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A B S T R A C T. This essay is a critical historiographical overview of the ongoing debate about the role of the Protestant Reformation in the process of 'the disenchantment of the world '. It considers the development of this thesis in the work of Max Weber and subsequent scholars, its links with wider claims about the origins of modernity, and the challenges to this influential paradigm that have emerged in the last twenty-five years. Setting the literature on England within its wider European context, it explores the links between Protestantism and the transformation of assumptions about the sacred and the supernatural, and places renewed emphasis on the equivocal and ambiguous legacy left by the upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Attention is also paid to the ways in which the Reformation converged with other intellectual, cultural, political, and social developments which cumulatively brought about subtle, but decisive, transformations in individual and collective mentalities. It is suggested that thinking in terms of cycles of desacralization and resacralization may help to counteract the potential distortions of a narrative that emphasizes a linear path of development.The tendency to herald the Protestant Reformation as a milestone on the road towards modernity and secularization, a landmark in the narrative of progress that traces the eventual triumph of rationalism over ' superstition ' in the age of the Enlightenment, has deep roots in Western European and Anglo-American culture and scholarship and continues to exert considerable influence. In particular, the idea that the religious revolution launched by Luther, Calvin, and other reformers played a critical role in eliminating assumptions about the intervention of magical and supernatural forces in the world has proved remarkably resilient. If it has stimulated and shaped many seminal contributions to the historiography of the early modern period over the last century, it has also served, in some ways, to constrain and distort our understanding of this era. This review offers a series of critical reflections and observations on the evolution and fortunes of this thesis against the backdrop of a body of recent research which has seriously complicated, challenged, and undercut it. Focusing especially on England, but set within a wider Continental context, its aim is to review the current state of the debate and to provide an interim report on

Modern History at the University of Cambridge, delivered on  Oct. . It explores how the religious upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reshaped perceptions of the past, stimulated shifts in historical method, and transformed the culture of memory, before turning to the interrelated question of when and why contemporaries began to remember the English Reformation as a decisive juncture and critical turning point in history. Investigating the interaction between personal recollection and social memory, it traces the manner in which remembrance of the events of the s, s, and s evolved and splintered between  and . A further theme is the role of religious and intellectual developments in the early modern period in forging prevailing models of historical periodization and teleological paradigms of interpretation.