HIST 341 - The Reformation and Wars of Religion

Credit Hours: 3

This course examines the sixteenth-century European Christian reform movements that established the Protestant churches and reinvented the Roman Church. It considers the Reformation not just as a religious transformation, but as a process of profound and violent social, political, and cultural upheaval in Early Modern Europe. Topics addressed will include the Reformation’s roots in medieval Christian theology and Renaissance humanism, the role of religious reform in the construction of modern states and notions of family and gender, reformed theology as a spur to violent class conflict, the formation of radical Christian theocratic communities, and the civil and international religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.