author
Preserved Smith
1880–1941
Best known for bringing the Protestant Reformation to a wide English-speaking audience, he wrote history with both scholarly care and a gift for clear explanation. His books helped generations of readers approach Martin Luther and the upheavals of sixteenth-century Europe with fresh curiosity.
1 Audiobook
The Age of the Reformation
by Preserved Smith
About the author
Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on July 22, 1880, Preserved Smith became an American historian whose life's work centered on the Protestant Reformation. He studied at Amherst College and earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University, later teaching and lecturing before joining Cornell University, where he spent much of his career.
Smith was especially admired for making a complicated period of religious and political change readable without flattening its complexity. Among his best-known books are The Age of the Reformation, Martin Luther: The Life and Letters, and The Social Background of the Reformation, works that helped establish him as a major English-language interpreter of Reformation history.
He died on May 15, 1941, in Kentucky. Remembered as a careful and wide-ranging scholar, he left behind books that still reflect a deep interest in ideas, belief, and the ways large historical movements shape ordinary lives.