ABSTRACT
On the eve of the religious Reformation, Europeans already confronted two other ideological challenges, which threw their sense of space and time off balance. The Renaissance and global voyages of discovery distracted many minds, compounding apprehensions about the state of the institutional Church. One-byone, civic and Christian humanists recovered cognitive tools from antiquity. The rebirth of classical learning engendered a self-conscious movement for political and social change based on past models of thought. While humanist scholars viewed their discoveries as contributing to the betterment of society on earth, they nevertheless fuelled disquiet in traditional quarters by admitting the validity of an alternate pagan past. At the same time, global exploration challenged old cosmological assumptions with geographic contradictions far more troubling than simple arguments about the shape of the planet. The encounter with the New World haunted Europeans with physical and mental apparitions of a terra incognita and its alien inhabitants. The simultaneous confrontation with an ancient past and a brave New World complicated religious questioning and forever changed Europeans’ mental map.
