Reformation : Europe's House Divided 1490-1700

A natural way to celebrate liberation in a new world was to smash up symbols of the old oppression.

This frequently involved disorder, and disorder has never appealed to the Swiss.

The sermons of some fifteenth-century preachers in central Europe seem obsessed with the problem of heresy and sectarianism, but much of this hysteria probably has as tenuous a connection with reality as the work of Senator McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950th.