Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Reformation in Germany
Within a generation a new way of looking at all history has become common among students of the past, a recognition of the fundamental importance of the economic basis of society, and the influence of economic changes, on all human institutions and movements. The economic interpretation of history has not yet been applied to the period of the Reformation, and that fact is the chief justification of this attempt to retell a story that has been so often told, yet told inadequately. That the great religious struggle of the sixteenth century was only a phase of the social revolution then going on in Europe and effecting a transformation of an its institutions, that momentous economic changes were the underlying cause of political and religious movements, are ideas for which the reader will look in vain in books on the Reformation accessible to him. But these ideas are now accepted by most historical students, and in the light of them all the history of the past is undergoing a reinterpretation. The external events of the Reformation have been told before with substantial accuracy; what is now needed is illumination of the facts by the light of this new knowledge.
By itself this would be a sufficient justification for the writing of a new book on this old subject. But there are other reasons. For more than a generation, Europe has been swept with lighted candle to find the smallest fragment of document, or one overlooked fact, that could shed light on the Reformation period. The result has been the accumulation of an enormous mass of material, much of it trivial and jejune - mountains of chaff, to speak plainly, with here and there a kernel of precious wheat. Little, relatively, has been done in the way of comparing, sifting, unifying this mass of useful and useless information. Monographs have multiplied, it is true, until every character of the age, however little noteworthy, has his biography; and every event, however obscure, has its separate documented story. Has not the time come for the telling of the larger story once more, in the light of this newly discovered body of fact?
The scientific method of studying history, with its emphasis on original research, its multiplication of documents, its flood of monographs on fields more and more restricted, tends to issue in the mean and sordid collection of mere fact, and to make the writing of history, as a branch of pure literature, a lost art. The reader finds himself, in these days, condemned to a dreary pilgrimage through a valley of dry bones.
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