historical materialist account of the protestant reformation

[L.A.P.]

Are there any good texts posters would suggest that deal with the subject, or at least any comments for discussion

[Hit The North]

I don't know of any detailed HM accounts of the protestant reformation per se, but if you're interested in Marxist critique of Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, your go-to guy is Henryk Grossman and his The Beginnings of Capitalism and the New Mass Morality (https://www.marxists.org/archive/grossman/1934/beginnings.htm) (1934)

[Queen Mab]

I've heard it said that the Reformation was the first and greatest bourgeois revolution. In Britain there was a massive transfer of wealth from the Church to the local gentry, setting the stage for capitalist development.

I think Engels covers some of this stuff in The Peasant War in Germany.

[Dodo]

I have never read on this matter, but I always viewed as part of the bourgeois "struggle" against feudalism and aristocracy and their entrenchment in catholicism. Religion was one of bourgeois's early "tools" to counter the previous-backwards system.