Whilst endorsing the traditinal view that Lollardy was indeed the lay face of Wycliffism, the author nevertheless challenges a number of cherished myths about England's late medieval heretics. Rex controversially argues that Wyclif and the Lollards were far less important than historians and literary scholars have often claimed, and takes issue with recent attempts to restore Lollardy to its once conventional position as a 'cause' of the Reformation.

“Yet catastrophist and triumphalist narratives, however sophisticated and nuanced the idiom, always suffer from a basic error: They oversimplify. To portray Luther as shattering church authority is to miss a simple historical truth: Church authority was already in a state of collapse and confusion by Luther’s day. Medieval Catholicism was a mess. Luther was responding to chaos, not creating it. Yet to portray Luther as recovering the pure gospel is really no better. It ignores his obvious connections to later medieval theology and the fact that he tore Protestantism itself in two, paving the way for the chaotic fragmentation we have today. Modern Evangelicals might portray him as one of their own, but they would have been no more acceptable to him than were the Zwinglians and Anabaptists of his own day.”

Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, explores 600 years of Germany's complex and often challenging history using objects, art, landmarks and literature.

To mark the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, Paul Hacker's landmark study Faith in Luther: Martin Luther and the Origin of Anthropocentric Religion appears now in a new English edition.

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, in his final memoir in 2016, remembers Paul Hacker as "a great master, someone with an unbelievably broad education, someone who knew the Fathers, knew Luther, and had mastered the whole history of Indian religion from scratch. What he wrote always had something new about it, he always went right to the bottom of things." No doubt one of the "things" he was referring to was Martin Luther's view of faith, which Hacker explores in this text.

St. Charles Borromeo, one of the great saints of the counter-reformation, or “Catholic Reform,” or “early modern Catholicism,” depending on your preferred historical-theological interpretation of that very long period. He along with St. Ignatius of Loyola, St. Philip Neri, and others were once associated with “the golden age” of confessional Catholicism, but now that age does not seem so golden anymore. Some of the reactions against Pope Francis seem to be the expression of (or to express a new enchantment with) medieval Christendom.