ABSTRACT
Many Europeans thought they had found—in national unity, bureaucratic centralization, royal absolutism, capitalism, religious reform, and most of all in the secular, rational, individualistic, humanistic, and optimistic values of the Renaissance—a new and better way to organize their states, economies, and cultures. Prior to the onset of the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century, there was already an agricultural and health crisis in medieval Europe. Some climatologists believe, in fact, that there was a Little Ice Age in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries that, because of its agricultural impact, explains much of the turmoil that took place in the Late Middle Ages. Given the horrors of the Black Death and the Hundred Years' War, Europe needed the reassurance provided by Catholic Christianity more than ever. The Church, however, spent most of the Late Middle Ages in a weakened and chaotic state.
