Students of history are well aware of the ambiguity of the term medieval. Although it may be true that for some thousand years, between c. 500 and c. 1500 A.D., the social, economic, political and religious life of Western Europe had characteristics easily distinguishable on a broad view from the ancient Greco-Roman civilization that preceded, and from what we call the modern world of nation-states that followed, yet within that millennium the developments are so great, and the changes and declines so numerous, that the careful historian distrusts anything approaching to a general judgment which might confuse century with century, and region with region. Yet in spite of this, many, whose knowledge of the social or artistic life of past ages is very wide, forget such distinctions, and speak readily of the medieval papacy, the medieval village, the medieval craftsman or medieval philosophy, as if each of these expressions denoted a single clear-cut system or institution.