Context
The overarching background context of the entire unit, characterized by a decline in feudalism, urban growth, and the invention of the printing press.
What is the Early Modern Period?
The selling of these directly caused Martin Luther to challenge Catholic authority.
What are indulgences?
The traditional medieval view of the universe, heavily defended by the Church, which claimed the Earth sat unmoving at the absolute center.
What is the Geocentric Theory?
The political system in which all governance and authority are centralized into the hands of a single supreme ruler.
What is Absolutism?
The specific historical skill demonstrated when a student explains how abuses inside the Catholic Church directly led to the Protestant Reformation.
What is identifying a cause-and-effect relationship? (Accept: Causation)
The specific "little c" event in 1517 where a single monk launched a local academic protest that sparked a continent-wide religious split.
What is Martin Luther writing/nailing the 95 Theses?
The mid-1500s meeting where Catholic leaders gathered to reform church corruption while strictly reinforcing their traditional doctrines.
What is the Council of Trent?
The revolutionary theory developed during the Scientific Revolution that directly challenged religious authority by proving the planets revolve around the sun.
What is the Heliocentric Theory?
The political theory used by absolute monarchs to argue that their power came from God, leaving them answerable only to God and not their people.
What is the Divine Right of Kings?
The skill a student is practicing when they analyze a document detailing the medieval worldview alongside a document detailing a scientific discovery.
What is comparison?
The economic condition in Italy that allowed rich families to fund and support the Renaissance.
What are Trade networks / Merchant wealth
The highly disciplined group of priests that acted as spiritual soldiers to stop the spread of Protestantism and win back followers for the Catholic Church.
Who are the Jesuits? (Accept: The Society of Jesus)
The step-by-step process of making observations and doing experiments that was created through the ideas of Francis Bacon and René Descartes.
What is the scientific method?
To gain and maintain control, absolute monarchs took advantage of a weakened nobility to build this massive state institution loyal only to the crown.
What is a professional standing army?
When a student uses evidence from a primary document about the Protestant Reformation to explain the reactions found in a document about the Counter-Reformation, they are showing this relationship.
What is causation?
The immediate "little c" environment of chaos, religious wars, and civil unrest that made populations willing to accept these rulers
What are absolute monarchs
The mechanism used during the Counter-Reformation to censor information and prevent people from reading Protestant or scientific ideas.
What is the Index of Forbidden Books?
The fundamental shift in how scholars found truth during the Scientific Revolution, moving away from a reliance on traditional authority.
What is shifting from religious/ancient authority to physical observation and experimentation?
To consolidate power, absolute monarchs systematically stripped power away from these local legislative bodies and traditional assemblies.
What are assemblies
If an exam question asks a student to find a connection between how Louis XIV ruled France and how Peter the Great ruled Russia, it is assessing this specific skill.
What is finding a historical similarity?
The Renaissance intellectual movement that shifted attention away from blind medieval obedience toward human potential and the critical study of history.
The system of church courts that used trials and punishments to aggressively root out and eliminate heresy in Catholic territories.
What is the Inquisition?
This specific combination of systematic observation and reasoning directly caused a cascade of new discoveries in these two fields of science.
What are physics and astronomy?
This specific group of people lost their traditional independence and political power as absolute kings centralized control under the crown.
Who are the traditional nobility (or nobles)?
The skill used when a student looks beyond a specific primary source to describe the broader global movements of the era, such as the Scientific Revolution or the Age of Absolutism.
What is "Big C" Contextualization?