

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even apart from economics and politics.

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So in working on the second edition of my book,

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I took the, really, the first chapter

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and the last chapter, the first one dealt with the state of

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as, where the collective mentalities

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of people in the pre reformation period

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and the final chapter looked at

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what was the cultural world like at the end of the,

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of the process that I've described.

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And I rewrote those chapters completely.

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Um, I I I, and

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moreover, I was sufficiently unhappy

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with my early ideas about, the evolving cultural world

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of the pre-modern

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that I produced a further book called Inter Enchanted

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Europe, which explores the whole question of

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how the reformation impacts on beliefs about the

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supernatural beliefs, about the power of ritual,

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about the power of words, the power

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of religious objects and so forth.

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So that's, that's been a major shift of emphasis.

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Now, one of the challenges has been that some of the works

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of the early cultural turn said, well,

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there's the pre-modern world,

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and as the modern post-industrial world,

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and really nothing much changes in the pre-modern.

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And so there was an argument that

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the reformation really had rather minimal effect,

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that it was not a modernizing force, that people were still

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believing in the power of magic.

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They were still believing in spiritual beings.

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And that is true,

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but the language with which people address

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the, these invisible forces

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that they believe were at work in their world does change.

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There is an impact of the reformation on this,

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but I had to work out how to say this in a very subtle way,

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not claiming that the reformation changed everything,

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but also not admitting that it changed nothing,

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because I do believe it's a very,

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very important cultural story.

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That's been the big change I've had to,

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rethink the language that I use

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between the two editions on a whole range of topics where,

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it it's important nowadays not to, to,

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to use even accidentally gendered language about humanity

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and especially about God.

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I I also realize that the,

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the argument could be structured better.

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So some chapters got moved around as a result of some

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of the constructive responses that I'd had

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to the book the first time around.

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But is that, it's that cultural turn, which I think is,

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is hugely important.

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And interestingly, there's a whole bunch of books

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that have appeared in the last 20 years with titles,

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the Reformation of something that can be the reformation

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of the Keys, the reformation of the landscape.

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These are all books written by good colleagues,

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good friends, people whose work I respect enormously.

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And what I am grateful for is that that is

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predicated on the idea

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that something happens in the reformation,

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which is important, even if it's not

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what the 19th century idealists thought it was.

Reflections on Reformation History and Personal Journey

00:00:00 - I grew up in the town of St. Andrews in Scotland, where the history of the reformation is just all around you. there's a castle, which was besieged after a cardinal was murdered in it, who had in turn been responsible for the execution of one of the first of the Protestant reformers in St. Andrews. So all of this story was all around me growing up and, I I, I just got more and more interested in it as I got older. It was also to some degree, the family business

00:00:34 - although he did things in a very different way from myself. Luther was a theologian and an interpreter of scripture, and at the beginning of his career is committed to being the very best kind of Christian monk and theologian that he can possibly be in his day. The way that the church understood making oneself acceptable to God was that there was a process which

00:01:10 - In other words, the way that someone became holy was by doing a whole lot of religious stuff, so to speak. They would, go to confession. They would carry out whatever penances were given. They would go to shrines and associate themselves with holy places and holy people of the past. They might, if they were super dedicated as Luther was, they might take a vow to live as part

Understanding Salvation: Luther's Reformation of Grace

00:01:40 - Now, all of this, according to the medieval church, was part of the process by which gradually the person became more acceptable to God. Now, you could arguments, but who is driving the process? Is it the spirit of God acting within us, or is it our own effort? Or is it a combination of the two that didn't alter the fact that the process, the business of actually making oneself holy through religious acts

00:02:14 - Now, what Luther concludes after all these years of work is that there's a radical misunderstanding of how God wishes to save human beings in all of this system. He concludes that God as an act of pure love, undeserved Erv chooses to save those whom God wishes to save, that God spontaneously forgives people, all the things that

00:02:44 - all the insufficiencies, all the wrongdoing. And then God gives people a spiritual gift, which enables them to do good things, To lead a better life. But that better life is never calculated. It's never appraised. It's never measured up against some standard because it's never enough. This was the point at which Luther had started.

Radical Forgiveness and the Logic of Salvation

00:03:17 - that he might do would never be enough because he would never do it with pure enough motives. He would never do it with sufficient energy and commitment. And what he concludes is that actually God knows that and God loves us anyway, and therefore, the way that we are saved is by this act of radical forgiveness on the part of God. And everything else that we do afterwards has no bearing on whether we're saved or not.

00:03:50 - of being saved by which God dwells within us and makes us lead, lead lives as better people, somewhat better people, not always, not all the time. It's in a sense, turning around the whole logic of salvation, saying, we don't do good works because God is trying to save us. We do good works because God has already saved us, and God dwells in us and makes those still very insufficient,

00:04:19 - Luther is a brilliant self publicist. That's the first thing to say. he writes his ideas in both Latin for the general scholarly community across Europe and in German for ordinary laypeople in short pamphlets, you know, a hundred pages or so, sometimes much less things that can be read very quickly and can be purchased very cheaply. But what he is in effect saying is that

Simplifying Faith: Luther's Shift from Ritual to Community

00:04:50 - is not about going on pilgrimage to this shrine or that holy place, it's not about depriving oneself of food or sexual companionship or all the other stuff that monks did. It's actually just about sharing the gospel, receiving the two biblical sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist, and about upholding the community of the faithful. So you can suddenly have a much simpler approach

00:05:22 - And that in turn means that you don't actually need to have this big, elaborate international organization which functioned as what some people at the time called as a well of grace. You don't need to have a big global institution run from Rome, which is dispensing the grace of God through lots of religious activities, because God's doing that anyway. The grace of God is, is the rain that is falling all

00:05:54 - And so the religious life becomes much simpler. The kind of people you can have in the church become much simpler. There's no longer any room for monks and nuns thinking that they're making themselves more holy. And and Luther says, you know, our, our, our, our monks must be now really sort of despairing because they suddenly realize that the, the servant girls sweeping the house is actually better and holier than the monk

The Shift from Monasticism to Lay Leadership in the Reformation

00:06:26 - Whereas the monk is doing something which God never asked for and never told one to do in a curious way. the reformation that Luther sets off, which has its knock on effects elsewhere in Europe, probably reduces the number of people who are actively engaged in religious activities, the people you would call clergy, because the monastic orders basically dwindle away.

00:06:57 - say religious services, often religious services on behalf of the departed, all of that goes. So what you have is you have the pastor and you have the parish community. You have the minister serving the people, preaching, teaching, baptizing, marrying, caring for people, consoling the departed, tho tho those who are bereaved when someone dies. So the religious life becomes much simpler,

00:07:29 - in a way that means that they are fully part of the life of the church. In the Middle Ages, there were those who said the church is basically the clergy. Now the clergy is such a smaller number of people, the lay people are much more involved. And in the early thought of Luther, not only are laypeople more involved, but they are actually more in control because Luther says in, in, in, in his early work,

Local Governance and Clergy Representation in the Reformation

00:07:59 - but at the beginning he says, the, the priest is simply the, the person who holds the task of representing the personality of the religious community, of the lay community. In other words, each parish can, at one point, he says this in 1523, quite bluntly, each parish has the right to call and if need be dismissed, its pastor. Now, as I say, it becomes more complicated there,

00:08:32 - to the life of the church is to say basically it's it's at local level. as, as a bishop friend of mine says, the Holy Spirit is moving at local level, and that's what he understands. Now, it doesn't stay that way, but more for political reasons and even defensive reasons than anything else over time, what you find is that, for example, the elector

00:09:03 - or you know, the Duke of the elector of Brandenburg has to organize their church in their territory. And so the church becomes defined by the local political unit, whether it's a free city or whether it's a principality, whether it's Nuremberg or Saxony. Then for their own defense, those different communities band together and they form leagues. And we have something like the League of Schal Calden, where everyone signs on to the confession of Augsburg,

Political Necessity in the Emergence of Lutheranism

00:09:34 - and encapsulates the minimum agreed ideas of the Lutheran churches. So what you end up having is a quote unquote Lutheran church, which wasn't actually there in the ideas of the reformers at the beginning, but it becomes necessary for, political and, practical reasons. I would argue that the story that I tell of how you start with religious change

00:10:06 - and that in turn affects the kind of political structures that you have in the church, that is an ideal, intellectual way of understanding the reformation. I don't claim for one moment that it is the way that ordinary people necessarily perceived it. what happens, I think, is that there are already before Luther, there are signs of anxiety about the way that the church intervenes in ordinary life.

00:10:42 - before anyone had heard of Luther, there had been series of statements called the grievances of the German nation against the church. People objecting not only to taxes going to Rome, but to the privileges of the clergy where, for example, a member of the clergy who committed a a a a crime or, was involved in some sort of civil suit, could not be brought before secular justice.

Political Alliances and Clerical Transformations in the Reformation

00:11:13 - and other politics had been trying for years to negotiate somehow to make the clergy into more cooperative citizens. And what Luther tells them is, look, all this idea of legal separation and sacramental sanctity and preciousness doesn't actually work in terms of Christian teaching. So he says, in effect, to the,

00:11:47 - nobility, who are actually the, the ruling elites in both cities and in, principalities, he says, look, you can run the church. You can take it over, and that will actually make you not heretics, not sacrilegious, people not stealing the holy things that belong to the church. This will actually be the right way to run the church. And so that I think, creates a political alliance

00:12:21 - and the reforming theologians. Now, I don't think it all lasts that way forever. What I've argued in, in, in my book on the Reformation is that the, the alliance between theological impulses and political ambition is a sort of temporary one. Once a new church is established, it's surprising how quickly the clergy start to think like clergy

Revisiting the Role of Culture in Historical Change

00:12:50 - collective ethos and their own sense of their special role in the, in the life of the community. They don't go back to being like the old church. They're still citizens. They're good subjects of their, their polities. but nevertheless, their ideas don't always coincide with those of the, of the pure politicians, shall we say. But the alliance lasts long enough to make the changes happen. As you know, I originally published my book on the

00:13:20 - which seems a ridiculous long time ago now. but I produced a rev very heavily revised edition in 2012. Now, one of the things that had happened in that process was that in, history and social history, there was a process that is sometimes nicknamed the cultural turn. and what happened in that was that social historians who in the post-second World War era had been very

00:13:55 - with local politics. Perhaps suddenly they realized that culture, that the, the world of imagery, of vernacular, belief patterns, belief patterns at, at a grassroots level, all of those things actually matter, and they're strong motivators, even apart from economics and politics. So in working on the second edition of my book,

Revising Perspectives: The Cultural Impact of the Reformation

00:14:24 - and the last chapter, the first one dealt with the state of as, where the collective mentalities of people in the pre reformation period and the final chapter looked at what was the cultural world like at the end of the, of the process that I've described. And I rewrote those chapters completely. I I I, and moreover, I was sufficiently unhappy with my early ideas about, the evolving cultural world

00:14:55 - that I produced a further book called Inter Enchanted Europe, which explores the whole question of how the reformation impacts on beliefs about the supernatural beliefs, about the power of ritual, about the power of words, the power of religious objects and so forth. So that's, that's been a major shift of emphasis. Now, one of the challenges has been that some of the works of the early cultural turn said, well, there's the pre-modern world,

00:15:28 - and really nothing much changes in the pre-modern. And so there was an argument that the reformation really had rather minimal effect, that it was not a modernizing force, that people were still believing in the power of magic. They were still believing in spiritual beings. And that is true, but the language with which people address the, these invisible forces that they believe were at work in their world does change.

Reassessing the Cultural Impact of the Reformation

00:16:00 - but I had to work out how to say this in a very subtle way, not claiming that the reformation changed everything, but also not admitting that it changed nothing, because I do believe it's a very, very important cultural story. That's been the big change I've had to, rethink the language that I use between the two editions on a whole range of topics where, it it's important nowadays not to, to, to use even accidentally gendered language about humanity

00:16:33 - I I also realize that the, the argument could be structured better. So some chapters got moved around as a result of some of the constructive responses that I'd had to the book the first time around. But is that, it's that cultural turn, which I think is, is hugely important. And interestingly, there's a whole bunch of books that have appeared in the last 20 years with titles, the Reformation of something that can be the reformation of the Keys, the reformation of the landscape.

00:17:20 - good friends, people whose work I respect enormously. And what I am grateful for is that that is predicated on the idea that something happens in the reformation, which is important, even if it's not what the 19th century idealists thought it was.

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