Late Middle Ages

The Late Medieval Church: Crisis, Reform, and the Forging of Modern Christianity

The late medieval Western church was the most powerful institution in Europe, and it was in crisis. The Avignon Papacy (1309–1377) had moved the pope out of Rome and into southern France, where the papacy appeared increasingly as a tool of French interests. The Western Schism (1378–1417) saw two, and at one point three, rival popes claim the throne of St. Peter, dividing the loyalty of Catholics across Europe. The conciliar movement of the early fifteenth century, which held that the authority of a general council was superior to that of the pope, briefly threatened to transform the structure of the church, but was eventually suppressed. The rise of heresies such as the Lollards and the Hussites revealed the depth of the religious anxiety of the period, and the long decline of the old Benedictine monasticism suggested that the inherited institutions of the church were no longer adequate to the new conditions of the late Middle Ages.

Yet the late medieval church was also an institution in renewal. The great mendicant orders of Franciscans and Dominicans, founded in the early thirteenth century, were at the height of their influence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and they helped to shape the religious life of the period in important ways. The Devotio Moderna, a movement of practical piety that originated in the Low Countries, was one of the most influential religious movements of the late Middle Ages, and it laid the groundwork for the reforms of the sixteenth century. The cult of the saints — especially the saints of the plague — expanded rapidly in the wake of the Black Death, and pilgrimage to the great shrines of Europe remained one of the most popular forms of religious devotion. The printing press, invented in the mid-fifteenth century, made possible the wide dissemination of religious texts, and it helped to lay the groundwork for the religious upheavals of the sixteenth century.

This guide is organised in four sections:

What was the church, and what was it for?

The church of the late Middle Ages was, in organisational terms, the pope’s diocese raised to a universal scale. It was a single hierarchy of clergy — bishops, priests, deacons — running from the pope in Rome down to the parish priest in every village of western Christendom. It was a single legal system, the canon law, administered by church courts that sat alongside the secular courts and had jurisdiction over marriage, wills, clerical discipline, heresy, and a long list of other matters. It was a single set of rites, organised around the seven sacraments, the Mass, and the daily round of the canonical hours. It was a single network of institutions — parishes, cathedrals, monasteries, friaries, hospitals, schools, and universities — that bound the society of western Christendom together.

This unity had been built slowly, over the eleventh and twelfth centuries, in the period that historians call the Gregorian Reform (after Pope Gregory VII, r. 1073–1085) and after. By 1300 the result was an institution of great power, great wealth, and great ambition. The papacy, the bishops, the religious orders, the universities, the mendicant preachers, the parish priests, and the laity all had their own interests within this structure, and the tensions between them are the substance of late medieval church history.

The crisis of the papacy

The most visible sign of crisis was the Avignon Papacy. In 1309, Pope Clement V, a Frenchman, moved the papal court from Rome to Avignon, a city in the Comtat Venaissin that was then part of the papal states. The popes remained at Avignon for the next sixty-eight years, and the period is sometimes called the “Babylonish Captivity” of the papacy, in deliberate imitation of the Babylonian Captivity of the Jews described in the Bible. The Avignon popes were widely seen as tools of the French crown, and the move was deeply unpopular in Italy, in Germany, and in England.

The Avignon Papacy was also a period of great centralisation of the church. The popes, who had been relatively weak rulers in the early Middle Ages, gradually built up the apparatus of a sophisticated monarchy — a centralised bureaucracy, a sophisticated system of taxation (annates, Peter’s Pence, the servitia communia), a professional diplomatic service, and a system of legal procedure that made the papal court the supreme court of Christendom. The papal court at Avignon was one of the most splendid in Europe. Yet the centralisation of the church was achieved at a cost, and the popes were widely criticised for their worldliness, their taxation, and their political ambitions.

The crisis of the church was compounded by the Western Schism. In 1378, the College of Cardinals, meeting in Rome, elected an Italian pope, Urban VI, in the hope of healing the breach with Italy. Urban turned out to be an austere and unpredictable figure, and within a few months the French cardinals had withdrawn to Avignon and elected a rival pope, Clement VII. The schism that followed lasted for nearly forty years, and at one point (1409) there were three rival popes, each claiming to be the true vicar of Christ. Bishops, priests, monks, and nuns had to choose sides, and the choice often followed political rather than religious lines. Kings, who had the right to tax the church in their territories, often used the schism as a lever to extract concessions from whichever pope claimed authority over them. The result was a profound weakening of the papal monarchy, and a corresponding strengthening of the nation-states that were emerging in the late Middle Ages.

The schism was eventually resolved by the Council of Constance (1414–1418), which succeeded in deposing three rival popes and electing a new pope, Martin V, who was recognised by the whole of the Western church. Yet the resolution of the schism did not end the crisis of the church. The conciliar movement, which held that the authority of a general council was superior to that of the pope, briefly threatened to transform the structure of the church, but it was eventually suppressed by the popes of the late fifteenth century.

Bishops, priests, and parishes

The bishops, who governed the dioceses into which the Western church was divided, were an important part of the church hierarchy. The great bishops of the late Middle Ages, including the archbishops of Canterbury, the bishops of Durham, the archbishops of Reims, and the bishops of Würzburg, were powerful lords in their own right, and they often played important roles in the political life of their kingdoms. Yet the bishops were also under pressure. The growth of royal power, the rise of national monarchies, and the development of secular institutions all contributed to a slow erosion of episcopal authority.

The parish priests, who ministered to the laity at the local level, were the backbone of the late medieval church. The parish priest was, on the ground, the most important figure in the religious life of the laity, and he was responsible for the celebration of the mass, the administration of the sacraments, the preaching of the gospel, and the care of the sick and the poor. The parish priests of the late Middle Ages were, however, often poorly educated, poorly paid, and poorly respected, and the complaints about their ignorance, their worldliness, and their moral failings were widespread. The long-running joke that a parish priest could not identify his patron saint was, by the late Middle Ages, more or less true in some dioceses.

The laity and the new religious movements

The crisis of the late medieval church was not only a crisis of the institution. It was also a crisis of the laity, and the response of the laity was one of the most important features of the period. The laity of the late Middle Ages, increasingly literate and increasingly aware of the religious controversies of the day, found their own ways of expressing their faith, and they developed a rich tradition of popular devotion that often bypassed the institutional church.

The confraternity, a voluntary association of laypeople devoted to a particular saint or a particular work of charity, was one of the most important expressions of this lay piety. The confraternities of the late Middle Ages — the Compagnia di Santa Maria della Croce in Florence, the Confrérie de la Passion in Paris, the numerous English guilds — played an important role in the religious and social life of the cities, and they helped to shape the religious culture of the period.

The mystics of the late Middle Ages, including Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, Henry Suso, and Julian of Norwich, were another important expression of lay piety. The mystics, who emphasised the personal, interior experience of God, often found themselves in conflict with the institutional church, and several of them, including Meister Eckhart, were charged with heresy. Yet the mystical tradition was one of the most influential currents of late medieval religious life, and it helped to lay the groundwork for the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century.

Heresy and dissent

The crisis of the late medieval church was accompanied by a wave of heretical movements, which revealed the depth of the religious anxiety of the period. The most important of these movements were the Lollards, followers of the Oxford theologian John Wycliffe, and the Hussites, followers of the Bohemian priest Jan Hus. The Lollard movement, which began in England in the 1370s, challenged the authority of the pope, the doctrine of transubstantiation, and the practice of pilgrimages and indulgences. The Lollard movement was eventually suppressed in England, but it had a long afterlife in the writings of the Lollard preachers and in the popular religious culture of the period.

The Hussite movement, which began in Bohemia in the early fifteenth century, was even more successful. Jan Hus, a priest and professor at the University of Prague, was invited to the Council of Constance to present his views, but he was arrested, tried for heresy, and burned at the stake in 1415. His death provoked a popular uprising in Bohemia, and the Hussite Wars (1419–1434) became one of the most important religious conflicts of the late Middle Ages. The Hussites eventually won a series of concessions from the church in the Compactata of Basel (1436), and the Unitas Fratrum (Unity of Brethren, or Moravian Church) survived in Bohemia as an organised body until the Reformation.

The Lollard and Hussite movements were not the only heresies of the late medieval period. The Cathars, a dualist heresy that had flourished in southern France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, had been largely suppressed by the Albigensian Crusade (1209–1229), but they had left a deep mark on the religious life of the region. The Waldensians, a movement of lay preachers founded by the Lyon merchant Peter Waldo in the 1170s, had survived in the Alpine valleys of Piedmont and in Bohemia. The Beguines and Beghards, lay religious movements that had flourished in the Low Countries and in the Rhineland, had been suppressed by the Council of Vienne in 1312.

Monasticism in transition

The monastic orders, which had been the foundation of the medieval church, were in transition. The Benedictine monasteries, which had been the great repositories of learning and the centres of the religious life of the early Middle Ages, were in slow decline. The number of monks and nuns had fallen, the discipline had slackened, and the great monasteries were often more concerned with the management of their estates than with the religious life of their members.

The decline of the Benedictines was, in part, a consequence of the rise of the mendicant orders of friars founded in the early thirteenth century. The Franciscans, founded by St. Francis of Assisi in 1209, and the Dominicans, founded by St. Dominic in 1216, were at the height of their influence in the late Middle Ages. The mendicants were different from the older monastic orders in that they did not withdraw from the world; they lived and preached in the cities, and they were devoted to the conversion of the laity. The mendicants were also, by 1300, the intellectual vanguard of the late medieval church, and the great universities of Paris, Oxford, and Bologna were dominated by Franciscan and Dominican scholars — Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham among them.

A new wave of monastic reform began in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with the development of the Devotio Moderna, a movement of practical piety that originated in the Low Countries around Geert Groote of Deventer (1340–1384). The Devotio Moderna emphasised personal devotion, the reading of scripture, and the imitation of the life of Christ. The most important product of the movement was the Brethren of the Common Life, a religious order that combined the contemplative life with the active life and that ran a network of schools that provided education to thousands of children. The Brethren of the Common Life were an important precursor of the Protestant Reformation, and the great humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam was educated in one of their schools at Deventer.

The late medieval church was not only an institution in crisis. It was also a church of popular devotion, and the religious life of the period was marked by a rich variety of practices — pilgrimage, the veneration of saints and relics, the celebration of the mass, the observance of the feasts and fasts of the liturgical year. The great pilgrimage shrines of Europe — Canterbury (the tomb of Thomas Becket, murdered 1170), Santiago de Compostela (the supposed tomb of St. James the Greater), Rome (the tombs of St. Peter and St. Paul), and Jerusalem (the Holy Sepulchre) — attracted millions of pilgrims over the centuries, and pilgrimage was one of the most popular forms of religious devotion.

The cult of the saints was a central feature of late medieval popular religion. The saints were believed to intercede with God on behalf of the living, and their relics — the bones, the clothing, the personal effects of the saints — were venerated as sources of miraculous power. The cult of the saints expanded rapidly in the wake of the Black Death, and the saints of the plague — St. Roch (a Provençal layman, popular in France and Italy), St. Sebastian (the Roman soldier martyred by arrows), and St. Christopher (the legendary giant who carried the Christ child across a river) — became some of the most popular saints of the period.

The cult of the Virgin Mary was one of the most distinctive features of late medieval popular religion. The Virgin was venerated as the Mother of God, the Queen of Heaven, the refuge of sinners, and the intercessor for the human race. The cult of the Virgin expanded rapidly in the late Middle Ages, and the great cathedrals of Europe were dedicated to her under various titles — Notre-Dame in Paris, Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, Unsere Liebe Frau in German cities. The Rosary, the Hail Mary, the Office of the Virgin, and the feast of the Assumption (15 August) all expanded in this period, and the great painting cycles of the late Middle Ages — the Ghent Altarpiece (1432), the Misericordia of Piero della Francesca, the Ave Maria of late-medieval German woodcuts — are monuments to a devotion that had become central to the religious life of the laity.

What changed, and what did not

The late medieval church cast a long shadow over the early modern period. The crisis of the schism, the rise of heresy, the decline of the old monastic orders, and the new movements of popular piety all contributed to the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. The reformers of the sixteenth century — Martin Luther, John Calvin, Huldrych Zwingli, and their followers — drew on the ideas of the late medieval reformers and heretics, including John Wycliffe, Jan Hus, and the Brethren of the Common Life. The Catholic Reformation, or Counter-Reformation, that followed the Protestant Reformation was, in turn, a response to the long crisis of the late medieval church, and it drew on the resources of the late medieval church, including the new religious orders (the Jesuits, the Theatines, the Capuchins) and the new forms of popular piety.

The cultural legacy of the late medieval church is equally impressive. The great cathedrals of the late Middle Ages — Beauvais, Amiens, Reims, the tower of Canterbury — are among the most impressive buildings in the history of Western architecture. The music of the late medieval church — the great polyphonic masses of Dufay, Ockeghem, Obrecht, and Josquin des Prez — is one of the highest achievements of Western culture. The literature of the late medieval church — the works of Dante, Langland, Julian of Norwich, and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing — is one of the great treasures of the Western literary tradition.

A note on what this guide does not do

The church treated in this guide is the church of the clergy, the theologians, the canon lawyers, and the well-documented laity. The result is heavy on councils, papal bulls, university condemnations, and named heretics; light on the religious experience of the mass of the population, whose parish priests rarely left any record of what they said in the pulpit or what their congregations believed. The popular religion of the late Middle Ages — the amulets, the charms, the holy wells, the unofficial saints, the processions that mixed piety and theatre — is treated where it intersects with the institutional record, but a full account of late medieval religion would need a different kind of source base.

Further reading

Chapters in this guide