tation of papal authority during the Great Schism from 1378 to 1415 and the dissipation of the great scholastic enterprise of Paris, that sense of European unity was much weakened. It is difficult to point to precise reasons for such a vast phenomenon but we should certainly attribute some force to the decline of seignorial landowning during the population fall and the relatively increased strength of the commercial cities of Italy and the Low Countries. Late medieval Europe was certainly not a poor society. On the contrary we find evidence everywhere of high levels of income, greater sophistication in domestic comfort and artistic taste, and great vigour in both the economic and aesthetic spheres. Paradoxically it was a Europe reduced in population by the plagues but bursting with energetic life which began the conquest of the non-European world with the explorations of Vasco da Gama and Christopher Columbus.

As we have seen in the chapters contributed by Peter Denley and Malcolm Vale we must now look for the development of civilization to a number of geographically separate areas which, while they were certainly connected, gave birth to contrasting manifestations of culture. We should not press the distinctions between them too far of course. If we look at important local cultural schools such as, for example, the decorated style of architecture produced in the cathedrals of Wells and Norwich in the early fourteenth century out of the common Gothic heritage, at Chaucer's development of chivalric literature in Troilus and Cresseide or at the expansion of the ideals of the rhetorician in the Renaissance classicism of Florence--in all these cases we are seeing creations which are both highly novel but also very clearly related to medieval antecedents. Nevertheless, the mark of the later medieval world is the extraordinary richness and diversity of its ways of life which made it a far more complex civilization than any which had preceded it and foreshadowed the inventiveness of modern Europe.

A major factor in the new diversity was the exploitation of a variety of languages in important writings. Latin and French which had dominated the twelfth and thirteenth centuries gave way to Italian, English, Flemish, Catalonian, and Czech. The origins of this movement may be in some ways mysterious but

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