Robert Scribner is perhaps the most influential, and in his own right a catalyst, to the new challenges to the theory that the Reformation was the reason behind ‘the disenchantment of the world’. Scribner maintains that there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the Reformation played a minor role in desacralisation and secularisation than former historians argued, referring to continuities between medieval and Protestant mindsets. In his work he found that rather than a whole rejection of the ‘economy of the sacred’, as previously thought by the likes of Thomas, the sacred was instead altered and incorporated into the Protestant belief system, producing a magic of its own. As Walsham writes, “it was also a telling sign of the loosening grip of a confessional and sectarian historiography of the Reformation – of the demise of framework of analysis underpinned by
Robert Scribner is perhaps the most influential, and in his own right a catalyst, to the new challenges to the theory that the Reformation was the reason behind ‘the disenchantment of the world’. Scribner maintains that there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the Reformation played a minor role in desacralisation and secularisation than former historians argued, referring to continuities between medieval and Protestant mindsets. In his work he found that rather than a whole rejection of the ‘economy of the sacred’, as previously thought by the likes of Thomas, the sacred was instead altered and incorporated into the Protestant belief system, producing a magic of its own. As Walsham writes, “it was also a telling sign of the loosening grip of a confessional and sectarian historiography of the Reformation – of the demise of framework of analysis underpinned by