OUTLINE
I. The Black Death
A. Preconditions and Causes of the Plague
B. Popular Remedies
C. Social and Economic Consequences
E. New Conflicts and Opportunities
II. The Hundred Years’ War and the Rise of National Sentiment
A.
The Causes of the War
B. Progress of the War
III. Ecclesiastical Breakdown and Revival: The Late Medieval Church
A.
The Thirteenth-Century Papacy
B.
Boniface VIII and Philip the Fair
C.
The Avignon Papacy (1309–1377)

D.
John Wycliffe and John Huss
E. The Great Schism (1378–1417) and the Conciliar Movement to 1449
IV. Medieval Russia
A.
Politics and Society
B.
Mongol Rule (1243–1480)
V. In Perspective

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1.
What were the underlying and precipitating causes of the Hundred Years’ War?
2.
What advantages did each side have?
3.
Why were the French finally able to drive the English almost entirely out of France?
4.
What were the causes of the Black Death, and why did it spread so quickly throughout Western
Europe?
5.
Where was it most virulent?
6.
How did it affect European society?
7.
How important do you think disease is in changing the course of history?
8.
Why did Pope Boniface VIII quarrel with King Philip the Fair?
9.
Why was Boniface so impotent in the conflict?
10.
How had political conditions changed since the reign of Pope Innocent III in the late twelfth century, and what did that mean for the papacy?
11.
How did the church change from 1200 to 1450?
12.
What was its response to the growing power of monarchs?
13.
How great an influence did the church have on secular events?
14.
What was the Avignon papacy, and why did it occur?
15.
How did it affect the papacy?
16.
What relationship did it have to the Great Schism?
17.
How did the church become divided and how was it reunited?
18.
Why was the conciliar movement a setback for the papacy?
19.
Why were kings in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries able to control the church more than the church could control the kings?
20.
How did kings attack the church during this period?