Western Europe

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.

Western Europe is the best documented region in this atlas, and the reason is a technology. Printing arrived in the middle of the fifteenth century and the religious upheaval of the following century was conducted through it: theses, catechisms, confessions, vernacular bibles, polemics answered within weeks, and cheap woodcut pamphlets aimed at readers who could not read Latin.

The consequence for the record is abundance of a particular kind. Doctrinal positions are stated with unusual precision because they were being defended in public against opponents who would quote them back. Institutional history is traceable in detail because both sides kept archives. Parish registers, visitation records and consistory minutes let a historian follow religion down to the level of a village and a year, which is possible almost nowhere else before the modern period.

What that abundance obscures is what nobody wrote down. Practice that was neither approved nor prosecuted leaves little trace, and the unofficial religion of charms, cunning folk and local shrines appears mainly when an authority objected to it. The witch trials produced enormously detailed records for exactly this reason, and they describe a set of beliefs shaped by the questions asked as much as by anything the accused held.

The region also exported its categories. The vocabulary this atlas uses, religion, doctrine, superstition, was formed in these arguments, and applying it elsewhere carries assumptions made here.