Chapter 13 Vocabulary (Long Definitions) Flashcards
Three-field System
A rotational system for agriculture in which two fields grow food crops and one lies fallow. It gradually replaced the two-field system in Europe.
Black Death
An outbreak of bubonic plague that spread across Asia, North Africa, and Europe in the mid-fourteenth century, carrying off vast numbers of persons.
Hanseatic League
An economic and defensive alliance of the free towns in northern Germany, founded about 1241, and most powerful in the fourteenth century.
Guild
In medieval Europe, an association of men (rarely women), such as merchants, artisans, or professors, who worked in a particular trade and banded together to promote their economic and political interests. Guilds were also important in other societies, such as the Ottoman and Safavid Empires. (Think labor union.)
Gothic cathedrals
Large churches originating in twelfth century France; built in an architectural style featuring pointed arches, tall vaults and spires, flying buttresses, and large stained-glass windows.
Renaissance (European)
A period of intense artistic and intellectual activity, said to be a “rebirth” of Greco-Roman culture. Usually divided into an Italian Renaissance, from roughly the mid-fourteenth to mid- fifteenth century, and a Northern (trans-Alpine) Renaissance, from roughly the early fifteenth to early seventeenth century.
Universities
Degree-granting institutions of higher learning. Those that appeared in Latin Europe from about 1200 onward became the model for all modern universities.
Scholasticism
A philosophical and theological system, associated with Thomas Aquinas, devised to reconcile Aristotelian philosophy and Roman Catholic theology in the thirteenth century.
Humanists (Renaissance)
European scholars, writers, and teachers associated with the study of the humanities (grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, languages, and moral philosophy), influential in the fifteenth century and later.
Printing Press
A mechanical device for transferring text or graphics from a woodblock or type to paper using ink. Presses using movable type first appeared in Europe in about 1450.
Great Western Schism
A division in the Latin (Western) Christian Church between 1378 and 1415, when rival claimants to the papacy existed in Rome and Avignon.
Hundred Years’ War (1337 - 1453)
Series of campaigns over control of the throne of France involving English and French royal families and French noble families.
New Monarchies
Historians’ term for the monarchies in France, England, and Spain from 1450 to 1600. The centralization of royal power was increasing within more or less fixed territorial limits.
Reconquest of Iberia
Beginning in the eleventh century, military campaigns by various Iberian Christian states to recapture territory taken by Muslims. In 1492, the last Muslim ruler was defeated, and Spain and Portugal emerged as united kingdoms.
