Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450–1650. By Carlos M. N. Eire (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2016) 893 pp. $40.00 Unavailable

This may be a case of a qualified reviewer in the wrong journal, since this lengthy and thoughtful survey of early modern Christianity makes no effort to be interdisciplinary. Even when religion and politics seem “really inseparable,” Eire insists that “distinguishing between the process of self-definition and the enforcement of theological and ethical norms … is absolutely necessary” (564). Less than 2 percent of his text is devoted to “Christian soldiers,” and the Puritan Revolution receives more space than the Thirty Years’ War (548–561). Religion always remains dominant, pulling everything else into its orbit. Eire’s preface names three major features of this work, “the first … [being] the conviction that religion is a real factor in history.” “The chief overarching assumption of the entire book” is that “we cannot begin to comprehend what we are now as Westerners without first understanding the changes wrought by the Reformations” (xvii). His epilogue...