User:Jfhutson/sandbox

Life in Europe in the Late Middle Ages, the period immediately preceding the Reformation, was dominated by the teaching of the Catholic Church and religious practices associated with it. Peoples' lives were structured around the sacraments, with baptism at birth, extreme unction at death, and five other sacraments administered throughout life. The period saw an increase in religious piety, especially among laypeople.

It was common in the Late Middle Ages for people to recognize a need for some type of reform in the Church. In the Avignon Papacy, from 1309 to 1376, the papacy moved away from Rome amid conflict with the King of France. This conflict between spiritual and temporal authorities was closely followed by the Great Schism of 1378 to 1417, when several competing papal claimants attracted wide followings. Both episodes demonstrated the fragility of the pope's claim to universal ecclesiastical authority. Intellectuals began to question the consensus that the church's unity and authority could be ensured by the papacy. The Great Schism was ended by the Council of Constance, and some in the church hoped that reliance on such councils to deal with conflicts, called conciliarism, would resolve the crisis of papal authority. But the following Council of Basel discredited this idea when it set off a new schism. The church was also seen as overly entangled in secular political affairs, leading to charges that it was corrupt, and that entanglements with secular duties conflicted with its spiritual role.

The earliest significant voice of outright dissent from Catholic orthodoxy in the fourteenth century was John Wycliffe, a theologian at the University of Oxford who emphasized mysticism and the reading of the Bible by common people in their own language. His followers, derisively called Lollards, attracted some of the gentry jealous of the church's great wealth, but were eventually stamped out by English clergy eager to demonstrate their loyalty to the pope. The Czech theologian Jan Hus drew on Wycliffe's ideas and inspired the Hussites, which went further than prior heretical movements in providing an alternative to the Catholic Church's worship and authoritative hierarchy. However, the Hussites did gain a following outside of their native Bohemia.