- Why did the Wars of Religion occur? To what extent was religion the thing they were fighting over? Why do these wars matter?
- Which “Revolution” was the more “revolutionary,” in your opinion — the Scientific, the French, or the Industrial? Which had the greatest significance for later Western history?
- What do you think Edmund Burke’s famous prediction towards the end of his Reflections on the Revolution in France, and the rise of Napoleon? Do you see Napoleon as a power-hungry zealot, as a social reformer true to the Revolution, as an example of the corruptibility of power, or in some other way?
- One of Martin Luther’s most important books is called The Freedom of a Christian; Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan argued that only Absolutism could offer freedom to society; Immanuel Kant’s essay “What is Enlightenment?” declared that “a loss of civil freedom is necessary to ensure the freedom of the mind”; the slogan of the French Revolution called for “Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite” (that is, “Freedom, Equality, and Brotherhood”). How did the ideas of freedom change over the 16th-19th centuries in western Europe, and why do these changes matter?
- What was Romanticism, and why does it matter?
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