Chapter 10: The Rise of Western Europe Vocabulary

agricultural revolution of the Middle Ages

Refers to technological innovations that began to appear during the eleventh century, making possible dramatic new sources of power with water and windmills, improving the pulling power of animals with better collars, using heavy plows to better exploit the soils of northern Europe, and employing a three-field crop rotation system that increased the amount and quality of food available.

manor

A medieval unit or agricultural management in which a lord supervised peasants who worked the land and acted as a presiding judge for crimes and disputes.

serfs

During the Middle Ages, ___ were agricultural laborers who worked and lived on a plot of land granted them by a lord to whom they owed a certain portion of their crops. They could not leave the land, but they had certain legal rights that were denied to slaves.

communes

Sworn defensive associations of merchants and workers that appeared in north-central Italy after 1070 and that became the effective government of more than a hundred cities. The ___ evolved into city-states by seizing control of the surrounding countryside.

usury

The lending of money for interest, condemned as sinful by Church councils.

Cluny

A monastery founded in Burgundy in 910 that became the center of a far-reaching movement to reform the Church that was sustained in more than 1,500 Cluniac monasteries, modeled after the original in ___.

simony

The practice of buying and selling church offices.

lay investiture

The practice of nobles, kings, or emperors installing churchmen and giving them the symbols of office.

Investiture Controversy

A dispute that began in 1076 between the popes and the German emperors over the right to invest bishops with their offices. The most famous episode was the conflict between Pope Gregory VII and Emperor Henry IV. The controversy was resolved by the Concordat or Worms in 1122.

excommunication

A decree by the pope or a bishop prohibiting a sinner from participating in the sacraments of the Church and forbidding any social contact whatsoever with the surrounding community.

curia

The administrative bureaucracy of the Roman Catholic Church.

interdict

A papal decree prohibiting the celebration of the sacraments in an entire city or kingdom.

friars

“Brothers” who wandered from city to city and throughout the countryside begging for alms. Unlike monks who remained in a cloister, ___ tried to help ordinary laypeople with their problems by preaching and administering to the sick and poor.

Eucharist

Also known as Holy Communion or the Lord’s Supper, the Eucharistic rite of the Mass celebrates Jesus’s last meal with his apostles when the priest-celebrant consecrates wafers of bread and a chalice of wine as the body and blood of Christ. In the Middle Ages the wafers of bread were distributed for the congregation to eat, but drinking from the chalice was a special privilege of the priesthood. Protestants in the sixteenth century and Catholics in the late twentieth century began to allow the laity to drink from the chalice.

transubstantiation

A doctrine promulgated at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 that explained by distinguishing between the outward appearances and the inner substance how the Eucharistic bread and wine changed into the body and blood of Christ.

circuit court

Established by King Henry II (r. 1154−1189) to make royal justice available to virtually anyone in England. ___ judges visited every shire in England four times a year.

grand jury

In medieval England after the judicial reforms of King Henry II (r. 1154−1189), ___ were called when the circuit court judge arrived in a shire. The sheriff assembled a group of men familiar with local affairs who constituted the ___ and who reported to the judge the major crimes that had been committed since the judge’s last visit.

trial by jury

When disputes about the possession of land arose after the late twelfth century in England, sheriffs assembled a group of 12 local men who testified under oath about the claims of the plaintiffs, and the circuit court judge made his decision on the basis of their testimony. The system was later extended to criminal cases.

Magna Carta

In 1215 some English barons forced King John to sign the “great charter,” in which the king pledged to respect the traditional feudal privileges of the nobility, towns, and clergy. Subsequent kings swore to uphold it, thereby accepting the fundamental principle that even the king was obliged to respect the law.

English Parliament

An assembly usually summoned because the king needed money. Parliament consisted of titled lords, bishops, and representatives of the “commons,” who were townsmen and prosperous farmers who lacked titles of nobility.

scholasticism

A term referring to a broad philosophical and theological movement that dominated medieval thought and university training. ___ used logic learned from Aristotle to interpret the meaning of the Bible and the writings of the Church Fathers, who created Christian theology in its first centuries.

Twelfth-Century Renaissance

An intellectual revival of interest in ancient Greek philosophy and science and in Roman law in western Europe during the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. The term also refers to a flowering of vernacular literature and the Romanesque and Gothic styles in architecture.

Thomism

A branch of medieval philosophy associated with the work of the Dominican thinker, Thomas Aquinas (1225−1274), who wrote encyclopedic summaries of human knowledge that confirmed Christian faith.

courtly love

An ethic first found in the poems of the late twelfth- and thirteenth-century troubadours that portrayed the ennobling possibilities of the love between a man and a woman. ___ ford the basis for the modern idea of romantic love.

Romanesque

A style in architecture that spread throughout western Europe during the eleventh and the first half of the twelfth centuries and was characterized by arched stone roofs supported by rounded arches, massive stone pillars, and thick walls.

Gothic

A style in architecture in western Europe from the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, characterized by ribbed vaults and pointed arches, which drew the eyes of worshipers upward toward God. Flying buttresses, which redistributed the weight of the roof, made possible thin walls pierced by large expanses of stained glass.