In England, the Protestant Reformation of the early sixteenth century did nothing to ameliorate this regime. Protestantism’s obsession with human sinfulness and the arbitrariness of salvation exposed the self only more acutely to the battleground of warring deities. For Martin Luther, who famously threw his inkpot at the Devil, Satan was as elemental and omnipresent as excrement. (Luther essentially told Satan to eat shit.) Keith Thomas tells the story of an English boy who, for five or six years, “went to sleep with his hands clasped in a praying position, so that if the devils came for him they would find him prepared.” This is the world brilliantly evoked in Daniel Kehlmann’s novel “Tyll” (2017), set in early-seventeenth-century Germany, in which Claus, a village miller who has been dabbling in magic and necromancy, is quickly forced to confess by Jesuit inquisitors and sentenced to hang. Claus humbly accepts that he’s done something wrong, though he doesn’t know what it is. The local hangman reassures him that execution is much nicer than it used to be: “These are better days. In the past you were all burned to death. That takes time, it’s not pleasant. But hanging is nothing. It happens quickly. You climb onto the scaffold and before you know it, you’re standing before the Creator. You’re incinerated afterward, but by then you’re dead, it doesn’t bother you at all, you’ll see.” “Good,” the unlucky Claus replies.