This chapter describes the origins of the modern, Western study of language, belief, and knowledge. "Europe" refers to the continent, itself with fuzzy boundaries, but when appearing in the world history of knowledge "European" usually refers also to the places most colonized by Europeans in the last two centuries, and to those places' peoples and their ideas. The chapter discusses how historians and others have treated four key moments in the history of knowledge and belief, and specifically at what role the Wider World plays in their scholarship. The four inflection points are familiar: hominization, the Axial Age of religious development, the European Scientific Revolution, and recent and continuing secularization. The secularization thesis was formed in a European scholarly milieu, based on ideas about contemporary and past Christianity, and only then expanded to the Wider World. The Wider World reinforces the secularization thesis, begs questions of the Scientific Revolution, and delights in the level playing field of the Axial Age.