I. MY QUESTION

The topic of religious revolution interests me because much of history has been shaped by religious revolution. Consider the history of the West. The rise of Constantine to the seat of the Emperor in the early 4th century allowed Christianity to flourish. The Roman Catholic Church became deeply influential some 400 years later with Charlemagne, who was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the Pope in 800. Religious revolution broke out in Europe with the Protestants, led by Luther, Zwingli, Knox, Calvin and Henry VIII. Their actions led to a revolution in the West that changed the nature of society. Today’s society has very much been impacted the Protestant Revolution, as strains of Puritanism are still seen in American society, for example, as authors like Hawthorne and Melville have shown.

What I hope to learn from the research is how religious revolution unfolded in Europe and what its impact was on society in the Middle Ages and on up through today. The question I want to answer is this: What have been the social, political and economic effects of the Protestant religious revolution in the West?

Three questions that might help me to explore this topic are: 1) Who started the religious revolution in the West? 2) What happened to the Roman Catholic Church as a result of the revolution? 3) What other revolutions were made possible as a result of the religious revolution?

II. MY SEARCH PROCESS

I began the search process by using Google Scholar and searching the keywords: “religious revolution West,” “Protestant Revolution,” and “social economic political effects of Protestant Revolution.” These searches yielded thousands of results, but they mainly all books. There were hardly any links to scholarly articles. I decided I would have to do some background research on the subject in order to better know what to search for.... I Googled “Protestant Reformation” and began reading about it on History.com. But this did not really tell me anything I didn’t already know. So I decided to search Google directly for scholarly journals. I used the keywords “medieval journals scholarly” and obtained a few promising choices. I tried another keyword search: “religious studies journals” and this gave me more selections. However, I wanted to explore an alternate approach. I knew that the Peace of Westphalia was an outcome of the Thirty Years War between Catholics and Protestants and that this peace ushered in a new era of political and social norms. I wanted to search this topic for more information so I returned to Google Scholar and searched “protestant reformation Westphalia” and many results came up in scholarly journals that looked very promising.
The works that I began looking at were: “The Religious Roots of Modern International Relations” by Daniel Philpott in the World Politics, vol. 52, issue 2 from the year 2000. This article actually had a lot of good references with links, which I could use to look up several other journal articles. Another article that appeared was “The Myth of the English Reformation” by Diarmaid MacCulloch in Journal of British Studies, volume 30, issue 1 from the year 1991. It examined the ways in which the identity of the Anglican Church was conveyed over time and how it impacted society. I located some books which proved helpful in expanding my understanding of the subject, such as The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560-1791 by Dale K. Van Kley, published by Yale University Press in 1996, and Wayward Monks and the Religious Revolution of the Eleventh Century by Phyllis G. Jestice, published by Brill in 1997. Both books were helpful in increasing my sense of the background of religious revolution…