Page:The Net of Faith.pdf/53

13 picturesque and dramatic appearance of a 19-year old village girl from the Vosges who "lectured, talked down, and over-ruled statesmen and prelates." In the South, a Pope was calling the curses of heaven down upon a second Pope who put up his headquarters at Avignon, and who retaliated in kind. In the East the Turks were knocking down the last fences of the Byzantine Empire which had been kept alive only by repeated blood transfusions.

The fourteenth century at the close of which Peter Chelc̄icky̍ was born, was a strange century indeed. It was an era of great social ferments, natural catastrophies, famines, plagues, and unusual men. In this period the ice drift cut off communication with Greenland, and the advancing glaciers almost literally pushed the settlements into the sea Europe an chroniclers of the century recorded two excessive cold winters. Crops failed in Norway and then in England and in France. There were excessive rains. The Sequoia tree rings in California ran to abnormal width, the Caspian Sea expanded, and the Rhine, the Danube, the Thames and the Elbe froze. Fifty-five summers of this century saw wiolentviolent [sic] floods and the Cathedral of Mayence was submerged to the famous frieze over the door. In the Netherlands George Bernard Shaw,, New York, Penguin books, 1946, p.l. (St.Joan of Arc lived from A.D. 1412 to 1431).