The Birth of Modern Belief: Faith and Judgment from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment

An illuminating history of how religious belief lost its uncontested status in the West

This landmark book traces the history of belief in the Christian West from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, revealing for the first time how a distinctively modern category of belief came into being. Ethan Shagan focuses not on what people believed, which is the normal concern of Reformation history, but on the more fundamental question of what people took belief to be.

Shagan shows how religious beli...