Dictionary:

reformation

  (rĕf'ər-mā'shən)

1. The act of reforming or the state of being reformed.
2. Reformation A 16th-century movement in Western Europe that aimed at reforming some doctrines and practices of the Roman Catholic Church and resulted in the establishment of the Protestant churches.

Equitable remedy consisting of a revision of a contract by the court, in cases where the written terms of the contract do not express what was actually agreed upon. Thus, reformation is generally only decreed upon a clear and convincing showing of mutual mistake (see Mistake); if only one party was mistaken, reformation is not appropriate unless the mistake of one party resulted from the other party's Fraud.

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Although ‘reform’ means many things, ‘the Reformation’ always denotes the 16th-cent. division of Latin Christendom into protestant and catholic. Protestantism rejected the catholic belief that salvation comes through grace received in the sacraments; it restricted the church's role to one of proclaiming the unmerited gift of divine forgiveness. The Church of England, established by statute in 1559, was unambiguously protestant. The church in England c. 1500 was devoutly catholic and loyally papalist. Many parish churches were extravagantly rebuilt, and lavished with vessels and ornaments. Kings and popes usually got on well. The fame of the German Reformation leader Martin Luther (1483-1546) caught the imagination of some English followers in the 1520s. Churchmen including Thomas Bilney (c. 1495-1531), Robert Barnes (d. 1540), and the Bible translator and controversialist William Tyndale (c. 1494-1536) reinterpreted the Reformation message. However, their support was confined to young university students and those with foreign connections.

Henry VIII's failure to secure papal annulment of his first marriage led to the break with the papacy during 1532-6. This policy required theoretical justification if the king was to carry such a profoundly catholic nation into schism. Thomas Cromwell recruited a number of young humanist writers, whose propaganda pieces criticized both the papacy and some aspects of the old cults, such as papal indulgences. Nevertheless, these moves were not avowedly ‘protestant’: Henry VIII detested Luther. Though Thomas Cromwell's commissioners who toured the doomed monasteries in 1535-6 mocked spurious relics and hunted dissolute monks, the ensuing abolition of the monastic order had no declared religious rationale.

All ambiguity was swept away in the next reign. Revision of the mass-book began almost at once, leading in 1549 to the publication of Cranmer's first Book of Common Prayer. Meanwhile royal commissioners ruthlessly stripped parish churches of most of the ornaments and furniture associated with the old cult. Distinguished continental reformers such as Martin Bucer and Pier Martire Vermigli settled in the universities and influenced further changes in worship. In 1552 a revision of the Prayer Book simplified the apparatus of worship to the barest protestant essentials.

Mary I inherited religious legislation, in her eyes ultra vires and void, which took some eighteen months to reverse. Nevertheless, priests and laity restored the mass at the mere breath of royal suggestion. Once owners of monastic lands were assured of their titles, papal authority was received back with some enthusiasm. The impact of the campaign which burned c. 280 heretics between 1555 and 1558 was greater in hindsight (helped by Foxe's martyrology) than at the time. Elizabeth, daughter of Anne Boleyn and legatee of the schism, found the catholic hierarchy much more stubborn than in 1531-3. Re-establishment of the royal supremacy and abolition of the mass required an almost clean sweep of the episcopate. Even the Thirty-Nine Articles approved by convocation in 1563 were altered by the queen herself, probably to placate conservatives.

The new bishops chosen by Elizabeth from leading reformed clergy in 1559, and most protestant zealots, assumed that the concessions made to tradition were temporary sops. To their increasing horror and bewilderment, they found that the queen obstinately refused to strip away the veneer of ritual. She feared that combative protestant preaching still risked alienating parts of the kingdom and sparking a religious war: the restoration of the mass during the northern earls' revolt of 1569, and her excommunication by the pope in 1570, lent these fears substance. In the ‘puritan’ controversies of the 1570s Elizabeth nurtured a faction of clerics led by John Whitgift (archbishop of Canterbury 1583-1604) which believed with equal zeal in protestant dogma, episcopal church government, and traditionalist ceremonial. So was the peculiar hybrid ‘Anglican’ church, founded both on Foxe's Martyrs and on Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, brought to birth by the end of the 16th cent.

The term Reformation refers in general to the major religious changes that swept across Europe during the 1500s, transforming worship, politics, society, and basic cultural patterns. One key dimension was the Protestant Reformation, the movement that began in 1517 with Martin Luther's critique of doctrinal principles and church actions in Germany and that led to the establishment of new official churches—the Lutheran, the Reformed or Calvinist, and the Anglican. These were separate from the Latin Catholic Church in organization and different from it in theology. Many other dissident groups and individuals, collectively known as the Radical Reformation, also emerged during the turmoil of the 1520s and 1530s, building communities despite frequent persecution. Ongoing efforts to reform the old church took on new urgency in response to these challenges, leading to a distinct Catholic Reformation. The Protestant Reformation affected patterns of change in Europe through Protestant theology's shifting theological emphases, through Protestant piety's emphasis on reading and knowledge, and through new alignments between organized churches and politics.

Because of the complex course and multiple outcomes of the Reformation movements, historians today speak of multiple Reformations during the first two-thirds of the 1500s—the Protestant, the Radical, and the Catholic; the urban, the peasants', and the princely; or the German, French, and British. The Protestant Reformation was embedded in larger processes that included the emergence of national states, new encounters with the outside world, and deep socioeconomic shifts. The breakdown of religious unity and the establishment of multiple churches in this era highlights the central role that religion played in early modern European self-understanding. Doctrinal and ceremonial changes had consequences for every aspect of society, from family life and gender roles to art and philosophy. As we learn more about different historical actors and their varying goals, we can no longer view the Reformation as a single conflict between Luther and the popes or as a single movement, positive or negative. Rather, we must approach the Reformation by looking carefully at the spiritual aspirations, the cultural frameworks, and the material circumstances of the people whose lives it transformed.

The idea of reformation had a long history in Western thought before 1500, with two main meanings: to modify in general (to reform) and to improve something by returning it to its original state (to re-form, or restore). St. Augustine's statement that "man is not able to reform himself as he is able to deform himself" durably connected reformation with individual conversion and divine grace, although during the Middle Ages the word could refer to any systematic change. Because the term implied renewal or even rebirth, it could also be associated with the renaissance of classical learning. By the late 1300s, the "reformation" of monasteries became a central goal of the Observant movements that sought to restore the principles of their orders' founders, and by the 1400s, calls for a "reformation in head and members" of the entire church had become loud.

When evangelical thinkers in the early 1500s called for radical changes in the church, they too described their project as a "reformation," as did those who sought to improve the church from within. Most sixteenth-century reformers hoped that a single purified church would be the outcome, while others saw religious division as a sign of the imminent Apocalypse. Only after 1600, when it became clear that the division among western European Christians was permanent, did the term "Reformation" become the name for the movements that created the division as well as for the period during which the division took place.

Antecedents of the Reformation

Scholars have pointed to several developments during the 1400s as possible forerunners of the Protestant Reformation. Developments in formal theology, in broader cultural life, and in different European regions all confirm the continuity between the Reformation and earlier historical processes. For example, disputes among academic theologians raised issues similar to those later addressed by Luther and other Reformation thinkers. Late medieval followers of St. Thomas Aquinas's via antiqua ('old path') argued against adherents of the via moderna ('new path') developed by William of Ockham (1280–1349), while mystical thinkers sought to bypass the confining procedures of Scholastic theology entirely. Particularly in the 1400s, learned churchmen disagreed about such fundamental issues as God's sovereignty, the place of human effort in gaining salvation, and the effects of sin and grace on the human soul. With the growth of universities and the spread of printed books around 1500, many more thinkers became aware of these debates about the fundamentals of Christian faith, setting the stage for Reformation controversies.

Other scholars point to the Renaissance and particularly to humanist philology as preparing the ground for religious turmoil. Although few historians today see the Renaissance as the birth of modern individualism, the recovery of Greek and Latin texts on philosophy and philology during the 1400s did spur intellectuals to look at the writings of the church fathers and the Bible in new ways. Even when motivated by orthodox zeal, careful printed editions and new translations of sacred texts raised new questions about the way the church interpreted its mission. Italian humanists such as Lorenzo Valla led the way in applying the new philology to sacred texts, but the humanist with the greatest impact in northern Europe was Erasmus of Rotterdam. In addition to editing both classical literature and the church fathers, Erasmus in 1516 issued the first printed edition of the New Testament in Greek, together with a new Latin translation that changed the meaning of several key passages. Erasmus was also a best-selling author of Latin textbooks—such as Encomium Moriae (1511; English translation, In Praise of Folly, published 1549)—that savagely mocked popular superstitions and greedy clergymen.

Finally, the Protestant Reformation shared important features with the Hussite movement that swept through Bohemia in the early 1400s. The teachings of Jan Hus contained several ideas that Luther later engaged: an emphasis on God's grace over human works in salvation, a harsh critique of the papacy, and a call for lay Bible reading in local vernaculars. Moreover, Hus's ideas gained support in Bohemia from a coalition of burghers, nobles, and peasants who combined Czech resentment of German dominance with aspirations for a just Christian society. Anger about the special privileges that priests enjoyed and about the fiscal impact of an international church on local societies heightened anticlerical feelings across Europe at this time. Luther's recognition that he shared Hus's ideas accelerated his break with the papacy, and Protestant propaganda later named Hus among its martyrs. Although the Hussite movement was limited to Bohemia after Hus's execution for heresy in 1415, it revealed how potent the combination of anti-clericalism, lay enthusiasm for new ideas, and effective preaching could be.

Early Protestant Movements in Germany

All across Europe after 1500, reformist clerics sought to reform church organization, to purify religious practice, and to intensify individual piety. In Italy educated priests such as Gasparo Contarini combined prayer and study while organizing groups to improve church services for the laity. In France a group around Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples also called for an evangelical renewal of the church. They, like John Colet in England, turned to the Epistles of St. Paul in their efforts to better understand God's will, as would Luther. Among all these groups, humanist ideas and connections played an important role. Evangelical ideas were therefore widespread in Europe, yet the course of reform differed enormously from place to place. To understand this variation, argues historian Euan Cameron, we must analyze the different coalitions that formed and sometimes dissolved around evangelical ideas.

The emergence of separate Protestant churches could not have taken place without the movement's early breakthrough in the Holy Roman Empire, where Martin Luther was the critical figure. Luther's doctrinal views took shape during the 1510s, but the Protestant Reformation as a movement began with the response that he evoked among German clergy, nobles, and common people in the 1520s. This response grew rapidly because of the force of Luther's writing and because evangelical texts were printed not just in Latin but also in pithy German summaries and in illustrated versions. Moreover, criticism of the Roman church was already widespread in Germany, as were lively popular piety and interest in correct religious practice. Many early adherents saw Luther as a German champion against a corrupt Roman hierarchy and its financial abuses, and approved of his attacks on the special status of the clergy; others found spiritual consolation in his understanding of salvation, thought that his calls for "spiritual freedom" would bring about a just world with lighter burdens, or shared his belief in an imminent Apocalypse. Luther's precise theological arguments about justification and grace, meanwhile, mostly influenced engaged clerics and other spiritually focused individuals.

After 1519 another evangelical center emerged in Zurich, where Huldrych Zwingli began preaching sermons that combined humanist critiques of the church and its ceremonies with theological ideas similar to Luther's. Zwingli's ideas quickly became popular in south German cities and in parts of the Swiss Confederation. Although the southern movement remained separate from Luther's, ultimately giving rise to the Reformed and Calvinist churches, both spread evangelical ideas throughout German society. The earliest representatives of the Radical Reformation also emerged during the early 1520s from the circles around Luther and Zwingli; while they joined Luther and Zwingli in attacking the existing church, they often called for radical reform of society and eventually diverged on key doctrinal issues as well.

Political and social tensions converged with new religious ideas to produce a mass movement in the empire, partly because many German and Swiss towns and even villages enjoyed considerable autonomy. During the decisive years between 1518 and 1521, moreover, political circumstances in Germany delayed action against Luther. Luther had powerful supporters among both churchmen and lay leaders, including his lord Frederick the Wise of Saxony, whereas the death of Emperor Maximilian and the struggle to elect his successor Charles V preoccupied the imperial authorities. By the time Luther was excommunicated in 1520 and banned by the empire in 1521, he had already become a national hero. The early Reformation coalitions in Germany thus included clergy, some nobles, and many townspeople and peasants.

After Luther refused to recant at the Diet of Worms in 1521, ordinary people in many German towns called for "preaching the pure Gospel." They enjoyed support from committed members of the local elites—often younger men with humanist educations. Through the 1520s, many German cities edged cautiously toward open rejection of Rome, and by 1530, a substantial majority had joined the Lutheran or Zwinglian "Reformation in the cities." It is striking how radically new converts during these years rejected practices such as the veneration of images, in which they had often participated right up to the introduction of evangelical ideas. Adopting the Reformation brought about sharp changes in daily ritual that everyone could see.

The German peasants also hoped that "Godly law" would help liberate them from their burdens. In 1525 during the German Peasants' War, many of them refused to pay dues, sacked monasteries and castles, and gathered into huge armed bands. Hundreds of peasant communes formulated demands that were ultimately distilled into the Twelve Articles of the Swabian Peasantry. These demanded the "pure Gospel," local election of priests, an end to serfdom, and free access to commons and forests. Specific Bible verses justified each of the articles, thus linking spiritual renewal to social change. Although poorer townspeople joined the movement in some areas, the German nobility brutally suppressed the uprising. Luther too condemned the peasants, although he had initially recognized the justice of some of their demands. The defeat of the "common man" in 1525 shifted Reformation coalitions in Germany toward urban elites and the territorial nobility, decisively shaping later developments.

For defenders of the old church, the Peasants' War proved that the evangelical movement was subversive. Luther's supporters among Germany's princes and magistrates also sought to control popular turmoil. They faced the challenge of rebuilding territorial church organization in a way that reflected the new teachings while taking account of social and political pressures. This required both gaining legal recognition for their faith and establishing a clearer definition of what they believed. Luther and his key supporter Philipp Melanchthon drew up a comprehensive statement of Lutheran principles, the Augsburg Confession of 1530, and published new catechisms to instruct the laity. The process of consolidation led to heightened repression against dissenters of all kinds. Fearing that Satan sought to destroy the Gospel by encouraging fanaticism, Luther supported the organization of new hierarchical churches under princely control.

After it became clear that neither church would gain a clear majority among the princes, prelates, and towns in the empire, both sides built up alliances, such as the Schmalkaldic League, which linked princely territorial ambitions with the defense of Lutheran doctrine. In 1546 the emperor sought a military solution in the Schmalkaldic War. The effects of his initial victory quickly evaporated amid political maneuvering, however, creating a deadlock that led to the Religious Peace of Augsburg in 1555. The peace decreed that political rulers within Germany could choose between the Catholic and Lutheran faiths for their entire territories: dissidents had to depart or face official persecution. The dynamic evolution of Reformation coalitions thus left the German-speaking world mixed in religious confession, with decisive power over religion in the hands of territorial rulers. Confessional division had a deep and lasting effect on German identity, churches, and politics.

Protestant Movements Outside Germany

The Protestant Reformation followed diverse paths outside the Holy Roman Empire, generally as a minority movement. The first adherents were often intellectuals who read Luther's Latin writings. With few exceptions, those in charge of both churches and governments remained hostile to the Reformation for at least a generation, rigorously persecuting those who sought to introduce it from Germany. Even where Roman authority was rejected early, as in England, Reformation coalitions appeared later, grew more slowly, and attracted fewer influential patrons than in Germany. Partly because of this delay, the form of Protestantism that had the greatest impact outside Germany was based on John Calvin's views rather than on Luther's.

The historian Heiko Oberman suggests that we view the Reformation outside Germany as a "reformation of the refugees," since so many leading figures had to flee from persecution. Calvin himself was a refugee who left France in 1534 during an early crackdown against French evangelicals. During stays first in Strasbourg and then in Geneva, he developed views that differed in important ways from the Lutheran tradition. Calvin shared Luther's belief in justification by faith but adopted a different interpretation of Communion. Calvin and his followers also wanted churches that were more independent from secular control than the Lutheran territorial churches. After Zwingli died in battle against the Catholic Swiss in 1531, his successor Heinrich Bullinger also sought to clarify the doctrine that separated the Zurich church from Catholics and Lutherans. Discussions among Bullinger, Calvin, and other Reformed theologians produced the Second Helvetic Confession of 1566 and the Heidelberg Catechism of 1562, important models for later Calvinist confessions of faith. In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin produced a systematic Reformed guide to doctrine. Calvinism expanded into France after the 1550s and spread through parts of Germany, the Netherlands, and eastern Europe. It also predominated in the theology (but not the organization) of the Anglican Church in England after 1558.

The emergence of new churches and the consolidation of a reformed Catholic Church confronted Europeans after the 1530s with a complex spiritual landscape. To understand how different Reformation coalitions formed, evolved, and sometimes collapsed, we need to consider the social position of early adherents, the political system, the nature of earlier heretical or anti-Roman ideas, and the international pressures each region faced. The Reformation outside Germany generally lacked peasant participation. It was an urban and professional movement whose most important early activists came from the younger clergy. In France the decision of some nobles to protect Reformation thinkers allowed the movement to grow despite harsh persecution. However, noble support also entangled evangelical religion with factional political disputes that led to vicious religious wars after 1560. In northern Europe the attitudes of monarchs were critical: Henry VIII's decision to break with Rome opened the way for the later spread of Protestantism in England, as did Gustav I Vasa's combination of Swedish independence with Lutheran conversion. Elsewhere, kings suppressed the Reformation using mechanisms such as the Inquisition in Spain or special courts in France. The previous history of religious dissent and the vitality of local humanist movements also affected local Reformation coalitions. In Bohemia, for example, the surviving Hussite church made common cause with the Reformers. The strength of humanism in Italy ensured that serious consideration of evangelical reform within the church continued into the 1550s under the protection of humanist-influenced bishops. Finally, external circumstances shaped the different Reformation coalitions. In the Netherlands, Calvinism became part of a national war against Spanish rule, while the Reformation in Scotland depended on relations between England and France. In eastern Europe political opponents of the Habsburg dynasty often turned to the Lutheran or Calvinist faiths.

Significance of the Reformation

Scholarly views of the Reformation have often reflected religious and ideological perspectives. Protestant historians portrayed it as a moment of heroic recovery from medieval "corruption," while some Catholic historians attacked it as a catastrophic out-break of undisciplined individualism. Nineteenth-century liberal descendants of Protestantism argued that Martin Luther's appeal to conscience represented the "birth of individual liberty," and saw the origins of the modern secular state in conflicts over the free practice of religion. Marxist historians argued that the popular appeal of Luther made him part of an "early bourgeois revolution," while the rebellious peasants were proletarians before their time.

Recent studies of the Reformation more often emphasize its social dimension, going beyond the doctrinal issues that divided Europeans. Because religion helped shape every aspect of European life, the practices of the new churches caused major changes. Sacramental ceremonies from baptism to last rites had long marked key moments in the lives and families and communities. By abolishing or changing the sacraments, Protestantism challenged the social meaning of these rituals. The Protestant attack on clerical celibacy emptied monasteries and nunneries and led to a married clergy. This shattered older understandings about sexuality and personal holiness and led to intensified debate about the role of women in society. New ideas about piety caused the abolition of many public festivals in Protestant regions, often against popular resistance. Poor relief and charity meant something different when they no longer served as rich people's way to perform penance.

In politics the fact that the church had been a political as well as spiritual power led to realignments at every level from villages to international diplomacy. Religious adherence became an important factor in political alliances until the end of the Thirty Years' War in 1648. The emerging Protestant states of northern Europe were strengthened by the windfalls of property they seized from their churches, and gained new authority over daily life through their tight control over the Protestant clergy. Current research concentrates especially on confessionalization, that is, the organizational consolidation of churches and identities along confessional lines. Of particular interest is the question of whether the Reformations—Catholic and Protestant—opened the way for European states to impose new standards of ethical and sexual behavior on their populations. Among intellectuals, debates among the emerging faiths challenged fundamental understandings about the relation of the individual conscience to God, about how sinful humans should live together in ordered societies, and ultimately about the sources of truth and authority. The confidence of the early reformers gave way later in the 1500s to bitter debates among theologians about ever smaller matters on the one hand, and to calls for the forcible reimposition of unity on the other. In contrast, arguments for greater toleration of dissent and skepticism about whether humans could really know God's will were met with repression throughout the 1500s.

Some thinkers have looked to the Reformation to explain the profound transformation of Europe between 1500 and the present. Notably, the sociologist Max Weber proposed that the religious culture of Protestantism, with its emphasis on Bible reading and ethical self-scrutiny, had produced habits that favored the emergence of modern capitalism, especially among Calvinists. Many other thinkers have probed the contrast between a Protestant "religion of the Word" and a Catholic religion focused on action and emotion, often suggesting that Protestant or radical views "disenchanted" the world to produce a more modern worldview. Today, most historians who study the cultures of Protestant and Catholic Europe are more cautious. Major cultural changes did not correlate in a simple way with religious difference. Moreover, recent research has demonstrated that the larger population only slowly absorbed the formal agendas of Protestantism and renewed Catholicism. It therefore seems unlikely that differences in religious doctrine can entirely explain later developments. Instead, current research seeks to include both the spiritual meaning and the social consequences of Europe's Reformations in efforts to explain Europe's early modern history.

Bibliography

Benedict, Philip. Christ's Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism. New Haven, 2002. Definitive study of the Reformed and Calvinist developments from the perspective of social history.

Brady, Thomas A., Jr., Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy, eds. Handbook of European History, 1400–1600: Late Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation. Leiden and New York, 1994. Scholarly assessments of major issues in European history during this period.

Cameron, Euan. The European Reformation. Oxford and New York, 1991. Comprehensive survey suitable for advanced readers, emphasizing the importance of varying coalitions.

Dickens, A. G., and John Tonkin. The Reformation in Historical Thought. Cambridge, Mass., 1985. Reprint 1999. Explores changing perceptions of the Reformation's course and significance.

Gordon, Bruce. The Swiss Reformation. Manchester, U.K., and New York, 2002. Best survey of the Protestant movements in German-speaking Switzerland.

Karant-Nunn, Susan C. The Reformation of Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany. London and New York, 1997. Explores how changes in ritual transformed religious life in Germany after 1520.

Mc Grath, Alister. Reformation Thought: An Introduction, 3rd ed. Oxford, 1999. An accessible introduction to Protestant theology with emphasis on key doctrinal issues.

Oberman, Heiko A. Luther: Man between God and the Devil. Translated by Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart. New Haven, 1989. Sets Luther's career in context of late medieval developments and later interpretations.

O'Malley, John W. Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era. Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2000. Explores changing understandings of reform and Reformation in a Catholic context.

Scribner, Robert W. For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation. 2nd ed. Oxford, 1994. Pathbreaking study of visual propaganda.

Scribner, Robert W., Roy Porter, and Mikulás Teich, eds. The Reformation in National Context. Cambridge, U.K., 1994. Concise introductions to the course of the Reformation in Western and Eastern European contexts.

Tracy, James. Europe's Reformations, 1450–1650. Lanham, Md., 1999. Comprehensive survey, suitable for all readers, reflecting latest research and perspectives.

—RANDOLPH C. HEAD

A remedy utilized by the courts to correct a written instrument so that it conforms to the original intent of the parties to such an instrument.

Legal documents, such as contracts, deeds, mortgages, and trusts, are all proper subjects for reformation. Since the original intent of the parties must control, however, a totally new agreement cannot be created through reformation.

The court, in the exercise of its equity powers to do justice, will reform a document only in the event that fraud or mutual mistake occurred in its execution.

Reformation is a remedy that is granted at the discretion of the court only where the facts and circumstances of a particular case warrant it. It will not be granted where an entirely new agreement would result between the parties or where unwarranted hardships would be imposed upon them. Only an individual who has acted in good faith can apply to the court to have an instrument reformed.

Reformation is not available as a remedy to correct every minor error, such as typographical errors; rather, it is granted where there has been a mutual mistake that substantially affects the parties' rights and obligations. The mistake must have been in existence at the time the instrument was drawn up. A mistake in the description of land and its boundaries ordinarily justifies reformation of an agreement where the purchaser and seller intended that all the seller's property be sold to the purchaser. In addition, a mistake of law by which both parties to the instrument have incorrectly comprehended the legal effect of the facts and the document might also result in reformation.

A religious movement in the sixteenth century that began as an attempted reform of the Roman Catholic Church but resulted in the founding of Protestant churches separate from it. Some of the leaders of the Reformation were Martin Luther, John Calvin, and John Knox. The Reformation was established in England after King Henry VIII declared himself head of the Christian Church in that country.