Western Civilization - History Of European Society

(Marvins-Underground-K-12) #1

CHAPTER OUTLINE


I. Introduction

II. Late Medieval Demands for Religious Reform
A. Anticlericalism and the Decline of Papal
Authority
B. The Struggle for the Transformation of Piety
C. The Heretics: Wycliffe and Hus
D. The Religious Impact of Nominalism,
Humanism, and the Printing Press

III. Martin Luther and the Outbreak of the
Protestant Reformation

IV. Other Forms of Protestantism: The Radicals,
Zwingli, and Calvin

V. The English Reformation

VI. The Catholic Reformation

VII. The Political, Economic, and Social
Consequences of Reform

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CHAPTER 14


THE RELIGIOUS REFORMATIONS


OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY


M


uch of Europe’s religious life was trans-
formed in the course of the sixteenth cen-
tury. Scholars have called this period the
Age of the Reformation, but this is some-
what misleading. There was more than one religious
reformation. Several forms of piety arose that may be
called Protestant, though their competing religious vi-
sions sometimes had little in common beyond opposi-
tion to the old church. Lutherans, Calvinists,
Anabaptists, and a host of other groups distrusted and
at times persecuted each other with un-Christian vigor.
Others, such as the Antitrinitarians, were perhaps radi-
cal enough to require a classification of their own. Ro-
man Catholicism was changed, in part by forces that
had long been stirring within and in part by the
church’s need to defend itself against Protestantism.
All of these reformations arose from conflicts
within the church and from its broader struggle with
the claims of the state. Some of the issues were institu-
tional and political. Others grew from changes in lay
attitudes or from the influence of movements such as
humanism and nominalism. Chapter 14 will examine
the demands for church reform that arose during the
later Middle Ages and describe how they grew into a
series of religious movements that split western Chris-
tendom and transformed the old church even as they
created new forms of religious belief.




Late Medieval Demands

for Religious Reform

The new assertiveness of the secular states brought
them almost immediately into conflict with the church
over rights, privileges, and revenues. That this occurred
when the laity and many clergy were demanding
higher standards of spirituality than ever before was the
church’s misfortune. Plague, war, and the perception of
social collapse had raised the overall level of spiritual

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