Western Europe, taken here as France, Germany, and the Low Countries in the early modern period, is a region that marks a turning-point in time as much as a place. This was the ground of the Protestant Reformation: it was in Germany that Martin Luther launched the movement in 1517, in Switzerland and France that Calvin built the Reformed tradition, and across the Low Countries and the Rhineland that the wars, debates, and confessional divisions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reshaped Western Christianity into its enduring Catholic and Protestant forms.
But the region's religious significance in this period runs in two directions at once. The same soil that produced the Reformation also produced its most radical critics and alternatives: the Enlightenment, centred in France and Germany, generated Deism, belief in a rational creator known through nature rather than revelation, and, at its edges, the first systematic modern atheism and the currents of religious dissent and esotericism, from Spiritism (the movement of communication with the dead, systematized by the Frenchman Allan Kardec) to the darker literary and occult reappropriations of the figure of Lucifer. Western Europe thus stands for the great fork in the modern religious road: the region where Christianity was reformed and refounded, and where the intellectual movements that would challenge revealed religion altogether first took hold.