Abstract
Two events distinguished and defined early-modern Europe. The first and most dramatic was the break-up of the res publica Christiana occasioned by the Reformation and the wars of religion that followed. The second, which was less dramatic but had an even greater impact on subsequent developments, was the jettisoning of confessional paradigms altogether and the re-grounding of politics, jurisprudence, and even morality solely on this-worldly calculation. Both developments had their beginnings in the second decade of the sixteenth century – when an obscure Augustinian monk in Wittenberg provoked a theological debate by attaching Ninety-Five Theses to a cathedral door, and