Early modern history studies the period between the medieval and industrial eras, roughly 1500 to 1800, through social and economic evidence, prices, population records, land tenure and archival administrative documents, rather than through political narrative alone. The field's professional identity in Britain sharpened with the founding in 1952 of the journal Past and Present, established by a group of historians drawn substantially from the Communist Party Historians Group, whose early volumes launched the long running debate over a general crisis of the seventeenth century and gave social and economic approaches to the early modern period a dedicated scholarly forum distinct from conventional political history.
The Reformation, the Catholic Counter Reformation and the era's witch persecutions all fall within early modern history's period, and the discipline's social historical method, reading religious change against demographic and economic pressure rather than treating doctrine as the sole driver of events, gives the atlas a documented material context for religious upheaval in this period. The atlas draws on early modern history wherever a religious change in this period is described alongside its economic and social setting.