3. The Great Tumult: The Reformation
3
THE GREAT TUMULT:
THE REFORMATION
History gives names to its great movements in which new ways of thinking and acting are swept into power. Often, those names are chosen by scholars many generations after the events that they describe. Our theme in the present chapter is the movement we now know as “the Reformation.” The Reformation was unquestionably a religious movement—but it was also a movement that embraced and encouraged massive social, political, and economic change. Like both the French and Russian Revolutions, the origins and causes of this development are complex, and are still not completely understood. There is no doubt, however, that one factor is of major importance to our story—the rise of individualism in the Renaissance.