100 books like Heretics and Believers

For all the books about the Protestant Reformation, very few stop to consider what it meant to be Protestant – how it felt, or what daily life was really like. Alec Ryrie tackles these questions both with empathy and analytical rigour, exploring the struggles and triumphs of individuals seeking to live godly lives against a background of ongoing religious change.

This book really foregrounds "ordinary" people and, in doing so, highlights the extraordinary quality of the everyday. It helped me to reach a better understanding of Protestantism as a dynamic and sometimes contradictory movement, and of its emotional resonance for those who embraced the reformed faith.

This book changed the way that I thought about the Reformation landscape. Alexandra Walsham shows that it was not only a terrain of ruins and fragments but also of converted and adapted structures, as well as of the memories and folk stories embedded in physical sites.

It taught me a lot about how the dissolution specifically was remembered, but also about the broader transformations within which it took place. The details in this book are endlessly rich and fascinating, and it is a great example of writing that takes serious the idea that history is rooted in space as well as time.

This is not just a book about the destruction, dispersal, and re-organisation of medieval libraries after the Reformation; it also encourages us to interrogate the very nature of the collections upon which historians rely.

From Jennifer Summit, I learnt that it is misguided to think of early modern libraries and archives as neutral spaces; rather, they shape and change the meaning of the works displayed on their shelves.

In her book, we come to see such libraries, including the foundational collections of the British Library and the Bodleian Library, as distinctively post-Reformation in character, paving the way for accounts of the triumph of Protestantism across the centuries.

This book explores post-Reformation attitudes to the medieval past, which was continuously debated and rewritten according to the shifting religious landscape of the sixteenth century and beyond.

Helen Parish’s work helped me to see the merits and benefits of crossing the rather arbitrary divide between the medieval and early modern periods, since it so deftly places medieval and Reformation sources in dialogue.

Her book also makes fascinating reading for anyone wanting to better understand reformed Protestantism as a culture of adaptation and accommodation, as much as of destruction and the outright rejection of the Catholic past. 

This incisive account of the development of Protestant extremism reveals that the beliefs of the Pilgrims were not novel. Dr Gunther traces their development back to the early years of the Reformation. When the religion of images and priests was replaced by the religion of words and preachers the implications for the English church could only be extensive and devastating. When the Bible was translated into the vernacular and increasing numbers of Christians read it for themselves it is clear (though only in hindsight) that the centre could not hold. People were driven by conscience to oppose, not only their bishops, but also their sovereign. This book is valuable for weaving the separatist vision into the weft and warp of Tudor society.

Eamon Duffy’s justly acclaimed ‘microhistory’ transports us away from the world of bishops, parliament and the court in order to track, across four crucial decades, the experiences of a tiny village on the edge of Exmoor in Devon, based on meticulous recordings in the ‘church book’ by the long-serving parish priest. It is a story in miniature of the tragically destructive aspects of the Reformation, but also an uplifting one in its depiction of the capacity of ordinary people to survive and adapt.

Since the later sixteenth century, historians have been trying to explain why the Irish refused to follow their political leaders into the newly established protestant church. Jefferies’s book highlights the scale of the problem – showing that by the turn of the seventeenth century, seventy years after the beginnings of protestant reform, the number of native Irish converts amounted to little more than one hundred. Pushing against the triumphalism that marked an older way of writing the history of the reformation, Jefferies demonstrates the popularity of the late medieval church and argues that historians should reframe their research questions.

It might be less important to ask why the protestant reformation failed, he suggests, and more important to ask why – despite everything – the Catholic church remained so popular.

So it is not a novel, but might as well be for its twists, turns, and transformations. Edinburgh in 1572 was a small town of some 3,000 families, so my real-life narrator William Fowler would know and meet one of its most notable citizens, Preacher John Knox of Haddington, along with his young and socially aristocratic second wife (the latter attribute was more a matter of gossip and criticism than the thirty-seven years age gap), and witnessed him being helped up into the pulpit at St Giles to give his congregation a last good talking to. This is the most recent (drawing on a major new cache of letters), and highly readable, life of the man who pushed Scotland towards a Presbyterian Calvinist form of Protestantism – crucially distinct from that evolving in England under the Auld Hag aka Elizabeth I. He is revealed as a much more complex and… show more.

This is my all-time favourite history book. It’s non-fiction, but is far from dry or academic, it grabs you from the get-go and is like a thriller, a real page-turner.

We all know about the religious persecutions of Mary I’s reign, a queen who has gone down in history as Bloody Mary, but in God’s Traitors, historian Jessie Childs explores just how dangerous it was being a Catholic in Elizabethan England.

Childs focuses on the Vaux family and their experiences of being Catholic as Elizabeth I swings from religious tolerance to viewing Catholics as the enemy.

It’s a fantastic read.

My upbringing taught me to believe that John Knox was the Antichrist but that only piqued my curiosity to know more about the Thundering Scot. What fired his driving ambition? Why did the ordained priest reject the Roman Catholic Church? How did he become leader of the Scottish Reformation? Was the twice married preacher who wrote The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women really such a rampant misogynist? How did his public persona differ from the private family man? Rev Lamont answers these questions and more in an exciting non-fiction account that reads more like an adventure thriller than a history.

While Jane Dawson’s comprehensive biography tackles the theological issues, this short book looks beyond the caricature of the pulpit-thumping Calvinist to reveal a complex, contradictory character.