Oh, sorry, cross posted.
Firstly, I object to the ideology behind this binary.
Catholicism and Protestantism are both about power and control.
Elizabeth I killed far more heretics than Mary I, for example. We are given a picture of a nice, fluffy, intellectually free Protestant Church, while the Catholics are painted as foreigners with an inquisition and torture.
It doesn't really stand up, and it sets up all of these xenophobic ideas about religion and oppression, which you can still see feeding into the language - if a politician such as Nick Clegg refers to, say, Iran's 'medieval' practices, you know he means repressive and dictated by a horrible religion.
So that's one issue. Secondly, I think it's bad history - it's made too neat.
There isn't this neat division between Catholicism and Protestantism, with Catholicism aligned with control and feudalism and Protestantism with freedom and emerging capitalism. The chronology doesn't follow.
We used to be taught that Henry brought in the Reformation, in one stroke, breaking with the Catholic Church, closing the monasteries and founding a free religion. But we know actually, he was Catholic all his life.
We also know that, despite what Bragg says about Tyndale, the Catholic Church itself had been having these debates for a very long time. Way back in 1215, the pope insisted that everyone needed to be able to understand religion in the vernacular, and in England, there was a huge move to translate things and improve literacy and so on. It looked for a long time as if that might just run and run, and plenty of countries were ok with vernacular Bible translations. At the same time, the economic structure was shifting, and you do see literacy going further down the social scale, and you also see people starting into urban commerce and what you could call proto-capitalism.
In 1370 or so, again, it all looks pretty exciting, and it looks as if we'll have an English Bible. People debate getting women priests into the church. I dunno how serious that ever was, really, but at this stage (on the economic side again), women are getting into the guilds in France, and getting their business rights upheld quite a bit, and society looks as if everything could change.
In this period (late fourteenth/early fifteenth century) we're also getting an influx of Italian Humanist writings - that's the beginnings of Renaissance thought.
The Church tries to stamp on it hard, because it turns into a political rather than a religious challenge, but it seems to have continued seething away under the surface.
So, you have this very long history of movements back and forwards - some bring a bit more freedom of one kind or another; some restrict it. It's complex. I don't like the idea of picking on Tyndal - who is historically 'at the right time' and claiming it was all his genius, especially when (as with the Bible), it patently wasn't. It's just not true.
Third thing - I'm not sure Protestantism was as good as it's painted.
In the sixteenth century, you have to remember that while Protestantism is hailed as a good thing, it gets rid of nunneries (where women could exercise a fair amount of autonomy, and could get a decent education), and it redefines education, increasingly taking the sort of education ordinary people were most likely to get out of the hands of women, who'd had a big role to play. One of the saddest things, for me, is reading about early modern school 'teachers' who were actually illiterate, and taught children to chant the alphabet even though they themselves never went on to learn to read. Women's roles also became, IMO, a bit more circumscribed - when I read early modern stuff, I'm struck by this emphasis on women's bodies as disgusting. Some women's networks of support also probably disappear.
So, I have problems with the narrative of progress we get given.
I am not saying 'yay, medieval Catholicism!' or trying to claim it was freeing and lovely. But, I think all big social changes happen very, very slowly. They are not usually motivated by altruism. Very few people are genuinely motivated by wanting to end all oppression, but almost every social movement towards change claims that's its motivation.