Shakespeare: Henry VI Part 1

I always feel a little outfaced whenever I tackle Shakespeare’s history plays, because so much background information is needed to follow them in any detail, and there are so many characters – and I’ve never been wildly interested in the historical periods he brought to life, and the squabbling, entitled upper classes. But I try and remind myself of context: the relatively recent end of decades of civil wars, as well as the chaos of the Reformation, and Shakespeare telling a national backstory which for him ends up with the relative peace and quiet of his present, and the ongoing emergence of England as a power on the international scene. It reminds me quite a bit of our own, current messy situation and the wish of so many people who ought to know better, to live on our past glories, empire days, and ‘winning’ the Second World War…

Here, in the first part of Henry VI, Shakespeare contrasts the divided and factious England, with its squabbling nobles and interfering bishops after the death of the great hero Henry V, with the French, united and rebellious and inspired by Joan of Arc, determined to throw off the English yoke. It’s pretty much a hotchpotch of random scenes and events with no real thread except the background of the Hundred Years’ War, and the only unity coming through the character of Talbot on the English side and Joan on the fRench. We can see the Wars of the Roses shaping up in the future.

It’s interesting that the English immediately picture Joan as a witch, a whore, in league with satanic powers; towards the end of the play Shakespeare confirms this in a bizarre scene where she calls upon various devilish powers for assistance as her campaign finally unravels.

Shakespeare’s inventiveness is restricted by the actualities of history, and his chronicle sources. I find the language fairly pedestrian, and the tone pretty monotonous, to be honest; there’s little sense of drama or suspense: it feels like a school history lesson. Necessarily it ends without a resolution: there is more chaos, more warfare ahead, and the audience can easily see that the leading characters’ fine words are just that. But the dramatist is just setting out on the road to his present, showing a real nation emerging from all this chaos at the end of Richard III…

Amin Maalouf: Leo the African

     I’d no idea it was so long since I last read this novel, which never ceases to amaze me, because it is a (fictionalised) account of a real life, and I really don’t believe you could make it up.

Jews, Muslims and Christians live reasonably peaceably alongside one another in pre-Reconquista Granada; there is a recap of events leading to the fall of Granada to the Spanish in 1492, and the mayhem which follows for those who are not of the Catholic faith. There is the full vileness of the Inquisition, persecution and the inability of Christians to accept that anyone might be different. Our hero, and narrator, is a Muslim. And though it’s technically a novel, it’s also an autobiography: we cannot have the same expectations of plot as we might have of a completely fictional text; the narrative is linear, but we do grow inevitably attached to people and places.

The narrator and his family leave Granada and settle in Fez; we learn of schooling and lifelong friendships. Eventually he becomes a rich and successful businessman, close to those in power, travels widely and is used on various diplomatic missions by the authorities. His weirdest adventure is his kidnapping by Christians and presentation as a gift to the Pope! Here, his knowledge and skills are put to the service of the incredibly corrupt Church at the time of the Reformation; he is baptised against his will, but escapes being ordained priest before one of his missions. In the end, after years of wanderings, he is able to return to his home and family and live out the remainder of his life in peace as a devout Muslim. I had mis-remembered the plot from my earlier readings, and forgotten how small a section of the novel is his life in Rome at the service of the Pope.

I realised that the narrator’s famous book The Description of Africa is based on his travels all over the north of that continent; when I last read the novel, I had yet to track down that book. Leo travels in the footsteps of his earlier Muslim forbear Ibn Battutah, whose journeys a couple of centuries earlier rivalled those of Marco Polo.

I found the first person narrative effective and convincing. In the back of my mind was always the thought, this stuff is true; the narrative style is that of a devout Muslim, whose faith is at the forefront of his life and deeds (most of the time), and the adventures are almost non-stop. Towards the end of the book, the narrator is at the centre of world-changing events, with the Reformation, the attempts of an incredibly corrupt papacy to consolidate its power and build alliances to secure its future, even if this means joining forces with the Ottomans, and also the various rivalries weakening the Muslim world in those tumultuous years.

Over the years I have come to realise how good a writer Amin Maalouf is. Not only has he written some very good novels, but also a number of very interesting historical and social texts in which he presents thoughtful and powerful analysis of the current state of the world. He has received recognition by being elected to the Académie Française, but that’s all, as far as I’m aware. At the moment, I’m reflecting on what is different about Arabic fiction, thinking of Maalouf, and also Naguib Mahfouz in particular. Maybe it’s my position as an ‘outsider’ to their world, but I’m conscious of a different feel to their novels, one which cannot just be explained by the Muslim background that is omnipresent in a way that Christianity isn’t in Western fiction, for instance. Does anyone out there have any pointers?

Hans Kung: The Catholic Church

     Here is another attempt, rather in the manner of some of the writings of Geza Vermes, to lay out the reality of what happened as Christianity developed right from its very beginnings; the difference is that the book is written by a committed – and controversial – Catholic priest and theologian rather than a Jewish sceptic. Küng is happy to stand accepted ideas on their head and ask awkward questions, though at times I also felt he moved on leaving some of them unanswered. I suppose you would have to call him a critical friend of the church.

Along with other recent church historians, Küng is clear that without Paul there would be no Catholic (or Christian) church. He outlines the early centuries with broad brush-strokes; a key moment is the religion becoming the official one of the Roman Empire, and the next key figure after Paul is Augustine of Hippo, to whom we owe the notion of original sin, and the linked vilification of sex and sexuality.

I had not clearly understood the notion of the gradual creation of the Holy Roman Empire in the west as a rival to the Byzantine Empire in the east, nor realised the widespread use of deliberately forged documents to embed the development of the hierarchy of the Western church, with its emphasis on the authoritarian power of the pope, which went against the practices of the early Church.

Kung also clarified for me the differences at the heart of the split which finally came to a head and hardened permanently in the eleventh century: the pope is an absolutist monarch, the Eastern churches retain autonomy and a collegiate relationship among themselves, which again is closer to the time of the early church. So from relatively early on, the powers and abuse of them by the papacy has been at the heart of what divided first the whole church, and more recently the Western church. Küng is scathing about the appalling papal vice and corruption which led to the Reformation, and recognises the general coherence and validity of Luther’s arguments and criticisms.

The failure of the Roman Catholic Church properly to reform itself, and the consequent religious wars, Küng sees as a major factor contributing to the development of secularism, with an age of reason replacing an era of faith, and being faced by a papacy demonstrating lengthy and long-lasting resistance to anything even vaguely modern or democratic, permanently turned in on itself and attempting to perpetuate the attitudes and behaviours of the late Middle Ages.

Küng offers a very strongly worded criticism of the Church, headed by Pius XII, for its failure to condemn the Nazi extermination of the Jews, and notes that despite its original hopes, the reformers of the Second Vatican Council ultimately have failed to shake or curb the immense power of the papacy and Roman Curia.

As a brief, clear and comprehensive introduction to the Catholic Church, this is excellent.

A tour of my library – part three

It’s only relatively recently that I’ve begun to take a serious interest in art, and it’s a pretty eclectic one, given that I have no formal training or study of the subject: it’s a bit ‘this is what I like’, really. I’ve long liked photomontage, having come across the work of John Heartfield when I was quite young; I fell in love with the romantic visions of Caspar David Friedrich, and actually went off to Rügen to see the famous chalk cliffs which he painted: they are quite stupendous, although have not survived in the same configuration today. Turner I came to like when I went on spec to a major exhibition of his paintings of Italy in Edinburgh about ten years ago; since then I have sought out other exhibitions and acquired books of reproductions of his watercolours too. If there’s a particular movement I really enjoy, it’s Expressionism. The one book I will rave about is actually the catalogue from an exhibition I visited in Berlin a few years back, which set great works with similar themes and subjects from the impressionists and the expressionists side-by-side. It was an absolute eye-opener and I spent hours, completely engrossed.

Currently there is a shelf in my study dedicated to Poland and things Polish, including a good number of history books, particularly those of Norman Davies. I have also collected a number of memoirs written by Poles who underwent similar experiences to those of my father during the Second World War, as well as diaries of writers and other cultural figures from that period. The most interesting and curious book in this collection I inherited from my father, who was presented with it on a visit to Poland in communist times, and it’s a very odd book for them to have allowed to be published: a facsimile of – I translate – Index of the Names of the Gentry, originally published a couple of centuries ago. Our family name is listed and we have (had, rather, for one of the first acts of the reborn Polish state in 1919 was to abolish the gentry) a coat of arms! What you need to know, contextually, is that it was the name that mattered, not wealth, status, social standing… you could be a poor peasant family (like us) or stinking rich with an estate.

I gave up the study of history after O Level, taking up English Literature instead, telling myself I could read as much history as I liked when I liked, and have done just that. My reading hasn’t been structured or systematic. Particular interests have been ancient Rome, the Reformation, the Soviet Union, Poland and modern history generally. Roman history I studied at school, and it’s such an important part of the background to European life and civilisation it’s hard to avoid; I also remind myself that the Roman Empire lasted for far longer than the British or American ones… The interest in the Reformation links back to my Catholic childhood and the cultural vandalism that was the English Reformation, as well as my current interest in theology, as I attempt to make sense of my existence. And Polish and Russian history – well, that’s obvious.

Marguerite Yourcenar: L’Oeuvre au Noir

Have you ever read a book, thought, “That was really good!” and realised that you hadn’t really grasped more that half of it? That happened again, with another Marguerite Yourcenar novel, just as it had a few years with her more famous Memoirs of Hadrian… I shall be going back to both of them, because there’e so much more in there.

This novel was translated into English as The Abyss by Yourcenar’s lover. It’s a bildungsroman in a sense, as it’s Zeno’s life and development that we follow mainly, in the development of the mind of a Renaissance genius and freethinker – so you know really that it’s not likely to turn out well for him. The early sixteenth century, with its explosion of knowledge plus a certain measure of intellectual liberty (in some places) unleashed by the Reformation, holds a fascination for writers; this novel recalled for me the award-winning (and soon-forgotten) Knowledge of Angels by Jill Paton Walsh, and the astonishing Q by Luther Blissett, the only novel I know of written by an anarchist collective… Also in there is an echo of Hermann Hesse’s Narziss and Goldmund, as Yourcenar does spend time comparing the attitudes and fates of Zeno’s childhood companion, too.

Zeno’s main interest is scientific – including alchemical – and medical research, many aspects of which were fraught with all sorts of dangers in those days. The rich heir, Zeno’s friend and companion of his early days, rejects that world in favour of soldiering and whoring; they meet up after many years in a significant encounter. Indeed there are many chance encounters and re-encounters throughout this novel, which add layers of depth and meaning to events and characters.

The turbulent backdrop of warfare and religious strife forms a panorama to the book; Yourcenar is clearly very interested in what people then knew and didn’t know, what they cared about and didn’t care about. The picture she develops is quite different from our twenty-first century picture of what things were like back then, and her picture of the isolation of thinkers, writers and savants in a time where communication was a lengthy process or hardly existed at all, where one didn’t learn of quite major or catastrophic events until months later is quite an eye-opener. Little knowledge being disseminated, it was possible for significant research and discoveries to be lost forever; equally laborious work might be duplicated unwittingly. It was a long time before a world of new learning had accumulated sufficient critical mass to become a permanent fixture, incapable of being suppressed by religious or temporal powers.

Yourcenar also evokes brilliantly through the character of Zeno how the mind of a savant in those times so different from our own might have worked, explored, wandered from subject to subject, and attempted to work things out; from the historical and the psychological perspective it’s a powerful and thought-provoking novel, and a reminder of both how dangerous knowledge can be, and how tenuous our hold on progress and civilisation is, too.

Diarmaid MacCulloch: All Things Made New

I think the blurb on this book is deliberately somewhat vague and misleading; the book isn’t a book so much as a collection of diverse essays and book reviews MacCulloch has written over quite a period of time, all linked in some way by Reformation themes. Having said that – and shame on Penguin Books for their marketing – it is a very good collection of pieces, as one would expect from the author.

His introduction is challenging, and reminds us of his magisterial scope, taking in Luther‘s profound pessimism about human beings and his seeing their salvation as completely dependent on God (I can’t help seeing such a god as a kind of gigantic, slightly sadistic, computer-game player), underlining the profound religious differences that exist between the United States and Europe, which are not usually understood or taken into account, and reminding us that during sixteenth century, if toleration existed, it was in Eastern Europe – Poland and Romania – rather than in the West… He never shies away from pointing out clearly the contradictions, contortions and illogicalities of both Protestant and Catholic beliefs.

There are sections on the Reformation generally, but a good deal of the book is taken up with the English Reformation more specifically. I didn’t know, for instance, that one of the primary financial motives behind the dissolution and destruction of our monasteries was to raise cash to build coastal fortifications against a possible French invasion. One of the lengthier and most interesting chapters explores and charts the complexities of the characters, beliefs and infighting during the reign of Henry VIII which ultimately permitted a successful reformation in this country, along with the attendant cultural vandalism. MacCulloch is also fascinating on the development of the Book of Common Prayer.

I particularly liked his description of the ‘theological schizophrenia’ of the Church of England… the more I read, the more confusing and confused the entire establishment and development of the English Church appears, and MacCulloch does nothing to dissipate this impression. He tackles the inaccurate, falsified and plain biased accounts of the English Reformation over the years, and also provides an interesting and helpful survey of a range of historians of the Reformation from various perspectives.

The book concludes with two rather long and to be honest, slightly tiresome essays, one on Hooker and the other on a forger of documents who deceived historians for over a century; though I was expecting (and enjoyed) an academic book, these two pieces seemed just a bit too specialised, really.

A useful read if you are seriously into history and religion; a good read because anything by MacCulloch has been, so far, in my experience.

Diarmaid MacCulloch: Reformation – Europe’s House Divided

Warning: a post about religion. I do not set out to offend anyone, but recognise that my opinions may offend some. If in doubt, avoid.

The writer makes it clear from the beginning that the mediaeval Church was not in a state of terminal decay and decline. However, poor leadership, numerous scandals and much internal squabbling did seriously undermine its authority in the years leading up to 1517. He manages, despite the complexity of the task, to give a clear picture of the differing theological positions of the leading actors in the various reformations in different parts of Europe at different times.

Much centres around the issue of predestination, a topic that it is very difficult to get one’s head around: the idea that people can be damned or saved from the moment of their birth, and be unable to do anything about this, suggests that some of the reformers invented a really cruel God for their new churches. I got just a little lost trying to follow how Augustine of Hippo, echoing Paul, and his doctrine of original sin, seemed to lead reformers inevitably to predestination, but it did… along with the baggage that came along with the labelling of original sin as a sexual sin, too. To me, predestination reads like a human attempt to limit the power of God, as it were, and I’m with whoever it was – Ludwig Feuerbach, I think – who basically said that man creates God in his own image… It all does seem astonishingly arrogant, if one wants to believe in a God, to then tell him (for it is a He!) how to run his creation. There was also an astonishing amount of hair-splitting about the nature of the Eucharist, and the arguments read like a re-run of the attempts a thousand years earlier to out-manoeuvre various early heresies.

The history of the early years of the Reformation, in Wittenberg, Strasbourg, Zurich and Geneva, shows how quickly very real differences emerged between those challenging the authority and teaching of Rome; this has been a facet of Protestantism ever since. Chaos ensued and everything flew apart very rapidly. Not only did Protestant oppose Catholic, but Lutheran opposed Calvinist, and so on… until you reach the Thirty Years War, a hundred years after the start of the Reformation, and an utter cataclysm for large parts of Europe.

MacCulloch’s scope and knowledge astonishes, and I learned many new things on this, my second reading of the book. Luther approved of images, which is why so many German churches retain their glorious mediaeval painting, sculpture and carving, which was so comprehensively trashed by Henry VIII’s hooligans in this country. I learned that there were different attitudes to Purgatory in northern and southern Europe, crucial as it was the issue of indulgences – designed to allow the dead to escape Purgatory – which initially fired Luther’s anger in 1517. And then there was the issue of the difference between reading and writing, which I deal with in an earlier post (here).

There were apparently lengthy and repeated attempts over a considerable number of years to effect reconciliation between the Reformers and Rome, but eventually the Roman hard-liners defeated the conciliators in the 1540s, and then followed the Council of Trent and the entrenchment of the Counter-Reformation. The picture of Protestantism is fragmented, that of the Catholic Church monolithic, and elsewhere I read recently that what the Catholic Church offers are rigid, inviolable beliefs, pronounced with authority, to be accepted and obeyed, no questions asked, but along with that, a recognition that its stance is an ideal and recognising that humans are necessarily imperfect and fallible; nevertheless, the Church gives its believers something to aspire to, even if they don’t achieve it. Somehow – although it’s not for me – that is rather more humane than the hellfire and damnation of Protestant fundamentalism.

When he deals with the Reformation in England, MacCulloch pulls no punches, labelling it as one of the most violent in Europe, and laying out much evidence which contradicts the feeling that we like to have about ourselves and our country, that we are such a tolerant place.

MacCulloch manages to offer clear explanations to non-believers, and without patronising believers, and those who are familiar with the events and issues; there are copious helpful notes and references and an excellent bibliography. His scope is very wide, and justifiably so. This is the book on the subject, I think.

La Belle Sauvage – again…

If you think about it, the Dark Materials trilogy is a self-contained work that cannot itself be added to or extended: the events of those novels span multiple universes, made possible by the operations of Lord Asriel, and also by the use of the subtle knife, and when the novels end, the doors between the universes must all be sealed up, and the knife broken, so no further movement between worlds is possible: this is what makes the separation of Will and Lyra at the end of The Amber Spyglass so moving and painful – as well as necessary.

So, any subsequent books, including La Belle Sauvage and whatever the second and third parts of The Book of Dust is to be called, are additions: La Belle Sauvage happens in Lyra’s world, which we all know and love, but does not extend outside of it. The machinations of the Church, and Asriel, and others researching the Rusakov particle, will lead to the fantastic events of the trilogy ten years later, and the ten years after those events, the following books may be set in Will’s or Lyra’s world (or both) I imagine, but without connection between them.

What these limitations leave Philip Pullman with, it seems to me, are his ideas, which for me were always at the heart of the Dark Materials trilogy anyway: questions of innocence and experience, the notion of good and evil, original sin, and the role of God, if there is one.

The world of the Church and the Magisterium is a cruel and Calvinistic one, it seems to me, and its evil has been clarified for me by some of the reading I’ve been doing lately that has been prompted by the 500^th anniversary of Luther‘s ninety-five theses and the start of the Reformation. One of the things which came from the Reformation was a stronger emphasis on what can only be called predestination: the idea that, in religious terms, or if one accepts that particular Christian doctrine, most people are born with no hope of salvation, doomed to damnation, and the small (smug?) band of the elect, or the saved, are saved through no effort of their own. Obviously I oversimplify, but it’s a pretty cruel God that some people have invented, and one that my own Catholic upbringing makes me find repellent.

The idea that we must try to build the Republic of Heaven here and now, in the world we are actually living in, is not a new one, though Pullman has made it clear and concrete in a different way in HDM. The choice to rebel against an arbitrary power (God, if you like) was evil, wrong, Satan-prompted, in traditional Christian terms, although even Milton in his epic Paradise Lost cannot help turning Satan into some kind of hero. But Pullman emphasises that the choice to reject control, to assume power oneself, is a positive and liberating one, as well as being the one that makes us fully human; again, it’s this final point that Milton cannot avoid in his poem. So, ultimately, is this choice to be human wrong – a sin – or inevitable, given our free will, and also liberating: this is what we are, and can be?

Free will is the problem, of course, for us humans now: many can and do choose evil, make wrong choices that harm and oppress others. Predestination removes the problem: we don’t have free will if we are predestined to damnation from the moment of birth, with no hope of changing our fate through our own actions, and what follows then is that nothing that happens in this world is of any ultimate significance or consequence at all: the elect get heaven anyway, and everyone else ends up in hell…

Back to Pullman, who nails his colours clearly to the mast in HDM: the Fall was a felix culpa, but not in the traditional Christian sense: the Fall liberates us to be human. Will and Lyra made many choices, considered and with the help and advice of many wise creatures, on their epic journey. Having read and enjoyed La Belle Sauvage, but thought further some of its inevitable limitations, I now realise that it’s the next two books that I’m really waiting for: what did happen next?

On 31 October, 1517

All sorts of things have been reminding me of October 31 being the 500^th anniversary of Martin Luther‘s 95 theses, whether or not these were actually nailed to the church door in Wittenberg. Having a Catholic school education in England in the 1960s was an interesting experience, as there was still some of the feeling of being a member of a persecuted minority in the air; we were presented with a sketchy outline of the split in the Church as part of history lessons at primary school. Moving to a secondary school where the Anglican Church was the norm and saw itself as continuous with the church brought to England by Augustine at the end of the sixth century, I was offered an account of events from an opposite perspective, together with no small amount of mockery of Catholic beliefs and practices. Then I moved to a Catholic secondary school and got everything in more detail from the ‘right’ perspective again…

I suppose those experiences were useful in terms of teaching me about different viewpoints; they certainly got me interested in what could have caused such major ructions at the heart of Christianity. I’m still learning, and there’s an excellent explanation of the doctrine of justification by faith alone in this week’s edition of The Tablet.

My travels have taught me how different the Reformation was in Germany compared with England; in Germany there seems to have been much more of a continuation than a violent rupture; no mass iconoclasm such as destroyed so many cultural riches in England. I continue to be appalled by the vandalism and wanton destruction of Henry VIII’s reign.

There are three writers who I’​ve found very helpful in developing knowledge and understanding of the religious issues and historical events. One is a Catholic priest who wrote in the 1950s, Philip Hughes, who wrote a short volume on the Reformation in general, and a second, monumental tome, The Reformation in England, which details the demolition of Catholic England.

Then there is Eamon Duffy, who has written works of socio-religious history which trace the actual effects of the English Reformation on its people in two detailed and astonishingly well-researched books, The Stripping of the Altars, and The Voices of Morebath. This second volume looks at the changes as they affected on small rural community over the years between the first breach with Rome and the Elizabethan settlement.

Finally there is Diarmaid MacCulloch, whose hefty tome Reformation came out in 2003, and which I have decided to revisit as we come up to that symbolic 500^th anniversary. I’ll write more about his book when I’ve finished it.

And then, I cannot forget some of the literature which uses the Reformation as its starting-point. Kingsley Amis‘ novel The Alteration posits the Reformation never having happened in England and focuses on the moral horror of a young boy who is due to be castrated to preserve his voice for use by the Church. And Keith Roberts‘ Pavane, a far better novel for my money, is set in a world where the Reformation also didn’t happen, along with various other events consequent upon it…

A curious novel – Q – was published a decade or so, apparently written by an Italian collective who presented themselves as one Luther Blissett. It focuses on the social upheavals in Europe during the early years of the Reformation particularly the Anabaptists and the events in Munster, along with the early efforts of Rome to thwart what was going on.

Finally, I can’t overlook the astonishing religious poetry of my favourite poet, John Donne, a man genuinely torn by the religious strife in England and the theological controversies – although he ultimately knew which side his bread was buttered on. He brings to his Holy Sonnets and other poems the same ardour he brought to his sexual conquests and fantasies in his love lyrics, before he ‘saw the light’, took holy orders in the Church of England and went on to become Dean of St Paul’s and a man whose sermons people came from all over Europe to hear. Not much likelihood of similar fervour nowadays.

Heiko A Oberman: Luther

I should probably give up on reading religious history, because I never seem to achieve the clarity I’m looking for. It will be 500 years next year since Martin Luther’s famous 95 theses started the Reformation, splitting western Christendom irreparably and in England leading to cultural vandalism of an order that parallels that wrought in other lands by ISIS and the Taliban in more recent years.

So, what am I looking to find out? What Luther and associates actually disagreed with Rome about, in theological terms, the question of justification and righteousness, and whether by faith alone or by good works too. The well-known stuff about the horrendous abuses and immoralities of the mediaeval church is easier to take on board.

This book clearly demonstrates how religious reform and politics were inextricably tied up with the evolution and development of the modern nation-state, which I’d deduced after a fashion, but never been fully clear about: across the whole of Europe, people were seeking independence from Rome’s interference, the spiritual trying to usurp the temporal, and what’s more, some attempting to do this whilst remaining Catholic, while others moved definitively away from the church. It’s very detailed and probing in its survey of what is known of Luther’s life and the development of his thought and theology, and presents new knowledge and insights: the theological wranglings remain incredibly difficult to follow, even for someone who has read quite a bit in this field, both history and theology. He catalogues the wider ramifications of events, and debunks a good number of long-held myths, too. It was news to me how much of a millenarian Luther was, as well as how increasingly anti-Jewish he became.

And the nit-picking… how many angels can you fit on the head of a pin? The more I read, the more I’m astonished at the twisting and perverting of what we think was the original basis of Christianity: the heresies, the councils, the definitions, the religious bureaucracy, the torturing and killing of those who dared to question or disagree… it does seem utterly bonkers. In a few days I shall be visiting some of the Cathar sites in southern France. They were a Christian sect annihilated by the Church in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with a Catholic bishop famously instructing troops to kill everyone in a captured town without distinguishing between heretics and true believers, on the grounds that “God will recognise his own”…

What the reformers were not interested in doing was going back to the origins, the church of the earliest days of Christianity: too many vested interests involved there. It all does seem, sadly, to have been as much about grabbing temporal power and wealth, at least for those not actually inventing the new theologies. An interesting, and difficult book.