PTET - godless culture

I stumbled across a great article on the horrors of 14th Century Europe on the website of author Sarah Douglas: "Few people realise that the fourteenth century was the darkest period in recorded European history, so on this page I'd like to give you an idea of the crises that beset fourteenth-century Europe - crises that I explore within the three books of The Crucible. Although there were many minor disasters, there were six major ones that were all to some degree interlocking and self-sustaining..."

There's lots of very interesting background on the loss of power of the Catholic Church during this time.