Between the Black Death (1350) and the Peace of Westphalia (1648), western and central Europe saw a variety of natural disasters, wars, political and economic transformations, and the split of Western Christianity (or: the birth of Protestant/Evangelical Christianity in opposition to the Roman Catholic faith that had dominated for 1000+ years). Everyone was talking about “reformations” (the need to reform religion, government, education, etc.) as well as “The End” (the thought that things were so bad that the Apocalypse was surely near, as the rise of heresies, plagues, famines, wars, witches etc. made clear). Throughout this course, we shall focus on the cohesion and tension between religious, social, economic, political, and psychological factors as a complex matrix, within which the Reformation movement took shape. Our goal is to recognize and elucidate the various contextual structures that influenced the unfolding of this history, and to give equal prominence to those less quantifiable elements such as religious motivation and mentality, without which the period cannot be properly understood. The hopes and fears of women and men, just as much as any social or economic factors, helped cast the drama of unfolding events.