Saxony, home of Martin Luther, was the first country to be divided over the issue of the Protestant faith. While Ernestine Saxony became the heartland of the Reformation, the neighbouring principality of Albertine Saxony saw the beginnings of the Counter-Reformation. The two Saxonies provide almost perfect laboratory conditions for comparing contrary reactions to the Reformation. By investigating the lives, piety and politics of the Wettin princes, Frederick the Wise, John the Constant and George of Saxony the Reformation is revealed to have been a true game changer. Christian humanism, attempts at church reform and sympathy for the Reformation did not correlate neatly. Rather, the dynamics of religious conversion disrupted lines of continuity from the Middle Ages into the early modern era. That disruption testifies to the groundbreaking impact of Protestant ideas. At the same time, early resistance to Luther in Electoral Saxony proves that even in his homeland, Reformation and Catholic reform were alternatives right from the very beginning.

The demons loosed in 1559–1561 transformed the French monarchy and hastened the arrival of a new rhetoric of politics, soon to be built around “the State” [l’Estat]. Practical political crises, such as the capture of John II, had often accelerated rapid changes in practice, theory, and justification, and I would argue did so precisely in that order. John’s capture led to the most fundamental change in the history of the French monarchy – permanent taxation – and, under his son Charles V, to a new monarchical discourse seeking to legitimize it. Permanent taxation required both a theoretical foundation and a public justification: that Charles V’s subjects rankled at this innovation is obvious from the events of 1380–1382. Charles V’s new discourse emphasized the “chose publique” of the kingdom of France; the “bien de la chose publique” lasted for nearly two centuries as the monarchy’s key justificatory phrase. After rampant rhetorical confusion between the 1560s and the 1590s, the neologism “bien de l’Estat” permanently took its place, as French (and other) monarchs sought to convince their subjects that the State was the new form of the res publica.