The intellectual parameters of Western Christendom -- The crisis of scholasticism -- Empire, papacy, Petrarch, and the Italian peninsula to 1400 -- The quattrocento to the death of Valla (1457) -- The Florentine Academy -- The imitation of Christ -- Fifteenth-century France -- Paris, England, and Italy : Erasmus to 1511 -- Lefèvre, Reuchlin, and Alcal -- The new century to 1516 : utopia and the Novum Instrumentum -- Germany and Luther -- Protestantism : the defeat of Erasmus -- France, 1520-1535 -- Secular supremacy, England, and the Swiss Confederation, 1520-1535.