Public-domain ebook
Language: en2,054 downloads on Project Gutenberg
Subjects
In: History - European·History - Early Modern (c. 1450-1750)·History - Religious
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #18879.
The Age of the Reformation is a scholarly survey written by Preserved Smith, a Harvard‑trained historian, and first published in 1920 by Henry Holt. The work opens with a detailed preface that explains the editorial choices made for the electronic version, replacing section symbols, moving footnotes, and handling marginal notes, before launching into a sweeping introduction that likens the early‑sixteenth century to a sudden spring after a long winter. Smith frames the period as a dramatic transformation, using Luther’s lifespan as a convenient measuring stick and noting the explosion of printed books, new artistic visions, and a “new heaven and a new earth” that reshaped European life.
The book’s voice is that of an early‑20th‑century academic, dense yet readable, with a formal, citation‑heavy style that reflects the era’s emphasis on exhaustive scholarship. Its structure follows a traditional chapter‑by‑chapter layout, each section meticulously annotated, making it especially appealing to readers interested in the intellectual, economic, and social dimensions of the Reformation. Students of history, scholars of religious studies, and anyone drawn to a comprehensive, source‑rich account of how the sixteenth‑century upheavals intersected with broader cultural currents will find Smith’s methodical narrative both informative and engaging.
The opening · free to read
In the original book, its various chapters' subsections were denoted with the "section" symbol. In this e-text, that symbol has been replaced with the word "SECTION". Where two of these symbols were together, they have been replaced with the word "SECTIONS".
Footnotes have been moved to the end of the section they appear in, rather than to the end of the chapter containing that section.
The original book had many side-notes in its pages' left or right margin areas. Some of these sidenotes were at the beginning of a paragraph, some were placed elsewhere alongside a paragraph, in relation to what the sidenote referred to inside the paragraph. In this e-text, sidenotes that appeared at the beginning of a paragraph in the original book are placed to precede their reference paragraph. All other sidenotes have been enclosed in square brackets and placed into the paragraph near where they were in the original book.
Some of the dates in this book are accompanied by a small dagger or sword symbol, signifying the person's year of death. Since this symbol doesn't exist in the ASCII character set, I've substituted "d." for it.
Page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers enclosed in curly braces, e.g. {99}. They have been located where page breaks occurred in the original book. This has been done only in the book's main chapters (I-XIV), not its front matter. For its Bibliography and its Index, page numbers have been placed only at the start of each of those two sections.
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