Chapter 15 The Latin West, 1200–1500 Flashcards
Latin West
Historians’ name for the territories of Europe that adhered to the Latin rite of Christianity and used the Latin language for intellectual exchange in the period ca. 500–1500.
Rural French Peasants
Many scenes of peasant life in winter are visible in this small painting by the Flemish Limbourg brothers from the 1410s. Above the snow- covered beehives one man chops firewood, while another drives a donkey loaded with firewood to a little village. At the lower right a woman, blowing on her frozen fingers, heads past the huddled sheep and hungry birds to join other women warming themselves in the cottage (whose outer wall the artists have cut away).
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 medieval Europe.
Black Death
An outbreak of bubonic plague that spread across Asia, North Africa, and Europe in the midfourteenth century, carrying off vast numbers of persons.
water wheel
A mechanism that harnesses the energy in flowing water to grind grain or to power machinery. It was used in many parts of the world but was especially common in Europe from 1200 to 1900.
The Black Death in Fourteenth-Century Europe
Spreading out of southwestern China along the routes opened by Mongol expansion, the plague reached the Black Sea port of Kaffa in 1346. This map documents its deadly progress year by year from there into the Mediterranean and north and east across the face of Europe.
Hanseatic League
An economic and defensive alliance of the free towns in northern Germany, founded about 1241 and most powerful in the fourteenth century.
Flemish Weavers, Ypres
The spread of textile weaving gave employment to many people in the Netherlands. The city of Ypres in Flanders (now northern Belgium) was an important textile center in the thirteenth century. This drawing from a fourteenth century manuscript shows a man and a woman weaving cloth on a horizontal loom, while a child makes thread on a spinning wheel.
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.
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
Degreegranting institutions of higher learning. Those that appeared in the Latin West from about 1200 onward became the model of 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.
Dante’s Divine Comedy
This fifteenth-century painting by Domenico di Michelino shows Dante holding a copy of the Divine Comedy. Hell is depicted to the poet’s right terraces of Purgatory behind him, surmounted by the earthly and heavenly Paradise. The city of Florence, with its recently completed cathedral, appears to Dante’s left.
