The romantic nineteenth-century view which saw not only the achievement but also the the considerable shortcomings of the Middle Ages through rose-tinted spectacles has long been proved unsatisfactory. Prof. Guillemain does not seek to show us the later Middle Ages as the golden age that some Catholics, with their eyes fixed nostalgically towards the past, would have it to be. He portrays for us medieval Christendom with all its inherent contradictions and oppositions, the differing conceptions that inspired its great men, its limited geographical extension and the seeds of the breakdown that came in the sixteenth century in the great schism, the heresies and other factors that contributed to the disintegration of the dream of temporal unity and of the idea of a theocracy. Prof. Guillemain shows us also the great positive achievements that distinguish the period in the establishment of a profoundly Christian civilization, the mystical movement, the growth of the universities and the great cathedrals. Thus is is by no means an entirely somber picture which emerges from this book devoted to the two and a half-centuries which came to an end in the middle of the fifteenth century.