Vocabulary Flashcards
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.
Three-field System
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.
Latin West
An outbreak of bubonic plague that spread across Asia, North Africa, and Europe in the mid-fourteenth century, carrying off vast numbers of persons.
Black Death
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.
Water Wheel
An economic and defensive alliance of the free towns in northern Germany, founded about 1241 and most powerful in the fourteenth century.
Hanseatic League
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.
Guild
Large churches originating in twelfth century France; built in an architectural style featuring pointed arches, tall vaults, and large stained-glass windows.
Gothic Cathedrals
A period of intense artistic and intellectual activity, said to be a “rebirth” of Greco-Roman culture.
Renaissance
Degree-granting institutions of higher learning.
Universities
A philosophical and theological system, associated with Thomas Aquinas, devised to reconcile Aristotelian philosophy and Roman Catholic theology in the thirteenth century.
Scholasticism
European scholars, writers, and teachers associated with the study of humanities (grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, languages, and moral philosophy), influential in the fifteenth century and later.
Humanists
A mechanical device for transferring text or graphics from a wood block or type to paper using ink.
Printing Press
A division in the Latin (Western) Christian Church between 1378 and 1415, when rival claimants to the papacy existed in Rome and Avignon.
Great Western Schism
Series of campaigns over control in the throne of France, involving English and French royal families and French Novak families.
Hundred Years War
Historians’ term for the monarchies in France, England, and Spain from 1450 to 1600.
New Monarchies
