Poets, Saints, and Visionaries of the Great Schism, 1378-1417

For almost forty years, from 1378 to 1417, the Western Church was divided into rival camps headed by twoand eventually threecompeting popes. The so-called Schism provoked a profound and long-lasting anxiety throughout European anxiety that reverberated throughout clerical circles and among the ordinary faithful. In Poets, Saints, and Visionaries of the Great Schism, Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski looks beyond the political and ecclesiastical storm and finds an outpouring of artistic, literary, and visionary responses to one of the great calamities of the late Middle Ages.

Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski is Professor of French at the University of Pittsburgh. Her books includeNot of Woman Born: Representations of Caesarean Birth in Medieval and Renaissance Culture(1990) and Reading Myth: Classical Mythology and Its Interpretations in Medieval French Literature (1997).