TTC Late Middle Ages

Course Lecture Titles

1. Late Middle Ages—Rebirth, Waning, Calamity?
2. Philip the Fair versus Boniface VIII
3. Fall of the Templars and the Avignon Papacy
4. The Great Papal Schism
5. The Hundred Years War, Part 1
6. The Hundred Years War, Part 2
7. The Black Death, Part 1
8. The Black Death, Part 2
9. Revolt in Town and Country
10. William Ockham
11. John Wycliffe and the Lollards
12. Jan Hus and the Hussite Rebellion
13. Witchcraft
14. Christine de Pizan and Catherine of Siena
15. Gunpowder
16. The Printing Press
17. Renaissance Humanism, Part 1
18. Renaissance Humanism, Part 2
19. The Fall of the Byzantine Empire
20. Ferdinand and Isabella
21. The Spanish Inquisition
22. The Age of Exploration
23. Columbus and the Columbian Exchange
24. When Did the Middle Ages End?

Were the two centuries from c. 1300 to c. 1500—an age that has come to be known as the Late Middle Ages—an era of calamity or an era of rebirth? Should we look on this time as still clearly medieval or as one in which humanity took its first decisive steps into modernity? Was it a period as distant from us as it appears, or was it closer than we suspect? Students of history are still trying, even after so many centuries, to reach anything approaching a consensus on the answers to these questions.

Ponder the many contradictions on your own and you may be frustrated by inconclusive answers. Instead, let Professor Philip Daileader be your guide and set you on the path to answers with The Late Middle Ages, the final course in his excellent trilogy that began with The Early Middle Ages and The High Middle Ages.

This provocative 24-lecture course introduces you to the age's major events, personalities, and developments and arms you with the essentials you need to form your own ideas about this age of extremes—an age that, according to Professor Daileader, "experiences disasters and tragedies of such magnitude that those who survive them cannot remember the like, and doubt that subsequent generations will be capable of believing their descriptions."

An Era of Disease, War, and Religious Turmoil

There was the Black Death, which killed perhaps half the population of Europe in four years and remained a constant and terrifying presence for centuries to come. ...

There was the carnage of frequent wars, particularly the Hundred Years War, and a steady progression in the deadly effectiveness of the weapons with which those wars might be waged. ...

There was religious turmoil, with the papacy humiliated, the popes departing Rome, and a Great Papal Schism that ultimately produced three competing popes, leaving the Catholic Church with no clear leader for a period of nearly 40 years. ...

And there was the threat of rebellion in both city and country as disasters and social change took their inevitable toll.