One of the books that influenced me most in my journey towards becoming a Catholic was a large book called Reformations by the Catholic Yale historian Carlos Eire.
Reading large, state-of-the-art histories of the Reformation may not be to everyone's taste, but in this case I found the book helpful for a number of reasons. It has helped me to sort the world out more than history is normally thought to do. It is an enormously rich work with many facets. One I found especially interesting was the effect of the Reformation. Eire argues that the distinction between Protestant and Catholic reform can be found in two principal binaries: whereas the Catholic Counter-Reformation was clerical and otherworldly in character, the Protestant Reformation was instead lay and materialistic.
