One more thought on the Norton book

At the end of class last Thursday some observations were made that I thought a lot about afterward.  I disagree (respectfully, of course) that the seventeenth century was Europe's most religious century; in fact, it may be Europe's first truly secular century since the adoption of Christianity. What might have begun as a religiously-minded century became one quickly eclipsed by the turmoil of wars over politics and economics. And I think this bolsters Norton's argument that the secularism of the time was partly a result of the foreign non-Christian rituals surrounding commodities like chocolate and tobacco.  The Europeans in the paintings reproduced in chapter 8, like Jan Steen's Dancing Couple, had to have known, even if it was mostly subliminal, they had to have known on some level that these new behaviors they embraced on a daily basis were part of a wholly different civilization with potent non-Christian gods and unusual cultural ideas.  They relished smoking tobacco and drinking chocolate and they were aware that their fathers, their grandfathers, absolutely none of their ancestors, in fact, had done the same.  That kind of cultural shift has to have created some psychological turmoil, and I think that finally manifested in the turbulence of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe.  The connection is in the picture, I believe.  The party shown in Steen's painting, despite the European clothes, reminded me strongly of the Mesoamerican merchant's feast (including the image of dancers by Diego Valades) described in detail on pages 20-29.