The political and religious crises of the sixteenth and early Essay

The political and religious crises of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, with fears, wars, and rebellions, led philo - Essay Example At the same time, religious control over the people was slipping as more and more of the populace learned to read and as the printing press made things such as translations of the Bible readily available. This caused individuals such as Martin Luther to question what he was taught by a Catholic Church that was suffering from internal schisms in their hierarchy. The political and religious crises of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, with their many fears, wars, and rebellions, led philosophers and rulers to consider alternatives to what they considered the insecure and chaotic institutional structures of the day. One such alternative was Absolutism. Absolutism is a political structure in which the power of the monarch is so complete that there are not any other institutions that can interfere in their rulings (Kimmel). Where the powers of today's kings are limited by their legislatures and the kings of the 19th century were increasingly limited by their social elite, the kings in the 16th and 17th centuries enjoyed the kind of power depicted by the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland - capable of ordering the execution of an individual for no other reason than they decided that person should die.