The Middle Ages
Late Middle Ages
If the High Middle Ages were marked by the achievement of institutional unity and intellectual synthesis, the late Middle Ages were characterized by conflict and dissolution. It was then that the secular state began to emerge-even though it often was no more than an incipient national feeling-and the struggle for supremacy between church and state became a fixture of European history for the next several centuries. Towns and cities, continuing to grow in size and prosperity, began to strive for political self-control, and the urban conflict became internal as well, as various classes and interests vied for control.
Beginnings of Political Science
One result of this struggle, particularly in the seignorial corporations of the Italian towns, was the intensification of political and social thinking. This thought focused on the secular state in its own right, independent of the church or community of believers. The independence of political inquiry is only one facet of a major trend in late medieval thinking. The grand project of high medieval philosophy, the attempt to reach a synthesis of all knowledge and experience, both human and divine, was becoming impossible. Some modern scholars have seen in this trend toward the specialization and narrowing of philosophical inquiry a loss of direction or decay. Others regard it as a new beginning-the beginning, for example, of the empirical investigation of the physical world, which can be traced to the breakdown of the high medieval philosophical synthesis.
New Spirituality
Although these philosophical developments were important, the spirituality of the late Middle Ages was the true register of the social and cultural turmoil of the age. Late medieval spirituality was characterized by an intense search for the direct experience of God, whether through the private, interior ecstasy of mystical illumination, or through the personal scrutiny of God's word in the Bible....
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