Sixteenth-century Europeans launched a struggle for order with an intensity and urgency that finds no parallels in modern European history. For the rural societies of Germany, the early sixteenth century brought massive upheavals that eroded the basis of social, political, economic, and religious life. In this probing study of village life, based on rich manuscript sources from the Old County of Hohenlohe, the author seeks to understand how petty German princes, Lutheran pastors, and villagers struggled to create order out of their confusing world. He shows that the foundations for social stability so evident in Germany after 1648 were laid in the forgotten era of German history, in the years after the early Reformation and before the Thirty Years' War.