History

The sixteenth century was one of the most tumultuous eras in European history, with the Reformations dividing Europeans into warring religious camps and religious dissenters facing widespread discrimination and persecution. This course will examine the religious, social and political transformations of Europe and Britain throughout the century. It will explore why Europeans wanted to reform their religious beliefs and institutions and how they went about it. Reform was applied also to political, economic, and medical beliefs and systems. Ordinary folk also sought reform, leading to the so-called “Peasants’ War of 1525” and the Anabaptist kingdom of Münster, 1534-35, as well as to the destruction of religious art during the iconoclastic fury. The course concludes with how the religious passions unleashed by the Reformations led to new political-religious states, new attitudes toward religious diversity and tolerance, and to the intensification of anti-Semitism and the revival of witch hunting.