Reviews for Dictionary of the Reformation (The Encyclopedia of Theology and Church)

The average rating for Dictionary of the Reformation (The Encyclopedia of Theology and Church) based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-12-14 00:00:00 Sara Woodbury Rating: 5 stars As a history nerd, I really enjoyed this book. I read the whole thing in the course of an afternoon, and I can honestly say that I was never bored. Melton explains things very clearly, and takes care to give as comprehensive a view as he can of the topics he talks about. This book provides an informational foundation for the public sphere in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and I will definitely return to it again and again as a reference guide.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-07-20 00:00:00 Sarah Brown A good companion to -- and critique of -- Habermas' The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere . Melton is much more readable and concrete than Habermas, of course, but also pretty intelligent about addressing the latter's weaknesses. In particular, Melton argues that the emergence of a political public sphere actually did not lag behind the emergence of a literary one; that the public sphere was as much noble as it was bourgeois; and that it facilitated reactionary and nationalist as much as liberal politics. Furthermore, Melton includes women in his picture of the eighteenth-century European public.