How did the Protestant Reformation cause a change in the way Europeans thought in the 16th and 17th centuries

How did the Protestant Reformation cause a change in the way Europeans thought in the 16th and 17th centuries?

Protestant reformation

·         Humanists such as Petrarch helped restore the dignity of mankind while men like Machiavelli injected humanism into politics

·         The century witnessed the growth of royal power, the appearance of centralized monarchies and the discovery of
new lands

·         a wave of scientific advance that would culminate with Newton at the end of the 17th century created a literate public eager for whatever came off the presses.

·         Above all, the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 established the important doctrine that salvation could only be won through good works -- fasting, chastity, abstinence and asceticism.

·         Reformations—Catholic and Protestant—opened the way for European states to impose new standards of ethical and sexual behavior on their populations.

·         Some thinkers have looked to the Reformation to explain the profound transformation of Europe between 1500 and the present. Notably, the sociologist Max Weber proposed that the religious culture of Protestantism, with its emphasis on Bible reading and ethical self-scrutiny, had produced habits that favored the emergence of modern capitalism, especially among Calvinists.