ABSTRACT
The Church of the fifteenth century looks, at first sight, like a uniform and well-structured hierarchical institution. The influence of the Church in people's lives can hardly be overestimated: its calendar shaped people's perceptions of time and its rites of passage punctuated the journey from cradle to grave. Bishops and parish priests were 'secular' clergymen, because they lived in the world. But the world beyond the parish offered enlarged experience as well as repressive discipline. Monastic and mendicant churches were additional focal points for devotion: their incessant round of prayers made them attractive burial locations. Few scholars would now maintain that Catholicism was morally or spiritually bankrupt at the close of the middle ages or that the reformation was in some sense 'inevitable'. Indeed, the current fashion is to emphasize the Church's considerable vitality and flexibility. But this very vitality was in itself a source of instability: pressures for reform were intense, both from within and outside the official Church.
