The year 2017 saw a flurry of quincentenary publications on the Reformation. Of these, one of the most important German-language histories was Erlöste und Verdammte: Eine Geschichte der Reformation by Thomas Kaufmann, the Göttingen church historian whose expertise on Martin Luther and the early German Reformation can hardly be doubted. Kaufmann’s book had much to recommend it. It did not treat Luther as a national hero but appreciated his sometimes unpleasant humanity. It recognized structural conditions—economic, political, intellectual, and cultural—that contributed to the dramatic changes that Kaufmann portrayed as emerging out of Luther’s challenges to the Catholic Church. Kaufmann’s book did not incorporate some key recent insights from social and cultural history, as well as related histories of gender and sexuality and global interconnections, but the work was well written and generally well received.

In 2023, Tony Crawford’s English translation, rendered as The Saved and the Damned, feels even more outdated. Recently, European historians have been putting generative energy into rethinking narratives that identify the origins of “modernity” in Europe, tracing its “progress” into other areas of the world. Such revisions have cast a critical light on older histories that saw the Reformation as having some distinct role in ushering in the modern world. Yet the Reformation’s singular contributions to the development of modernity remain central to this book. Kaufmann’s core argument is that the Reformation should be understood in the singular, as an intellectual challenge by Luther to the Catholic Church in 1517 that ignited a new historical epoch. Such an approach contrasts with recent efforts to treat the diversity of intellectual, social, cultural, and political changes as one of Reformations, in the plural. Kaufmann recognizes the diversity of belief and practices in the post-Reformation world, for sure, but leaves methodological complexities required to appreciate that diversity unresolved. He also sometimes treats the appeal of “the Reformation” as self-evident; it failed in this account only when a coercive force (like the Spanish Inquisition) subdued it. While for Kaufmann, Luther is the Reformation’s central protagonist, scholars from Lucien Febvre in 1929 (“Une question mal posée: Les origins de la Réforme française et le problème général des causes de la Réforme,” Revue Historique 161, no. 1: 1–73) to Nicholas Terpstra in 2015 (Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World: An Alternative History of the Reformation [Cambridge]) have offered significant insights precisely by de-centering Luther. In 2012, Berndt Hamm also notably called for an end to thinking of the Reformation as a distinct epoch (“Abschied vom Epochendenken in der Reformationsforschung. Ein Plädoyer,” Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 39, no. 3: 373–411). One wonders if not grappling with these types of challenges more expansively constitutes a snub, an oversight, a blind spot, or a concession for the sake of brevity.

Outside the German-speaking lands, Kaufmann offers some useful insights. He highlights the importance of itinerant ethnic Germans (especially merchants and students) in spreading evangelical ideas across Europe. His attention to Scandinavia also allows him to present the English Reformation within a typology of monarchical reformations, rather than as an exception. At times, Kaufmann’s claims are out of step with the current scholarship, though. Few experts on Reformation Geneva today would suggest that consistorial discipline so effectively ended illegitimate pregnancies (161). Most scholars of the Dutch Reformation no longer describe the Revolt of the Netherlands as a “political liberation” of the Dutch from “Spanish repression” (171–72) but as a civil war. Few scholars still treat the repression of dissent under the English Queen Mary I as distinctly brutal (182, 199), compared to that under other monarchs. And few historians of the post-Reformation would assert so boldly that “religious uniformity remained a cultural characteristic of territories in Latin Europe well into the modern period” (233), given the attention in recent years to informal practices of pluralism and survival strategies adopted by religious minorities.

The final two chapters have been printed in reverse order from the German original (wisely, in my view). The first centers on meanings assigned to the Reformation from 1617 into the late twentieth century. This topic has been covered by others, though Kaufmann provides useful updates. The final chapter offers Kaufmann’s assessment of the long-term consequences of the Reformation; he argues that it promoted distinct national cultures, secularism, a respect for universal education, and a deepening sense of subjectivity in what Kaufmann describes as the “modern West.” When considering the Reformation from a global perspective, he focuses on Europeans’ spread of Protestant ideas to Latin America, Asia, and Africa rather than how encounters with the diversity of the world’s peoples shaped Europeans’ cosmologies and identities.

The Saved and the Damned is unlikely to serve as a replacement for existing English-language overviews of the Reformation. Still, the author’s deep knowledge of Luther and the early Reformation makes this book essential reading for graduate students and other new scholars seeking to understand the spread of Protestant ideas. It is too bad that the press devoted insufficient attention to editing. The error on page 240, where a translated caption of an image removed from the German original sits in the middle of the page, is particularly awkward for such a well-regarded publisher.