Early modern Europe is the term used by historians to refer to a period in the history of Europe (especially Western Europe and Central Europe) which spanned the centuries between the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, roughly the late 15th century to the late 18th century. The early modern period is often considered to have begun with such events as the invention of moveable type printing in the 1450s; the Fall of Constantinople in 1453; the end of the Wars of the Roses in 1485; the Voyages of Christopher Columbus and the completion of the Reconquista in 1492 or the start of the Protestant Reformation in 1517. Its end point is often linked with the outset of the French Revolution in 1789, or with the more nebulous origins of industrialism in late 18th century Britain. As with most periodizations of history, however, the precise dates chosen vary.
Some of the more notable events of the early modern period included the Reformation and the religious conflicts it provoked (including the French Wars of Religion and the Thirty Years' War), the European colonization of the Americas and the peak of the European witch-hunt phenomenon.
Read more about Early Modern Europe: Characteristics, Periodization, Difference Between 'early Modern' and The Renaissance, Religion in Early Modern Europe, Political Powers
Famous quotes containing the words early, modern and/or europe:
“We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“The modern woman is the curse of the universe. A disaster, that’s what. She thinks that before her arrival on the scene no woman ever did anything worthwhile before, no woman was ever liberated until her time, no woman really ever amounted to anything.”
—Adela Rogers St. Johns (1894–1988)
“In everyone’s youthful dreams, philosophy is still vaguely but inseparably, and with singular truth, associated with the East, nor do after years discover its local habitation in the Western world. In comparison with the philosophers of the East, we may say that modern Europe has yet given birth to none.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)