TRENT 1543-63 What Happened at the Council John W O'Malley Catholicism history

Trent: What Happened at the Council

by John W. O'Malley

Pub. Harvard University Press, 2013.

Hardback in dustjacket.

viii, 335 pages

The Council of Trent, which met over the course of 18 years during the 16th century, was one of the most important of the ecumenical councils in the history of the Catholic Church, even if the exact nature of the Council's decisions is relatively obscure to even modern-day Catholics. Not attempting to challenge the comprehensive scholarship of Hubert Jedin's four volume Geschichte des Konzils von Trient, which he considers to be "the first point of reference for all scholarship related to the council," O'Malley (Georgetown U.) instead sets himself the more modest task of distilling the work of Jedin and subsequent scholars for a general audience in order to dispel certain myths and misunderstandings, describe the contexts and challenges that guided the Council's deliberations, explain the solutions it adopted, and present a framework for deriving some coherency of the many seemingly discrete decisions the council took.

Condition: very good+.