This chapter presents a snapshot of all of Europe in 1450, when the climate was colder and wetter than it had been several centuries earlier, which led to poor harvests and recurring famine. Most people lived in small villages in households organized around a marital couple, and never traveled very far. Cities were growing in many parts of Europe, however, with some urban dwellers becoming wealthy and powerful, though the nobility remained the dominant group. In some areas nation-states were slowly coalescing, and everywhere warfare was common, with gunpowder weapons becoming increasingly important. The invention of the printing press with movable metal type spurred the expansion of literacy in vernacular languages, though advanced education was in Latin, and limited to men. The Christian Church in central and western Europe was a wealthy, hierarchical, bureaucratic institution headed by the pope. Most people living in Europe were Christian, and engaged in a variety of religious rituals throughout the year and across their lifespans, as did Jews and Muslims. Production of most commodities was organized through guilds, but cloth-making and mining were increasingly organized along capitalist lines, with an investor providing money for tools, and workers paid for their labor.

In late medieval Europe, most people accepted the Catholic Church’s teachings, but a significant minority called for reforms. In the 1520s, reformers came to include Martin Luther, a professor of theology in Germany. Luther’s ideas turned into a movement, in part through the new technology of the printing press. He and other reformers worked with political authorities, and much of central Europe and Scandinavia broke with the Catholic Church and established independent Protestant Churches. In England, King Henry VIII’s desire for a male heir led him to establish a separate English Church. In the late 1530s, the Catholic Church began to respond more vigorously to Protestant challenges and began carrying out internal reforms, led by the papacy and new religious orders such as the Jesuits. At the same time, the ideas of John Calvin inspired a second wave of Protestant reform, in which order, piety, and discipline were viewed as marks of divine favor. Protestant and Catholic political authorities thought that their territories should have one official state Church, and sought to purge ideas, objects, and people considered religiously alien. The Reformation led to religious persecution, individual and group migration, and more than a century of religious war.

The introduction explores the impact of terms key to the book and the field. for example, the term “early modern,” which grew out of the intellectual model that divided history into three eras – ancient, medieval, and modern – led scholars to emphasize what was new and downplay continuities with earlier periods. Similarly, defining Europe as a continent rather than simply the western part of Asia has meant that its history has often been explored in isolation from that of other areas. Newer perspectives on early modern Europe, reflected in the book, see its history as more connected with that of the rest of the world, and pay increased attention to continuities along with changes. Our knowledge of this era has widened dramatically over the past forty years, as historians have focused on groups that had earlier not been part of the picture, such as women, peasants, children, and religious minorities. In their research, they rely on printed materials, manuscript sources, art, material objects, and the natural world to broaden the range of information available, and apply methods of interpretation and analysis drawn from a range of scholarly fields.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the world became far more interconnected than it had been before. The Portuguese connected with the existing rich trading network of the Indian Ocean, and, in response, the Spanish monarchs agreed in 1492 to provide financial backing for Columbus. Other mariners supported by other European monarchs also began to explore the coasts of the “New World” and establish colonies. European voyages, trading ventures, and colonization had a wide range of impacts. In Asia, existing trading networks, traditions, and structures of power changed relatively little. In Africa, the slave trade began to expand, which encouraged warfare, siphoned off workers, and destroyed kinship groups. In the Americas, European diseases eventually killed the vast majority of the Indigenous population. The Spanish set up plantations, built churches, and mined precious metals, using enslaved Americans and Africans. Gold and silver mined in the Americas fueled global trading connections. Increased contacts with Africa, Asia, and the Americas led Europeans to develop new ideas about difference and hierarchy that built on earlier notions and involved religion, social standing, ethnicity, and skin color. Overseas conquests gave Europe new territories and sources of wealth, and also new confidence in its technical and spiritual supremacy.

Drawing on the ideas of ancient Greek scientists, people in early modern Europe thought of their bodies as containing fluids that influenced health. To them, illness was caused by an imbalance in these fluids, for which bloodletting was the most common treatment. Food was more important than medicine in keeping the body healthy, and what people ate was determined by social class and religious teachings. Many children died young, and those who survived began their training for adulthood at an early age. As young people reached adolescence, the experiences of boys and girls grew more distinct from one another. Authorities tried to restrict sexual behavior, but courts were successful in imposing rules only when these fitted with community norms. Most people married, earlier in eastern and southern Europe than in northern and western Europe, and remarried after the death of a spouse. Widows were more common than widowers, and older women were poorer than older men. Death came at all stages of life, and the living cared for the dying and memorialized the dead with a variety of rituals. Families, guilds, and religious organizations provided people with a sense of community.

Chapter 5 introduces the reader to the remarkable world of the Neandertal, discussing some of the most controversial issues relating to this species of Homo: its emergence, lifeways and ultimate extinction. It introduces cutting-edge ideas about how the probable encounters between Neandertals and anatomically modern humans, also present in the same timeframe and territories, might have been.