To many people, medieval life seems heroic, entertaining, and romantic. In reality, life in the Middle Ages, a period that extended from approximately the fifth century to the fifteenth century in Western Europe, was sometimes all these things, as well as harsh, uncertain, and often dangerous.

The Catholic Church was the only church in Europe during the Middle Ages, and it had its own laws and large coffers. Church leaders such as bishops and archbishops sat on the king's council and played leading roles in government. Bishops, who were often wealthy, came from noble families, and ruled over groups of parishes called "diocese." Parish priests, on the other hand, came from humbler backgrounds and often had little education. The village priest tended to the sick and indigent and, if he was able, taught Latin and the Bible to the youth of the village.

Monasteries in the Middle Ages were based on the rules set down by St. Benedict in the sixth century. The monks became known as Benedictines and took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience

Dante Alighieri was born in 1265 and was laid to rest in the year 1321. His city-home Florence was racked with political struggle, and Dante had to flee. Exile from city life gave the writer time to create The Divine Commedia, an epic account of the poet's journey through purgatory and hell to heaven. As can be seen in Chartres, the connection for Dante between the miry political world on earth and the spiritual world of after-life is clear in one part of his work, The Inferno, where the poet encounters those who have sinned on earth such as politicians, liars, murderers, even those great people from history whose only misfortune was to have been born before Christ. His great work reifies the medieval integration of the religious and the social. Dante's view on the church and the role that it played in the government greatly divided him from the church. This was evident with the placement of Pope Boniface in the last level of hell with Satan.

Peter Abelard, born in 1079-1142, a French philosopher drew fame to himself and as a dialectician drew so many students, he is regarded as the founder of the University of Paris. His secret marriage to a pupil, Heloise, ended when her uncle, Canon Fulbert of Notre Dame, hired people to emasculate him. As he was becoming sick as a monk, he built a hermitage and monastery, the Paraclete, which he later presented to Heloise, who had become an abbess. Abelard's first theological work had been burned, 1121, as heretical. In 1140, the mystic St. Bernard of Clairvaux secured his condemnation by the council of Sens, and he retired in submission to Cluny. Following Plato in theology, Abelard espoused the method of Aristotle's dialectic, holding that the system of Logic could be applied to ones belief in the system of faith. His view of universals anticipated the conceptualism of St. Thomas Aquinas. His most influential and controversial work, Sic et non, collected contradictory writings of the Church fathers.

Monks went to the monastery church eight times a day in a routine of worship that involved singing, chanting, and reciting prayers from the divine offices and from the service for Mass. The first office, "Matins," began at 12 A.M. and the next seven followed at regular intervals, culminating in "Vespers" in the evening and "Compline" before the monks retired at night. Between prayers, the monks read or copied religious texts and music. Monks were often well educated and devoted their lives to writing and learning. These texts that were so diligently duplicated by the monks were the bases of the education that could be given to children.

As Charlemagne's empi

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