Quotes from Frances Gies

He may leave a prescription of herbs and drugs, and recommend diet—perhaps chicken broth, the milk of pulverized almonds, or barley water mixed with figs, honey, and licorice.

I am a good lawyer," said Renard. "Often I've made right out of wrong and wrong out of right, as it suited me." —ROMAN DE RENARD

If you have a good voice, sing boldly. In the company of people who ask you, and by yourself for your own pleasure, sing; but do not abuse their patience, so that people will say, as they sometimes do, "Good singers are often a bore.

Theoretically, the curriculum consists of the "seven liberal arts."2 But schools rarely teach all seven of the arts, and the emphasis is very unequal. These "arts" are "liberal" because their purpose is not moneymaking and because they are worthy of a free man. There are seven mainly because people are fond of the number seven, one of the keys to a numerologically ordered universe.

The numerals (actually Indian in origin) are spreading through the Italian business community. The key to the Hindu-Arabic system is the zero, which permits the position of the digit to indicate its value as unit, ten, hundred, or thousand. Rapid and accurate computation can be done, something difficult with clumsy Roman numbers. The

Wrath makes the heart pound, impels us against our nearest relations, drives the tongue to curses, creates havoc with the mind, generates hatred of our dearest, and dissolves the covenant of friendship.

Scutage was an aspect of two fundamental historic trends in twelfth-century Europe that profoundly affected the knights. The first was the increasing concentration of power in the hands of a few kings and great princes that gradually professionalized warfare. The second was the economic upturn from the depressed state of the ninth and tenth centuries to the Commercial Revolution of the eleventh and twelfth centuries that raised living standards and inflated prices.

With the growth of proletarian discontent many towns are taking care to restrict the privilege of arms to the wealthy. In Troyes only those citizens possessing vingt livres vaillant ("twenty pounds' worth of property") are authorized to own a crossbow and fifty bolts.

Popular spite attributes a proverb to the medical profession: "Take while the patient is in pain.

If you unfortunately visit a patient and find him dead, and they ask you why you came, say you knew he would die that night, but want to know at what hour he died.