ABSTRACT
With the Renaissance a highly dynamic state intervened, which shook the very foundations of mediaeval society. The religious feeling of the Renaissance was certainly anti-clerical, but the age was not primarily anti-religious at all, and its material life was strongly linked up with the Church. But whereas the Catholic Church, like the absolute state, practically went hand in hand with the monetary powers and gave decisive support to capitalist developments, Protestantism, the reaction from the worldly-inclined Church of the Renaissance and the return of a predominantly spiritual religion, showed greater unconcern towards material things. In religion as well as socially, by virtue of the interdependence of these two fields, the Reformation and, in a different sense, the Counter-Reformation were a reaction after the Renaissance. This reaction was the conclusion to the prelude of modern times which was only continued by the Age of Reason.
