The late Middle Ages were ‘the threshold and the foothold’ of the Renaissance and the Reformation (Lindberg, 1996, p 24) for they witnessed the societal changes that contained the seeds for a gradual break with the past: the rise in trade and banking, the rural migration to the towns, the rediscovery of Greek learning, the impact of Arabic culture through the crusaders, the rise in literacy, the increased public perception of Church corruption and hence of anti-clericalism, the emergence of social values in support of wealth accumulation, the growth in nationalism that was anxious to reduce the power of the papacy, the near abolition of serfdom, and the explorations that led to the discovery of the New World.

Despite these changes, early 16th- century Western Europe was still a primarily rural society with a subsistence economy where most people earned their living from agriculture. The household was still the basic economic unit, producing primarily for consumption, and selling and buying only at the margin. It was a strictly hierarchical society where social mobility was at its bare minimum; it was also a grossly unequal society where most of the land was owned by the nobility and the Church. The dominant spirit of the age was still obedience to those above you in the social hierarchy – people knew their status in life and tried to behave accordingly. The endless pursuit of wealth was still ‘tainted with the sins of covetousness and avarice’ (Wrightson, 2000, p 57). Poverty was endemic and semi-starvation was never far away for the masses in both the towns and the countryside. Western Europe may have been on the verge of entering the new world but was still largely in the world of the Middle Ages.

It is within this broader socio-economic environment that the ideas discussed in this chapter should be understood: the ideas of two Renaissance humanist writers – Erasmus and More – who argued for moderation, tolerance, open-mindedness and the enhancement of public welfare; and of the two main leaders of the Protestant Reformation – Luther and Calvin – who wanted to replace one religious orthodoxy with another, perhaps less worldly and opulent and more concerned with public welfare.