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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