_The Earth And Its Peoples_ Terms; Chapter 16, The Latin West, 1200-1500 Ce

Front 1

Black Death

Back 1

An outbreak of bubonic plague that spread across Asia, North Africa, and EUrope in the mid-fourteenth century, carrying off vast numbers of persons.

Front 2

Gothic cathedrals

Back 2

Large churches originated in twelfth-century France; built in an architectural style featuring painted arches, tall vaults and spires, flying buttresses, and large stained-glass windows.

Front 3

Great Western Schism

Back 3

A division in the Latin (Western) Christian Church between 1378 and 1417, when rival claimants to the papacy existed in Rome and Avignon.

Front 4

Guild

Back 4

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.

Front 5

Hanseatic League

Back 5

AN economic and defensive alliance of the free towns in northern Germany, founded about 1241 and most powerful in the fourteenth century.

Front 6

Humanists (Renaissance)

Back 6

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.

Front 7

Latin West

Back 7

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. 1000-1500.

Front 8

New monarchies

Back 8

Historians' terms for the monarchies in France, England, and Spain from 1400 to 1600. The centralization of royal power was increasing within more or less fixed territorial limits.

Front 9

Printing press

Back 9

A mechanical device for transferring text or graphics from a woodblock or type to paper using ink. Presses using movable type first appeared in Europe in about 1450.

Front 10

Reconquest of Iberia

Back 10

Beginning in the 1000s, military campaigns by various Iberian Christian states to recapture territory taken by Muslims. In 1492 that last Muslim ruler was defeated, and Spain and Portugal emerged as united kingdoms.

Front 11

Renaissance (European)

Back 11

A period of intense artistic and intellectual activity, said to be a "rebirth" of Greco-Roman culture. Usually divided into an Italian Renaissance, from 1350s to 1450s, and a Northern (trans-Alpine) Renaissance, from the 1400s-1600s.

Front 12

Scholasticism

Back 12

A philosophical and technological system, associated with Thomas Aquinas, devised to reconcile Aristotelian philosophy and Roman Catholic theology in the 1200s.

Front 13

Three-field system

Back 13

A rotational system for agriculture in which one field grows grain, one grows legumes, and one lies fallow. It gradually replaced the two-field system in medieval Europe.

Front 14

Universities

Back 14

Degree-granting institutions of higher learning. Those that appeared in Latin West from about 1200 onward became the model of all modern universities.

Front 15

Water wheel

Back 15

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.