Abstract art: Painting or other artwork that shows forms or designs, but does not represent objects as they really appear.
Aristocracy: The richest and most powerful members of society.
Ascetic: A person who renounces all earthly pleasures as part of his or her search for religious understanding.
Canonization: Formal declaration of a deceased person as a saint.
Cloister: A monastery, or sometimes the inner part of a monastery.
Convent: A dwelling in which nuns live.
Dialect: A regional variation on a language.
Divine: Godlike.
Dynasty: A group of people, often but not always a family, who continue to hold a position of power over a period of time.
Excommunicate: To banish someone from the church.
Mlumination: Decoration of a manuscript with elaborate designs.
Manorialism: An early form of feudalism that lasted from the late Roman Empire into the Merovingian age.
Monastery: A place in which monks live.
Monasticism: The tradition and practices of monks.
Monk: A man who leaves the outside world to take religious vows and live in a monastery, practicing a lifestyle of denying earthly pleasures.
Nomadic: Wandering.
Nun: The female equivalent of a monk, who lives in a nunnery, convent, or abbey.
Order: An organized religious community within the Catholic Church.
Papal: Referring to the pope.
Purgatory: A place of punishment after death where, according to Roman Catholic beliefs, a person who has not been damned may work out their salvation and earn their way to heaven.
Relic: An object associated with the saints of the New Testament, or the martyrs of the early church.
Representational art: Artwork intended to show a specific subject as it really appears, whether a human figure, landscape, still life, or a variation on these.
Rome: A term sometimes used to refer to the papacy.
Serf: A peasant subject to a feudal system and possessing no land.
Trial by ordeal: A system of justice in which the accused (and sometimes the accuser as well) has to undergo various physical hardships in order to prove innocence.
Tribal: Describes a society, sometimes nomadic, in which members are organized by families and clans, not by region, and in which leadership comes from warrior-chieftains.
Villa: A type of country estate in Roman times; more generally, any kind of large, wealthy estate.
A map of Western Europe, c. a. d. 500, showing the movements of the various tribes across the continent. Illustration by XNR Productions. Reproduced by permission of the Gale Croup.
The tribes themselves. Though the Western Roman Empire was finished, out of its collapse would come many beginnings.
Such was the case, for instance, with the Burgundians, for whom a region—later to emerge as an important French kingdom—was named. They came in the 400s, only to be subdued by the powerful Franks, another Germanic tribe, in 534. And there were the Lombards, who in the 500s stormed out of Eastern Europe and into the part of Italy that came to be known as Lombardy. They, too, succumbed to the Franks in 774. As for the Franks, they settled in Gaul—which, because of them, would thenceforth be known as France.
The Franks in time dropped their Germanic language and adopted Latin, which would emerge as a local dialect and then as a full-fledged language, French. Before the Franks and before the Romans, however, Gaul had been controlled by the Celts, a group whose language had little relation to either Latin or German. Celts had spread from the European continent to the isle of Britain, where they came to be known as Britons; and beyond
Hadrian's Wall, built between a. d. 122 and 128, stretches across some seventy-three miles of Scotland. Reproduced by permission of the Corbis Corporation.
Britain to Ireland, where the Celtic language of Gaelic is still spoken today.
World History
