Within the past half-century, though, historians have come to realize that there were between 100 million and 1 billion?other?people in Europe whose stories need to be told.

1. Great movements and great events meant nothing unless great numbers of ordinary people were caught up in them.
2. Most people in European history never saw a king, voted in an election, or even fought a war.
3. Instead, they spent most of their time worrying about the same things that we worry about: growing up, falling in love, getting a job, rearing children, putting food on the table, staying healthy, and coming to terms with death.
4. This, too, is a story worth telling.

this is a story that must be told with a view to what came before, if only because Europe did not begin in 1500.

1. In fact, what this course is really about is how we stopped being medieval and became modern.
2. Therefore, to help auditors and viewers place this period in a larger?chronological?context, this course will provide background lectures for the period before 1500, covering:

a. The geography of Europe.

b. The intellectual inheritance of the Middle Ages, in particular, a hierarchical worldview called the Great Chain of Being.

c. A series of developments that began to undo the Great Chain of Being at the dawn of modern Western history.

The next six lectures address developments between 1500 and 1650 that were destroying the medieval worldview and laying the groundwork for the modern world. These developments include:

1. Renaissance Humanism.
2. The rise of centrally governed nation-states.
3. The discovery of the New World.
4. The invention of the printing press.
5. The Protestant Reformation and the Wars of Religion.
6. The Rational and Scientific Revolutions.