בתי-אב, תקנות וקסם

Hierarchy persisted

• Established hierarchies of class, religion and gender continued to define social status and perceptions in rural and urban settings.
• The CED's verb is continued — this subtopic's baseline is stability, not change.
• Rural and urban households worked as units, with men and women engaged in separate but complementary tasks.

But a debate opened

• The Renaissance and Reformation raised debates about female education and women's roles in the family, church and society.
• The CED's word is debates, not changes — the argument was opened, and the outcome was not settled in this period.
• Both movements supplied the tools: humanist education and the claim that a believer should read scripture.

Three responses to one strain: formal, informal, and lethal

Cities took over moral regulation

• Social dislocation, coupled with the shifting authority of religious institutions during the Reformation, left city governments with the task of regulating public morals.
• The CED gives two causes: dislocation (1.10's migrants) and shifting religious authority (2.4's settlements).
• So the secular state's reach grew in an area nobody had planned to transfer to it.

Leisure and communal norms

• Leisure activities continued to be organised according to the religious calendar and the agricultural cycle, and remained communal in nature.
• Local and church authorities continued to enforce communal norms through rituals of public humiliation.
• Both sentences use continued — the texture of ordinary life is the unit's largest continuity.

Witchcraft accusations peaked

• Reflecting folk ideas and social and economic upheaval, accusations of witchcraft peaked between 1580 and 1650.
• The CED gives two causes and a date range, and the date range overlaps almost exactly with this unit's conflicts.
• So the peak is evidence about upheaval, and it belongs in an answer about social effects of religious and economic change.