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Christian Books & Bibles

Ryrie, Alec

Bible Study & Reference

Harper-collins Publishers

Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

William Collins

Unbelievers

HarperCollins GB

Why have Western societies that were once overwhelmingly Christian become so secular? Looking to the feelings and faith of ordinary people, the award-winning author of Protestants Alec Ryrie offers a bold new history of atheism. 
We think we know the history of faith: how the ratio of Christian believers has declined and a secular age dawned. In this startlingly original history, Alex Ryrie puts faith in the dock to explore how religious belief didn’t just fade away. Rather, atheism bloomed as a belief system in its own right. 
Unbelievers looks back to the middle ages when it seemed impossible not to subscribe to Christianity, through the crisis of the Reformation and to the powerful, challenging cultural currents of the centuries since. As this history shows, the religious journey of the Western world was lived and steered not just by published philosophy and the celebrated thinkers of the day – the Machiavellis and Michel de Montaignes – but by men and women at every level of society. Their voices and feelings permeate this book in the form of diaries, letters and court records. 
Tracing the roots of atheism, Ryrie shows that our emotional responses to the times can lead faith to wax and wane: anger at a corrupt priest or anxiety in a turbulent moment spark religious doubt as powerfully as any intellectual revolution. With Christianity under contest and ethical redefinitions becoming more and more significant, Unbelievers shows that to understand how something as intuitive as belief is shaped over time, we must look to an emotional history – one with potent lessons for our still angry and anxious age.

History

Historical Study & Educational Resources

The Reformation was about ideas and power, but it was also about real human lives. Alec Ryrie provides the first comprehensive account of what it actually meant to live a Protestant life in England and Scotland between 1530 and 1640, drawing on a rich mixture of contemporary devotional works, sermons, diaries, biographies, and autobiographies to uncover the lived experience of early modern Protestantism. Beginning from the surprisingly urgent, multifaceted emotions of Protestantism, Ryrie explores practices of prayer, of family and public worship, and of reading and writing, tracking them through the life course from childhood through conversion and vocation to the deathbed. He examines what Protestant piety drew from its Catholic predecessors and contemporaries, and grounds that piety in material realities such as posture, food, and tears. This perspective shows us what it meant to be Protestant in the British Reformations: a meeting of intensity (a religion which sought authentic feeling above all, and which dreaded hypocrisy and hard-heartedness) with dynamism (a progressive religion, relentlessly pursuing sanctification and dreading idleness). That combination, for good or ill, gave the Protestant experience its particular quality of restless, creative zeal. The Protestant devotional experience also shows us that this was a broad-based religion: for all the differences across time, between two countries, between men and women, and between puritans and conformists, this was recognisably a unified culture, in which common experiences and practices cut across supposed divides. Alec Ryrie shows us Protestantism, not as the preachers on all sides imagined it, but as it was really lived.

Being Protestant in Reformation Britain

Religion & Spirituality

Oxford University Press

An earl's son, plotting murder by witchcraft; conjuring spirits to find buried treasure; a stolen coat embroidered with pure silver; crooked gaming-houses and brothels; a terrifying new disease, and the self-trained surgeon who claims he can treat it. This is the world of Gregory Wisdom, a physician, magician, and consummate con-man at work in sixteenth-century London. Drawing on previously unknown documents to reconstruct this extraordinary man's career, Alec Ryrie takes us through the cut-throat business of early modern medicine, down to Tudor London's gangland of fraud and organized crime; from the world of Renaissance magi and Kabbalistic conjurers to street-corner wizards; and into the chaotic, exhilarating religious upheavals of the Reformation. On the way, we learn how Tudor England's dignified public face and its rapacious underworld were intimately connected to each other. Gregory Wisdom's career is an object lesson in how to conjure up wealth and respectability from nothing in a turbulent age. And it provides a unique glimpse into a world intoxicated with new ideas, where it was impossible to know quite what to believe--or who to trust.

The Sorcerer's Tale: Faith and Fraud in Tudor England

Europe

An earl's son, plotting murder by witchcraft; conjuring spirits to find buried treasure; a stolen coat embroidered with pure silver; crooked gaming-houses and brothels; a terrifying new disease, and the self-trained surgeon who claims he can treat it. This is the world of Gregory Wisdom, a physician, magician, and consummate con-man in sixteenth-century London. Drawing on previously unknown documents to reconstruct this extraordinary man's career, Alec Ryrie takes us through the cut-throat business of early modern medicine, down to Tudor London's gangland of fraud and organized crime; from the world of Renaissance magi and Kabbalistic conjurers to street-corner wizards; and into the chaotic, exhilarating religious upheavals of the Reformation. On the way, we learn how Tudor England's dignified public face and its rapacious underworld were intimately connected to each other. Gregory Wisdom's career is an object lesson in how to conjure up wealth and respectability from nothing in a turbulent age. Praised as "an excellent snapshot of a time intrigued by the spiritual realm" (Los Angeles Times), this is a unique glimpse into a world intoxicated by new ideas.

'Masterly' - Eric Metaxas 'Mould-breaking' - John Guy 'A little gem of a book' - Suzannah Lipscomb From the Introduction: 'There is no such thing as "the English Reformation". A "Reformation" is a composite event which is only made visible by being framed the right way. It is like a "war": a label we put onto a particular set of events, while we decide that other - equally violent - acts are not part of that or of any "war". Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English people knew that they were living through an age of religious upheaval, but they did not know that it was "the English Reformation", any more than the soldiers at the battle of Agincourt knew that they were fighting in "the Hundred Years' War". . . . 'Plainly these religious upheavals permanently changed England and, by extension, the many other countries on which English culture has made its mark. There is not, however, a single master narrative of all this turmoil. How could there be? . . . The way you choose to tell the story is governed by what you think is important and what is trivial, by whether there are heroes or villains you want to celebrate or condemn, and by the legacies and lessons which you think matter. Once you have chosen your frame, it will give you the story you want. 'So this book does not tell "the story" of "the English Reformation". It tells the stories of six English Reformations, or rather six stories of religious change in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. The stories are parallel and overlapping, but each has a somewhat different chronological frame, cast of characters and set of pivotal events, and has left a different legacy.'

The English Reformation: A Very Brief History (Very Brief Histories)

SPCK Publishing

The last years of Henry VIII's life, 1539-47, have conventionally been seen as a time when the king persecuted Protestants. This book argues that Henry's policies were much more ambiguous; that he continued to give support to Protestantism and that many accordingly also remained loyal to him. It also examines why the Protestants eventually adopted a more radical, oppositional stance, and argues that English Protestantism's eventual identity was determined during these years.

The Gospel and Henry VIII: Evangelicals in the Early English Reformation (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History)

Cambridge University Press

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Books by Ryrie, Alec