Can you explain the first and second reformations?

In late medieval Europe, the majority of Europeans accepted the Catholic Church's basic teachings and found its ceremonies and rituals meaningful. However, an increasingly vocal and significant faction of unhappy clergy and humanist intellectuals called for reforms. Martin Luther, who was a professor of Theology at Wittenberg University in Germany, was the most significant of these early reformers, and following his publication of 95 theses remonstrating the perceived injustices of the Roman Catholic Church in 1517, the first wave of reformation began in central Europe. The spread of reformed christianity was in part facilitated by the invention of the moveable type printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in ca. 1450, and the reformers were some of the first intellectuals to take full advantage of this innovation. Furthermore, Luther and other reformers worked closely with political/princely authorities, and as a consequence, much of central Europe and Scandinavia broke away from Rome in the following decades. In England, King Henry VIII's desire for a male heir led him to split with the Catholic Church and establish an independent Church of England, a radical move that was willingly accepted by many whilst others vehemently resisted. Protestant and Catholic political authorities all thought that their territories should have one official state church, but some individuals and groups rejected this idea, and believed that religious (or confessional) loyalty should be an individual choice. These groups also developed views about various Christian teachings which were considered radical, and they were often mercilessly persecuted by unsympathetic authorities, and forced to move from place to place. Similarly, peasants who used the new religious teachings to justify their own mistreatment at the hands of their lords and princes, were suppressed with often brutal force. The first wave of Reformation brought about a century of religious wars, beginning in Switzerland and Germany, spreading to France and the Netherlands later in the sixteenth-century.In the late 1530s, The Catholic Church began to respond more vigorously to Protestant challenges, and began to carry out their own internal reforms as well. These reforms, in contrast to the protestants, were led by the pope himself with the support of new religious orders such as the Jesuits, culminating in the Council of Trent (Trento) 1545-1563, which reaffirmed Catholic orthodoxy and traditional doctrine. At the same time, the ideas of Jean Calvin (in particular) inspired a second wave of of Protestant reform, in which order, piety, and discipline were viewed as marks of divine favour (or "approbation"). This emphasis on morality and social discipline emerged in Catholic territories as well, and authorities throughout Europe sought to teach people more about their particular variant of Christianity in the process of Confessionalisation, a political and religious process which created the tense dynastic and territorial disputes which would culminated in the Thirty Yeas War.

Answered by Frederick C. History tutor

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