Customer Reviews

Renaissance and Reformation: The Intellectual Genesis

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This is a book on a current topical subject. In the wake of 9/11 a number of writers have attributed the different attitudes in the Islamic world to secularism (and other issues) to the absence of a phenomenon in the Islamic world comparable to the Renaissance and Reformation. At the same time, others have argued that part of the roots of at least the renaissance lie in Andalus, i.e. Islamic Spain, where muslim philosophers like Averroes have helped to transfer Greek philosophy from the antiquity to the post-medieval age.

This book had been well received by critics (at least some I have read). However I found it to be an extremely detailed description (in chronological order) of innumerable events and actions of people involved in the genesis of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Although the author attempts to put both events in perspective, with an introduction on scholastic thought which had been dominant in the Christian West before the Reformation, I believe that it is certainly not an introduction to how Renaissance and Reformation have come about because it leaves many really big-picture questions unanswered. This book is excellent though for the reader who has had all those answers already and would like to know every discreet step of how this process unfolded.

To give you an idea of the author's style, here's one typical sentence :

"But Groote's spirituality also avoided the religious tensions imposed by Ockham's insistence on the potentially arbitrary nature of the decrees of a transcendent God, on the unicity of the divine act of foreknowledge and predestination which appeared to make effort otiose, and on the paradoxical and unsupported belief that God would nevertheless give grace to those who did whatever lay with them, while offering no means for individuals to ascertain their own spiritual state."

I suppose some will love it for its detail and quite a few others will hate it. I thought it was interesting, but hard work.