The Age of Schism deals with the time of notorious corruption within the church from AD 1304 to AD 1503. Herbert Bruce goes deeper than the obvious institutional corruption and draws from the literature and records of the time to illuminate the vivid religious experience that was characteristic among clerics and laymen of the time. He also covers various papacies and councils, social and political conditions of Europe, church life in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Renaissance, and more.