At first sight it all seems quite simple and obvious. Medieval man lived in a predominantly religious culture, but we live in a predominantly secular one, and the process of the secularisation of European culture took place, for the most part, in the period covered by this volume. The Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment were all milestones on the road to a secular culture and society, and the secularisation process accelerated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One theological position after another was made untenable by repeated attacks and was abandoned for another, further behind the lines, in the shrinking territory of the sacred. Belief in the supernatural was gradually replaced by a more rational, scientific out-look, a process summed up by the sociologist Max Weber as ‘the disenchantment of the world’ (Die Entzauberung der Welt). The clergy lost in turn their monopoly of learning, their power to persecute the unorthodox, and their influence on the policy of governments.

The fundamental change of attitude between the sixteenth century and the twentieth may be summed up in two quotations. In his General History of the Indies (1552), Francisco López de Gómara described the discovery of America as ‘The greatest event since the creation of the world (excluding the incarnation and death of Him who created it).’ But in 1969, when men first landed on the moon, Richard Nixon spoke quite simply of ‘the greatest week in the history of the world since the creation’.