An Age of Personal Piety.

The late Middle Ages witnessed a period of popular piety and mysticism that is quite unparalleled in Christian history. Ideas of service to others in the world combined with spirituality, which came on the heels of twelfth- and thirteenth-century monastic and religious reforms and found itself deeply imbedded in the fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century religious mindset. The search for a direct and personal communication with God, whether it was through mystical experience or a life of quiet inner contemplation of images (such as the arma Christi or the implements used to torment Christ, as in a miniature from a book of hours now in Oxford, England), seemed to replace the notion of conformity to institutional rituals. Like the religious reformers in the centuries before them, however, the proponents of this new kind of spirituality were often seen...