Book excerpt: This voluminous work on Church History by Philip Schaff (1819-1893) was originally published between 1858 and 1893 in eight volumes in the USA and covers the period from the beginnings of Biblical Christianity in A.D. 1 to the History of the Reformation in Germany and Switzerland (1517-1648). Being still a popular text in North America, this work had been out of print for over a century and has now been carefully edited and reformatted for republication in four volumes, each of them containing the text of two volumes of the original edition. Schaff’s work, unlike other works in the field, covers a multitude of church history-related aspects - from church doctrine, policy, events and processes to aspects of social moral and family life, arts and more. This is the fourth and final volume in this series and is a special edition covering the period of the Reformation from 1517-1648 that ends with the Peace Treaty concluded 1648 in Münster, Westphalia, following the long period of the Thirty-Year War.