begun with Martin Luther's Ninety-five Theses (1517).

The term "modern" was coined shortly before 1585 to describe the beginning of a new era. It was long thought that the term "early modern" was invented either in the 1930s, to distinguish the time between the Middle Ages and late Enlightenment (1800), or the mid-20th century, and only gained traction in the 1960s. Justus Nipperdey pointed to its widespread usage by American historians around 1900 already,