Germany would be a desert covered with the skeletons of Catholics, Eva — Protestant Reformation

"The family in early modern Europe was a patriarchal unit. This view, confirmed by contemporaries and historians alike, held that the man, as both husband and father, was supposed to rule his wife and the rest of the household. The German pastor Justus Menius stated it trenchantly in 1528: “A husband has two functions: first, he should rule over his wife, children, and servants and be head and master of the entire house; second, he should work and produce enough to support and feed his household.” Theologians and humanists shared this opinion about the man’s role in marriage. In Reformation Germany the model of patriarchy was promoted both by the Hausvater literature and by the pamphlets of Protestant preachers like Menius. These authors, and presumably many of their readers and listeners, believed they were living in a time “when fathers ruled.” Humanists, who admonished men to fulfill their civic as well as their familial duties, argued that a man who could not rule his family was a man who could not exercise authority in the commonwealth."

"Lying teachers are rising, introducing ruinous sects, and drawing upon themselves speedy doom. Their tongues are fire, a restless evil, full of deadly poison. They have bitter zeal, contention in their hearts, and boast and lie against the truth."

"It has often been said that a reformation should begin with each man reforming himself. That, however, is not what actually happened, for the reformation produced a hero who paid God dearly enough for his position as hero. By joining up with him directly people buy cheap, indeed at bargain prices, what he had paid for so dearly; but they do not buy the highest of all things."

"Iconoclasm was the central sacrament of the reform," states Eamon Duffy. It is an assertion that is more provocative than strictly accurate, especially in its dismissive use of the term "sacrament" in association with the Anglican Church, but many historians have persuasively presented iconoclastic extremism as a defining factor in the English Reformation. The long struggle over "images" had broad and deep connections with the transformation of English society and the ideologies of selfhood, identity, gender, and sexuality that governed, or as Louis Althusser puts it, "interpelated", men and women into the grand narrative of their culture. Today, some may say the picture of the world advanced by the reformers was maybe no less false, the idolatry of the Word no less pernicious than the idolatry of the Image. Yet Aston confesses that while she believes that historians are "not supposed to take sides," she finds it hard to "sympathize with the reformers zeal for destruction. Doing without images is one thing, annihilating them is another. Destruction may be exhilarating, but it has an eventual fall-out which is the opposite of life-enhancing."

"Why, for instance, did Martin Luther succeed, whereas other important rebels against the medieval church — like John Huss — fail? Well, Luther was successful because printing had been developed by the time he advanced his cause. So his good earthy writings were put into pamphlets and spread so far and wide that the church officials couldnt have stopped the Protestant Reformation even if they had burned Luther at the stake."

"While occasionally acknowledging in unenthusiastic fashion St. Paul’s defense of the single life, the Reformers were far more comfortable with the social order described in Luther’s Exhortation to the Knights of the Teutonic Order: “We were all created to do as our parents have done, to beget and rear children. This is a duty which God has laid upon us, commanded, and implanted in us, as is proved by our bodily members, our daily emotions, and the example of all mankind.”"