ABSTRACT
The overarching historical question that has framed this study is why the Reformation took root in some places in Europe and not in others. While no single issue can bear the weight of the whole complex of events, changes and continuities that characterized the Reformation, religion was the heart of the matter, the ground in which the decisive changes took place. Steven Ozment has claimed that the religious history of the late medieval and Reformation periods provides 'the most telling if people search the period for the issues that made it historically unique, generated institutional change. Euan Cameron has challenged historians who would lean toward social or economic explanations of the Reformation 'to explain why, with so many urgent difficulties in the day-to-day sphere, the people of Europe so readily expressed their discontents in terms of religion'. The variety of teaching found in the Church left different regions open or resistant to evangelical critiques and alternatives.
