Europe's Reformations establishes a new standard for historians of the early modern era. In recent decades, Reformation scholars have dismantled brick by brick the idea that the Middle Ages came to an abrupt end in 1517, with Martin Luther's Ninety-five Theses. Prominent historian James D. Tracy is the first scholar to effectively synthesize this new understanding of the profound continuities between medieval Catholic Europe and the multiconfessional sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Tracy illustrates how Reformation-era religious conflicts tilted the balance in church-state relations in favor of the latter, so that the secular power was able to dictate the doctrinal loyalty of its subjects. Religious reform, Catholic as well as Protestant, reinforced the bonds of community, while creating new divisions within towns, villages, neighborhoods, and families. In some areas these tensions were resolved by allowing citizens to profess loyalty both to their separate religious communities and to an overarching body-politic. This kind of society, a product of the Reformations, though not willed by the reformers, was the historical foundation of modern pluralism.