"The sixteenth-century reform movement that produced Lutherans, Calvinists, Huguenots, Presbyterians and the Church of England profoundly reshaped the identity of the emerging nation-states of Europe." "Patrick Collinson finds the roots of the Reformation within the late-medieval Church itself. He considers, in turn, the importance of words, language and books; the contribution of Erasmus; the importance of printing, which made the vernacular Bible the most important vehicle for cultural nationalism (despite the illiteracy of most of the population); the central role of Martin Luther; Zwingli's Zurich and Calvin's Geneva; and the main differences between the Evangelical (Lutheran) and the Reformed (Calvinist) churches." "He looks, too, at the dynamics of the Catholic, or Counter, Reformation; at the Reformation in the British Isles - the revolutionary Scottish Reformation, the non-event of the Irish Reformation and the much-contested English Reformation, where Queen Elizabeth was an important moderating influence on thoroughgoing Protestantism; and at the most extensive holocaust of religious imagery in history."--BOOK JACKET.