section_path: Conclusion and legacy/Historiography
section_name: Historiography
paragraph_text: Historiography
  
  Margaret C. Jacob argues that there has been a dramatic shift in the historiography of the Reformation. Until the 1960s, historians focused their attention largely on the great leaders and theologians of the 16th century, especially Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli. Their ideas were studied in depth. However, the rise of the new social history in the 1960s led to looking at history from the bottom up, not from the top down. Historians began to concentrate on the values, beliefs and behavior of the people at large. She finds, "in contemporary scholarship, the Reformation is now seen as a vast cultural upheaval, a social and popular movement, textured and rich because of its diversity."
  
  For example, historian John Bossy characterized the Reformation as a period where Christianity was re-cast not as "a community sustained by ritual acts, but as a teaching enforced by institutional structures," for Catholics as well as Protestants; and sin was re-cast from the seven deadly sins —wrong because antisocial— to transgressions of the Ten Commandments —wrong as affronts to God.