reformation

name

1. The religious movement initiated in the 16th century against the Roman Catholic Church, leading to more than a century of internecine conflict that ended with a durable division between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism.

   “Who or what is a Catholic? This Greek word has become one of the chief battlegrounds in western Latin Christianity […] How can the word describe all of these things and still have any meaning? I have written this book about the sixteenth-century Reformation in part to answer that question. The Reformation introduced many more complications to the word; in fact there were very many different Reformations, nearly all of which would have said that they were simply aimed at recreating authentic Catholic Christianity. For simplicity’s sake I will take for granted that this book examines multiple Reformations, some of which were directed by the Pope. From now on I will continue to use the shorthand term ‘Reformation’, but readers should therefore note that this is often intended to embrace both Protestantism and the religious movements commonly known as Tridentine Catholicism, the Catholic Reformation or Counter-Reformation: the revitalized part of the old Church which remained loyal to the Pope. ’Catholic’ is clearly a word which a lot of people want to possess. By contrast, it is remarkable how many religious labels started life as a sneer: the Reformation was full of angry words. […] Reformation disputes were passionate about words because words were myriad refractions of a God one of whose names was Word: a God encountered in a library of books itself simply called ‘Book’ – the Bible. It is impossible to understand modern Europe without understanding these sixteenth-century upheavals in Latin Christianity. They represented the greatest fault-line to appear in Christian culture since the Latin and Greek halves of the Roman empire went their separate ways a thousand years before; they produced a house divided. The fault-line is the business of this book.”

noun

Etymology: Originally a variant of Etymology 1. In later use also independently from re- + formation, after re-form.

1. Alternative form of re-formation.