Volume 1 of 2. Reformation in Germany from Its Beginning to the Religious Peace of Augsburg. This history of the Reformation was written with the intention of describing a great religious movement amid its social environment. The times were heroic, and produced great men, with striking individualities not easily weighed in modern balances. A history of the Reformation must describe five distinct but related things - the social and religious conditions of the age out of which the great movement came; the Lutheran Reformation down to 1555, when it received legal recognition; the Reformation in countries beyond Germany which did not submit to the guidance of Luther; the issue of certain portions of the religious life of the Middle Ages in Anabaptism, Socinianism and Anti-Trinitarianism; and the Counter-Reformation.