The Middle Ages were marked by religious upheaval in Europe. Two new major world religions were coming to power: Islam and Christianity. The rapid success of Christianity led the Roman Catholic Church to become the dominant religious force in most of the western world, and as with any powerful institution, it became increasingly corrupt (Swanson 409). As Lillian Bisson writes in Chaucer and the Late Medieval World, "[the] Medieval church . . . was a collection of competing factions with often contradictory agendas" (49). The church's internal conflict led to public mistrust in religious authority (51-53). Expanding on Bisson's observations, this paper will describe the development of religious doubt in Medieval Europe and note how it characterizes the literature of the period.
