Books: Age of Flame

THE REFORMATION (1,025 pp.)—Will Durant—Simon & Schuster ($7.50).

When Bishop Latimer was about to burn at the stake for his Protestant loyalties (during the reign of Catholic "Bloody Mary" Tudor), he not only spoke one of history's most famous lines but defined an age: "We shall this day light such a candle by God's grace in England, as shall never be put out." The Reformation was an age of flame, lit both by candles and by faggots, by holiness and horror. Materialist-minded historians have no trouble tracing economic pressures and class struggles in the Reformation, yet it remains above all a conflict...