The volume opens where the Reformation did, with Martin Luther, presented not as a man carrying out a plan to remake the church but as a professor whose 1517 invitation to debate indulgences drew him into a quarrel he had not sought. What he wanted was the renewal of theology and of ordinary piety.

From there the century and a half to 1660 runs along two tracks. One is European and confessional: Calvin's Geneva, the radical and spiritualist currents around Karlstadt, Müntzer and Denck, the council at Trent and a wave of new Catholic orders, and the settlements reached at Augsburg, Nantes and Westphalia. The other is the extension of Christianity beyond Europe, marked by Jesuit missions to Japan and China and by the inquisition planted in Mexico and Peru.