ABSTRACT
The Renaissance spans the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, embracing, loosely, the late Middle Ages and Early Modernity. The Reformation is often more precisely dated. It began in 1519 when Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral (if, indeed, he did so) and concluded with the final volley of the European Religious Wars in 1648; 30 years of terrible conflagration that swept through central Europe causing the deaths of one-fifth of its population. MacCulloch (2003) waives this precise periodisation in favour of a broader span, from 1490–1700. The Reformation, like the Renaissance, sat between the Middle Ages and Modernity. Both periods overlapped. The humanism of the later informed the cultural development of the former. Together they constituted ‘Early Modernity’, a curious cacophony of civilisation and barbarism, science and superstition.
