than old superstitions, systematized and reduced to rule, though here
and there the later physical science, based on observation and
experiment, peeped through. In jurisprudence the epoch is marked by
the final conquest of the Roman civil law, in its spirit, where not
in its forms, over the old customs, pre-feudal and feudal.

The subject of Germany during that closing period of the Middle Ages,
characterized by what is known as the revival of learning and the
Reformation, is so important for an understanding of later German
history and the especial characteristics of the German culture of
later times, that we propose, even at the risk of wearying some
readers, to recapitulate in as short a space as possible, compatible
with clearness, the leading conditions of the times--conditions which,
directly or indirectly, have moulded the whole subsequent course of
German development.

Owing to the geographical situation of Germany and to the political
configuration of its peoples and other causes, mediaeval conditions of
life as we find them in the early sixteenth century left more abiding
traces on the German mind and on German culture than was the case with
some other nations. The time was out of joint in a very literal sense
of that somewhat hackneyed phrase. At the opening of the sixteenth
century every established institution--political, social, and
religious--was shaken and showed the rents and fissures caused by time
and by the growth of a new life underneath it. The empire--the Holy
Roman--was in a parlous way as regarded its cohesion. The power of the
princes, the representatives of local centralized authority, was
proving itself too strong for the power of the Emperor, the recognized
representative of centralized authority for the whole German-speaking
world. This meant the undermining and eventual disruption of the
smaller social and political unities,[4] the knightly manors with the
privileges attached to the knightly class generally. The knighthood,
or lower nobility, had acted as a sort of buffer between the princes
of the empire and the Imperial power, to which they often looked for
protection against their immediate overlord or their powerful
neighbour--the prince. The Imperial power, in consequence, found the
lower nobility a bulwark against its princely vassals. Economic
changes, the suddenly increased demand for money owing to the rise of
the "world-market," new inventions in the art of war, new methods of