One may read about the "early church" or the "Renaissance popes" without a clear idea of the who-where-when-what-why-and-how of those eras. This easy-to-read volume answers the basic question "what did the Church look like in this particular period?" for the four traditionally recognized eras of Church history: early, medie-val, Reformation, and modern.
Each chapter includes a map and timeline to locate the reader in place and place. The timeline identifies what else was going on. Then they address these topics: 1) The Big Picture: a broad overview of the era; 2) The Church's Hierarchy: a look at the popes, cardinals and bishops with their concerns; 3) The Church in the Pews: what was Christianity like for the average person; and 4) What made this period unique - taking a comparative approach.
All chapters conclude with discussion questions and a list for further reading.

Studied almost exclusively as a literary humanist, Nicolas de Clamanges (ca. 1363/1364-1437) was closely involved in the Great Western Schism, French humanism, politics at the University of Paris, and Church reform. Far more than an elegant writer, this Parisian scholar and sometime papal secretary was an important but until now unjustly neglected religious reformer. In Part One of this volume, Christopher M. Bellitto presents a biography of Clamanges' life and a survey of his writings within the multiple contexts in which he operated: schism, Hundred Years' War, Parisian humanism, French civil war. It places his literary images of a troubled Church within the framework of his ideas of the humanism of reform, identifying his great debt to Pauline and Augustinian ideas of the interplay of divine and human activities. Part Two explores Clamanges' normative emphasis on personal reform, which was essentially a via purgativa that drew on monastic piety and late medieval spirituality, especially the imitation of Christ in the Modern Devotion. His was an inside-out reform that radiated from the heart of the individual Christian through the rest of the Church. In Clamanges' writings, we hear the calls for the personal reform of the cleric-in-training ultimately directed toward improvements in the cura animarum and the demand for the renewal of episcopal leadership that were hallmarks of Trent's systematic reform program. This examination of his thought reveals Clamanges to have been in continuity with ancient and medieval Catholic reform ideas that foreshadowed not Luther, but Trent. His spirituality of personal reform may be seen as one bridge over which the Fathers' model of personal reform was passed along from the early Church to the twelfth-century renaissance, and then through the late Middle Ages to early modern Catholicism and the Council of Trent.