This book studies the connections between the political reform of the Holy Roman Empire and the German lands around 1500 and the sixteenth-century religious reformations, both Protestant and Catholic. It argues that the character of the political changes (dispersed sovereignty, local autonomy) prevented both a general reformation of the Church before 1520 and a national reformation thereafter. The resulting settlement maintained the public peace through politically structured religious communities (confessions), thereby avoiding further religious strife and fixing the confessions into the Empire's constitution. The Germans' emergence into the modern era as a people having two national religions was the reformation's principal legacy to modern Germany.

Winner of the 2010 Sixteenth Century Society and Conference's Gerald Strauss Book Prize

'This extraordinary book provides the reader with the best account of late medieval and early modern German history available in any language … This is a post-confessional history in which religion retains its centrality but not its polemical edge, a modern history that has been released from the shackles of modernization, and a history in which ordinary villagers and townsmen take their places in a story that was most often dictated by princes and nobles. And it is a story with a powerful narrative arc. What an achievement.'

H. C. Erik Midelfort - University of Virginia

'A commanding and brilliant view of the Reformation era. This masterful book is the new starting point for anyone seeking a fresh and up-to-date understanding of the Germanies, the reformations in religion, and the religious confessions linking the early modern and modern worlds … No one understands the volatile mix of politics, public life and religion better than Tom Brady.'

Tom Robisheaux - Duke University

'This is a quite extraordinary manuscript; one of those few books which can truly be termed a masterpiece. Tom Brady is the foremost senior scholar of the Reformation, and he has devoted his career to reshaping the way German Reformation history is understood, by bringing social and political history to bear on a terrain that used to be primarily that of ecclesiastical history. This book is the summation of his life’s work. No other scholar could command a similar range and depth of scholarship, and combine it with a completely original, mature vision of the entire period 1400 to 1650.'

Lyndal Roper - Balliol College, Oxford University

'Brady's writing is gripping, his scholarship deeply erudite, and his arguments are strongly and persuasively presented …There is no one better to have filled this need than Brady.'

Source: H-German

'… like no other history of the Holy Roman Empire … this book is interdisciplinary in the most judicious and fruitful ways. It is filled with riveting stories. Brady's analyses are often profound, yet his text includes basic information for the nonspecialist.'

Susan C. Karant-Nunn Source: American Historical Review