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ericwelch's review against another edition
5.0
1/17/12
- Just realized I forgot to rate this.
I love everything I've read by the Goldstones and this is starting out as no exception. They begin with a fascinating account of Gutenberg's invention (his patron Johann Fust attempted to take all the credit for it) of movable type. He did more than just that though, inventing the ink and a new press, as well. I was struck by the fact that he presented some of his first printed books at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1640. I had the good fortune to attend this fair several years ago and it's a librarian's wet dream. 9000 publishers (and that year attendance was down because I attended in October of 2001). I had no idea the fair had such an illustrious and long history.
Anyway, the 16th century was a battle between Charles V, Francois of France and Henry VIII, and control of ideas was vital. Gutenburg threatened to upset the applecart. But the real enabler was the printer Aldus Manutius who invented the octavo, making books portable, which, in turn spread ideas (coupled with the rise of humanism) around Europe. He worked with Erasmus to produce popular translations of many classic works, another seditious behavior.
Michael Servetus, a child prodigy, grew up in northern Spain, surrounded by an unusual heterodoxy, the political battles between France, England and Spain, the mixture of Muslim and Jewish cultures, and religious minorities battling for recognition. He learned Hebrew, a language usually forbidden at the time in order to prevent the Old Testament from being read in the original. (It wasn't until 1531 under Francis I in France that Hebrew was permitted to be taught openly in universities.)
For a thousand years, the Catholic Church had prohibited general reading and distribution of the Bible wanting no stray interpretations to be promoted. Finally the Complutensian Polyglot Bible was approved by the Vatican in 1522. It placed the entire Bible side by side in Hebrew, Greek and Latin Vulgate. Unusually, Servetus (he had changed his name from Miguel Serveto partially because of prejudice against the Spanish) could read all of them. Additionally, he could read Arabic and so he read the Koran as well. He was seventeen years old. He decided that only a return to "classic biblical scholarship could save religion."
Servetus was so horrified by the pomp and waste of Pope Clement's (he had been captured following the sack of Rome in 1527 when Charles V's troops mutinied and went nuts) coronation of Charles that he left his service and moved to Basel, then a hotbed of the Protestant Reformation under Johannes Oecolampadius (aka Hausschein or Hussgen.) Servetus had come to the conclusion, after reading the original Biblical texts, that Arius had been correct (see [b:When Jesus Became God The Struggle to Define Christianity during the Last Days of Rome|253881|When Jesus Became God The Struggle to Define Christianity during the Last Days of Rome|Richard E. Rubenstein|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173165094s/253881.jpg|246026]) and that no intermediary was needed between man and God.
By this time, Protestantism, like all revolutionary movements, had become reactionary and was more interested in accommodation with Rome than removing its underpinnings. Realizing he was risking Protestant wrath, Servetus fled to Strasbourg where he found a publisher for De Trinitatis Erroribus (On the Errors of the Trinity.) The book had a major flaw: "Servetus was SO smart that it never seemed to occur to him that his arguments would be more effective if he didn't imply that anyone holding an opposing view was an idiot." Despite this -- or perhaps because of it -- and heretical views being all the rage, the book sold very well but it placed Servetus squarely in the sights of the Inquisition. Servetus, much like Salman Rushdie, had underestimated the zeal of his opponents.
It was Calvin who used the Inquisition to bring down Servetus. Furious with the publication of Christianisimi Restitutio and Servetus's intemperate remarks regarding some of Calvin's writings, Calvin brought down his and the Roman Church's wrath upon Michael head, resulting in, well, you'll see. The book itself, hero of the story, contained some extraordinary medical discoveries. It was Servetus who proposed the workings of the circulatory system, oxygenation of the blood, and the different functions of veins and arteries, discoveries credited to researchers much later.
The intolerance and fear for ideas not one's own led not long after to the St. Bartholemew's massacre resulting in the slaughter of 3000 Protestants in Paris, a number that proportionally today might be in the tens of thousands. It's a wonder the human race survived the internecine battle between Catholics and Protestants.
quote regarding the Thirty Years War which followed: In the Thirty Years' War every hatred, ambition, and fear that had been unleashed by the spread of knowledge erupted in an orgy of sustained horror. Although central Europe, mostly Germany, was the battleground, there was not a country in Europe that did not contribute combatants and victims. From 1618 to 1648, Catholic fought Calvinist, Calvinist fought Lutheran, Hapsburg fought Bourbon, nationalist fought imperialist. The wreckage was unthinkable. Cities were revisited again and again by a succession of marauding armies that killed, burned, raped, stole every bit of food in sight, then ruined the fields so that nothing further could be grown. In the Netherlands they had eaten rats and leather to survive; in Germany they ate each other. No statistic is more chilling than this: there were 21 million people living in Germany in 1618 at the start of the war; by 1648, the war's end, only 13 million were left. The plague was not so efficient.
- Just realized I forgot to rate this.
I love everything I've read by the Goldstones and this is starting out as no exception. They begin with a fascinating account of Gutenberg's invention (his patron Johann Fust attempted to take all the credit for it) of movable type. He did more than just that though, inventing the ink and a new press, as well. I was struck by the fact that he presented some of his first printed books at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1640. I had the good fortune to attend this fair several years ago and it's a librarian's wet dream. 9000 publishers (and that year attendance was down because I attended in October of 2001). I had no idea the fair had such an illustrious and long history.
Anyway, the 16th century was a battle between Charles V, Francois of France and Henry VIII, and control of ideas was vital. Gutenburg threatened to upset the applecart. But the real enabler was the printer Aldus Manutius who invented the octavo, making books portable, which, in turn spread ideas (coupled with the rise of humanism) around Europe. He worked with Erasmus to produce popular translations of many classic works, another seditious behavior.
Michael Servetus, a child prodigy, grew up in northern Spain, surrounded by an unusual heterodoxy, the political battles between France, England and Spain, the mixture of Muslim and Jewish cultures, and religious minorities battling for recognition. He learned Hebrew, a language usually forbidden at the time in order to prevent the Old Testament from being read in the original. (It wasn't until 1531 under Francis I in France that Hebrew was permitted to be taught openly in universities.)
For a thousand years, the Catholic Church had prohibited general reading and distribution of the Bible wanting no stray interpretations to be promoted. Finally the Complutensian Polyglot Bible was approved by the Vatican in 1522. It placed the entire Bible side by side in Hebrew, Greek and Latin Vulgate. Unusually, Servetus (he had changed his name from Miguel Serveto partially because of prejudice against the Spanish) could read all of them. Additionally, he could read Arabic and so he read the Koran as well. He was seventeen years old. He decided that only a return to "classic biblical scholarship could save religion."
Servetus was so horrified by the pomp and waste of Pope Clement's (he had been captured following the sack of Rome in 1527 when Charles V's troops mutinied and went nuts) coronation of Charles that he left his service and moved to Basel, then a hotbed of the Protestant Reformation under Johannes Oecolampadius (aka Hausschein or Hussgen.) Servetus had come to the conclusion, after reading the original Biblical texts, that Arius had been correct (see [b:When Jesus Became God The Struggle to Define Christianity during the Last Days of Rome|253881|When Jesus Became God The Struggle to Define Christianity during the Last Days of Rome|Richard E. Rubenstein|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173165094s/253881.jpg|246026]) and that no intermediary was needed between man and God.
By this time, Protestantism, like all revolutionary movements, had become reactionary and was more interested in accommodation with Rome than removing its underpinnings. Realizing he was risking Protestant wrath, Servetus fled to Strasbourg where he found a publisher for De Trinitatis Erroribus (On the Errors of the Trinity.) The book had a major flaw: "Servetus was SO smart that it never seemed to occur to him that his arguments would be more effective if he didn't imply that anyone holding an opposing view was an idiot." Despite this -- or perhaps because of it -- and heretical views being all the rage, the book sold very well but it placed Servetus squarely in the sights of the Inquisition. Servetus, much like Salman Rushdie, had underestimated the zeal of his opponents.
It was Calvin who used the Inquisition to bring down Servetus. Furious with the publication of Christianisimi Restitutio and Servetus's intemperate remarks regarding some of Calvin's writings, Calvin brought down his and the Roman Church's wrath upon Michael head, resulting in, well, you'll see. The book itself, hero of the story, contained some extraordinary medical discoveries. It was Servetus who proposed the workings of the circulatory system, oxygenation of the blood, and the different functions of veins and arteries, discoveries credited to researchers much later.
The intolerance and fear for ideas not one's own led not long after to the St. Bartholemew's massacre resulting in the slaughter of 3000 Protestants in Paris, a number that proportionally today might be in the tens of thousands. It's a wonder the human race survived the internecine battle between Catholics and Protestants.
quote regarding the Thirty Years War which followed: In the Thirty Years' War every hatred, ambition, and fear that had been unleashed by the spread of knowledge erupted in an orgy of sustained horror. Although central Europe, mostly Germany, was the battleground, there was not a country in Europe that did not contribute combatants and victims. From 1618 to 1648, Catholic fought Calvinist, Calvinist fought Lutheran, Hapsburg fought Bourbon, nationalist fought imperialist. The wreckage was unthinkable. Cities were revisited again and again by a succession of marauding armies that killed, burned, raped, stole every bit of food in sight, then ruined the fields so that nothing further could be grown. In the Netherlands they had eaten rats and leather to survive; in Germany they ate each other. No statistic is more chilling than this: there were 21 million people living in Germany in 1618 at the start of the war; by 1648, the war's end, only 13 million were left. The plague was not so efficient.
peterseanesq's review
3.0
Please give my Amazon review a helpful vote - https://www.amazon.com/review/R17Y500XO012PU/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
Michael Servetus was a 16th century polymath. He was born in Spain in 1511, demonstrated a gift for learning in his childhood, given a first-rate education, and was part of the entourage at Charles V's coronation in 1530. At 20, Servetus went AWOl from the court of Charles V and professed Protestantism. Servetus's Protestantism was a Protestantism with a difference in that he was - or may have - been influenced by the vestigial Jewish and Muslim influences of his native lands - certainly, he had read both the Old Testament and the Koran in their original languages - which inspired him to advocate an anti-trinitarian theology.
He was in short a Unitarian, albeit he was referred to, on occasions, as an "Arian."
The authors explain the position expressed by the twenty-year-old Servetus in his first work, The Error of the Trinity, as follows:
"About viewing the Holy Spirit as “a separate being,” Servetus wrote that it was “practical tritheism, no better than atheism.” He added that the doctrine of the Trinity itself was “inconceivable, worst of all [it] incurs the ridicule of the Mohammedans and the Jews.” Finally, he observed, “I know not what madness it is in men that does not see that in the Scriptures every sort of unity of God is always referred to as the Father.”
We are told by the authors that Servetus could find nothing in the Bible that supported a Trinitarian position, and that Servetus joined a long line of Reformers who pinned the original sin of Christianity on the Council of Nicea.
The authors speculate that Servetus forced the hands of the Reformers by making the Trinity a controversy over a doctrine that they might otherwise have abandoned if allowed to develop over time:
"In fact, the Trinity had already been causing problems for the reformers, independent of anything Servetus had written. Luther left it out of his catechisms, and others had tried to avoid the subject entirely. Nonetheless, they were hesitant about eliminating the Trinitarian doctrine entirely and casting such an obvious insult at the Catholic Church. Servetus, it has been argued, by the directness of his attack, brought the issue prematurely into the open and forced the reform movement to decide whether it would support the Trinity or not. Without Servetus’s book, the Protestant churches might well have later rejected the Nicene Creed and adopted Servetus’s view of the Trinity as three dispositions of God."
Perhaps, although it seems unlikely.
With the publication of his book, Servetus wore out his welcome in Basil and left for Paris under the assumed name of Michael Villeneuve. He crossed paths with another headstrong Reformer in Paris, namely, John Calvin. Servetus had a career as an editor, as part of which he edited an new edition of Ptolemy's Geography. Servetus went back to school to study medicine and spent a couple of decades practicing medicine, antagonizing John Calvin, in Geneva, and writing and publishing a new book of Unitarian theology. With the publication of his new book, Christianismi Restitutio (The Restoration of Christianity), the jig was up and the full force of French orthodoxy descended upon Servetus, instigated, according to the authors, by John Calvin, who dreamed of nothing more special than seeing Servetus executed.
Calvin got his chance when, for reasons mysterious, Servetus fled his hometown of Lyon for Italy by heading the opposite direction, traveling to Geneva, and popping into the church where Calvin was preaching. Servetus was spotted, identified, arrested, tried, and finally burned at the stake with his book.
For the authors, Calvin is the villain of this book. If the reader has any doubt, consider the author's description of Calvin:
"He came in, this mere twig of a man, thin, bent over, almost cadaverous, with the long Frankish nose, the wisp of a beard, and the smoldering stare that itself was enough to break most men. He walked slowly to a place at the front of the room, trailed by his ministers."
Servetus, of course, is a prince of a man and beloved by all for his warmth, humanity and generosity.
With that, I have to say that I am in a quandary about how I should rate this book. It has some virtues and some vices.
My biggest problem is the lack of footnotes. There is a bibliography at the end, but there is no way to connect any particular claim with any particular source. This frustrates fact-checking or further research.
This flaw is compounded by other problems. One problem is the obvious hagiography and bias of the authors. The authors are telling Servetus' story in the mold of Arthur Dickson White's "Warfare Thesis" with religion being constantly depicted as superstitious and regressive and always aiming at suppressing science lest religion loses its control over the minds of the population. Thus, we get silly statements like:
"He even altered the mode of papal dress by wearing long hunting boots, making it a good deal more difficult for the devout to kiss his toe."
Seriously? I am dying to see the source of that claim.
This one is simply wrong:
"Despite the council’s edict, designated as the Nicene Creed, it remained difficult for the Church, even on pain of heresy, to convince the faithful to embrace the new doctrine, which many found incomprehensible."
In fact, it was generally the Eastern theologians who went along with Arianism, but it was the laity whose worship presupposed that Jesus was God who refused to accept Arianism and could not comprehend how Arianism. (An excellent source on this is [[ASIN:B003UV8ZZ8 When Jesus Became God: The Epic Fight over Christ's Divinity in the Last Days of Rome]].)
This one misconstrues the sociology of the Middle Ages:
"Prohibiting access to the Bible had for more than a thousand years been the primary instrument of Church control. Only a select few were allowed to read the Scriptures and determine their meaning."
By "select few," the authors presumably mean "everyone who could read." After all, the church set up schools to teach literacy, only a "select few" could attend, and those "select few" became the clergy.
The world before printing and the wealth that we take for granted was not our world.
In other words, this book is filled with tendentious misrepresentations, exaggerations and half-truths, which is hardly surprising inasmuch as one of the books identified in the bibliography actually is Andrew Dickson White's tendentious, anti-clerical work, written in 1905, Dickson, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. It is really surprising to see that book cited as serious support for a supposed work of scholarship. It is like looking in the footnotes and finding a citation to a Jack Chick tract.
On which point, another source for the authors was "De Rosa, Peter, Vicars of Christ: The Dark Side of the Papacy (New York, 1988; Crown)." This text is less a work of scholarship than it is a polemical piece written by a putative Catholic who opposes the Church's position on abortion. Certainly, there are more objective and more recent texts than this one, which has a title that speaks to its appeal to a nasty kind of anti-Catholicism.
Another strange thing was the age of the sources. There may have been sources more recent than the mid-90s, but I noticed that the only history of the papacy - other than scandal-mongering De Rosa book - was written in the 1950s.
So, caveat emptor. There is a lot here to be suspicious of.
Another thing that was weird is the way that the authors managed to fit the biography of a theologian into the "War on Science" theme. They do this by noting that in an offhand passage of Christianismi Restitutio, Servetus speculated that blood was exchanged through the ventricles, thereby anticipating William Harvey by 75 years. On this basis, the authors pronounce Servetus as a man of science who would have revolutionized science but for evil religion hunting him down.
Of course, religion didn't hunt him down; he went in the direction of religion after tweaking religion's nose for decades. Also, although it is fascinating to see another instance of the strange dynamic of scientific anticipation, whereby discoveries are made independently at almost the same time, we have no basis for knowing how Servetus knew this. Was he prepared to do the hard work of demonstrating his theory, as Harvey did? Was it a lucky guess? What was the context of this observation? We have no idea, as neat and as fascinating as the author's claims are. Moreover, this discovery had absolutely nothing to do with Servetus' fate. So this is a slender reed on which to base a "Warfare on Science" thesis.
On the other hand, when the authors moved away from their hobbyhorse of bashing religion tout court, I got the feeling that they were more trustworthy. I liked their description of the dynamics of publishing, the history of Unitarianism, and the career of Erasmus. I particularly liked the last part of the text which involves the incredible story of the survival of the last three copies of the Christianismi Restitutio, including Calvin's copy.
So, it is mixed bag. Read it and enjoy it, but don't buy into the slant and spin.
Michael Servetus was a 16th century polymath. He was born in Spain in 1511, demonstrated a gift for learning in his childhood, given a first-rate education, and was part of the entourage at Charles V's coronation in 1530. At 20, Servetus went AWOl from the court of Charles V and professed Protestantism. Servetus's Protestantism was a Protestantism with a difference in that he was - or may have - been influenced by the vestigial Jewish and Muslim influences of his native lands - certainly, he had read both the Old Testament and the Koran in their original languages - which inspired him to advocate an anti-trinitarian theology.
He was in short a Unitarian, albeit he was referred to, on occasions, as an "Arian."
The authors explain the position expressed by the twenty-year-old Servetus in his first work, The Error of the Trinity, as follows:
"About viewing the Holy Spirit as “a separate being,” Servetus wrote that it was “practical tritheism, no better than atheism.” He added that the doctrine of the Trinity itself was “inconceivable, worst of all [it] incurs the ridicule of the Mohammedans and the Jews.” Finally, he observed, “I know not what madness it is in men that does not see that in the Scriptures every sort of unity of God is always referred to as the Father.”
We are told by the authors that Servetus could find nothing in the Bible that supported a Trinitarian position, and that Servetus joined a long line of Reformers who pinned the original sin of Christianity on the Council of Nicea.
The authors speculate that Servetus forced the hands of the Reformers by making the Trinity a controversy over a doctrine that they might otherwise have abandoned if allowed to develop over time:
"In fact, the Trinity had already been causing problems for the reformers, independent of anything Servetus had written. Luther left it out of his catechisms, and others had tried to avoid the subject entirely. Nonetheless, they were hesitant about eliminating the Trinitarian doctrine entirely and casting such an obvious insult at the Catholic Church. Servetus, it has been argued, by the directness of his attack, brought the issue prematurely into the open and forced the reform movement to decide whether it would support the Trinity or not. Without Servetus’s book, the Protestant churches might well have later rejected the Nicene Creed and adopted Servetus’s view of the Trinity as three dispositions of God."
Perhaps, although it seems unlikely.
With the publication of his book, Servetus wore out his welcome in Basil and left for Paris under the assumed name of Michael Villeneuve. He crossed paths with another headstrong Reformer in Paris, namely, John Calvin. Servetus had a career as an editor, as part of which he edited an new edition of Ptolemy's Geography. Servetus went back to school to study medicine and spent a couple of decades practicing medicine, antagonizing John Calvin, in Geneva, and writing and publishing a new book of Unitarian theology. With the publication of his new book, Christianismi Restitutio (The Restoration of Christianity), the jig was up and the full force of French orthodoxy descended upon Servetus, instigated, according to the authors, by John Calvin, who dreamed of nothing more special than seeing Servetus executed.
Calvin got his chance when, for reasons mysterious, Servetus fled his hometown of Lyon for Italy by heading the opposite direction, traveling to Geneva, and popping into the church where Calvin was preaching. Servetus was spotted, identified, arrested, tried, and finally burned at the stake with his book.
For the authors, Calvin is the villain of this book. If the reader has any doubt, consider the author's description of Calvin:
"He came in, this mere twig of a man, thin, bent over, almost cadaverous, with the long Frankish nose, the wisp of a beard, and the smoldering stare that itself was enough to break most men. He walked slowly to a place at the front of the room, trailed by his ministers."
Servetus, of course, is a prince of a man and beloved by all for his warmth, humanity and generosity.
With that, I have to say that I am in a quandary about how I should rate this book. It has some virtues and some vices.
My biggest problem is the lack of footnotes. There is a bibliography at the end, but there is no way to connect any particular claim with any particular source. This frustrates fact-checking or further research.
This flaw is compounded by other problems. One problem is the obvious hagiography and bias of the authors. The authors are telling Servetus' story in the mold of Arthur Dickson White's "Warfare Thesis" with religion being constantly depicted as superstitious and regressive and always aiming at suppressing science lest religion loses its control over the minds of the population. Thus, we get silly statements like:
"He even altered the mode of papal dress by wearing long hunting boots, making it a good deal more difficult for the devout to kiss his toe."
Seriously? I am dying to see the source of that claim.
This one is simply wrong:
"Despite the council’s edict, designated as the Nicene Creed, it remained difficult for the Church, even on pain of heresy, to convince the faithful to embrace the new doctrine, which many found incomprehensible."
In fact, it was generally the Eastern theologians who went along with Arianism, but it was the laity whose worship presupposed that Jesus was God who refused to accept Arianism and could not comprehend how Arianism. (An excellent source on this is [[ASIN:B003UV8ZZ8 When Jesus Became God: The Epic Fight over Christ's Divinity in the Last Days of Rome]].)
This one misconstrues the sociology of the Middle Ages:
"Prohibiting access to the Bible had for more than a thousand years been the primary instrument of Church control. Only a select few were allowed to read the Scriptures and determine their meaning."
By "select few," the authors presumably mean "everyone who could read." After all, the church set up schools to teach literacy, only a "select few" could attend, and those "select few" became the clergy.
The world before printing and the wealth that we take for granted was not our world.
In other words, this book is filled with tendentious misrepresentations, exaggerations and half-truths, which is hardly surprising inasmuch as one of the books identified in the bibliography actually is Andrew Dickson White's tendentious, anti-clerical work, written in 1905, Dickson, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. It is really surprising to see that book cited as serious support for a supposed work of scholarship. It is like looking in the footnotes and finding a citation to a Jack Chick tract.
On which point, another source for the authors was "De Rosa, Peter, Vicars of Christ: The Dark Side of the Papacy (New York, 1988; Crown)." This text is less a work of scholarship than it is a polemical piece written by a putative Catholic who opposes the Church's position on abortion. Certainly, there are more objective and more recent texts than this one, which has a title that speaks to its appeal to a nasty kind of anti-Catholicism.
Another strange thing was the age of the sources. There may have been sources more recent than the mid-90s, but I noticed that the only history of the papacy - other than scandal-mongering De Rosa book - was written in the 1950s.
So, caveat emptor. There is a lot here to be suspicious of.
Another thing that was weird is the way that the authors managed to fit the biography of a theologian into the "War on Science" theme. They do this by noting that in an offhand passage of Christianismi Restitutio, Servetus speculated that blood was exchanged through the ventricles, thereby anticipating William Harvey by 75 years. On this basis, the authors pronounce Servetus as a man of science who would have revolutionized science but for evil religion hunting him down.
Of course, religion didn't hunt him down; he went in the direction of religion after tweaking religion's nose for decades. Also, although it is fascinating to see another instance of the strange dynamic of scientific anticipation, whereby discoveries are made independently at almost the same time, we have no basis for knowing how Servetus knew this. Was he prepared to do the hard work of demonstrating his theory, as Harvey did? Was it a lucky guess? What was the context of this observation? We have no idea, as neat and as fascinating as the author's claims are. Moreover, this discovery had absolutely nothing to do with Servetus' fate. So this is a slender reed on which to base a "Warfare on Science" thesis.
On the other hand, when the authors moved away from their hobbyhorse of bashing religion tout court, I got the feeling that they were more trustworthy. I liked their description of the dynamics of publishing, the history of Unitarianism, and the career of Erasmus. I particularly liked the last part of the text which involves the incredible story of the survival of the last three copies of the Christianismi Restitutio, including Calvin's copy.
So, it is mixed bag. Read it and enjoy it, but don't buy into the slant and spin.
panxa's review
2.0
This book focused on a lot more than Servetus. It included the rise of the printing press, the lives of the scholars around him, the religious upheaval of the day. It was very encompassing, but at times I found the central story got lost. Servetus didn't seem to be the focus for much of the book.
samchase112's review
5.0
Rating: 5 stars
*late review*
This was such a fantastic novel! I am a history nerd to the highest degree, and this book was perfect for me. The authors did a great job of combining a) Michael Servetus's personal story with b) the history of the time surrounding Servetus and c) the impact that his work had on the future. Every single fact was accompanied by in-depth explanations and great research. Just thinking about how much work the authors had to do to complete this book blows my mind. The Reformation was such an interesting part of European history, and one that I hadn't learned much about until reading this novel, which made it even more fascinating. The history behind the creation of books and how that impacted the world in such a profound way was especially interesting to me - because I'm both a book nerd and a history nerd. I was engaged in the story the entire time. I would definitely go back and reread this book, and I would also love to read more from Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone.
I highly recommend this book to history nerds like me!
*late review*
This was such a fantastic novel! I am a history nerd to the highest degree, and this book was perfect for me. The authors did a great job of combining a) Michael Servetus's personal story with b) the history of the time surrounding Servetus and c) the impact that his work had on the future. Every single fact was accompanied by in-depth explanations and great research. Just thinking about how much work the authors had to do to complete this book blows my mind. The Reformation was such an interesting part of European history, and one that I hadn't learned much about until reading this novel, which made it even more fascinating. The history behind the creation of books and how that impacted the world in such a profound way was especially interesting to me - because I'm both a book nerd and a history nerd. I was engaged in the story the entire time. I would definitely go back and reread this book, and I would also love to read more from Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone.
I highly recommend this book to history nerds like me!
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