Quotes About Medieval

Appearing thus late in the story, Cecil must be at once described. He was medieval. Like a Gothic statue.

Lucy does not stand for the medieval lady, who was rather an ideal to which she was bidden to lift her eyes when feeling serious.

He remained in the grip of a certain devil whom the modern world knows as self-consciousness, and whom the medieval, with dimmer vision, worshipped as asceticism

The predatory barons, kings, and princelings of the Middle Ages had bred a swarm of rulers with the political ethics of highway robbers and, for the most part, the intellects of stable boys.

we forget to appreciate what it meant for people to escape from the wages of medieval times to incomes two or three times the medieval level, as most people in Britain, America, France, and the German lands came to enjoy in the 19th century.

A gentle knight was pricking on the plain.

For trumpets sterne to chaunge mine Oaten reeds, And sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds;

Love is a disease. A social disease. A romantic, venereal, medieval disease. A hangover from the days of the fornicating troubadours and the gentlemen in iron britches.

Friend Roland, sound your horn.

I sing of a maidenThat is makeless;King of all kingsTo her son she ches.

I refer to the eleventh and twelfth centuries as a uniquely fruitful moment in the production and meaning of desire. These centuries saw the first development of romantic feeling.

Starlight rains onto every crenellation.

In Florence, classical buildings sit against medieval buildings. It's that contrast we like.

The bassoon is one of my favorite instruments. It has a medieval aroma, like the days when everything used to sound like that. Some people crave baseball...I find this unfathomable, but I can easily understand why a person could get excited about playing the bassoon.

Sorry, I don't do castles. I hate those winding turret stairs.

If you were a medieval scholar reading a book, you knew that there was a reasonable likelihood you'd never see that particular text again, and so a high premium was placed on remembering what you read. You couldn't just pull a book off the shelf to consult it for a quote or an idea.

Los medievales, prosigue Lewis, «veían el cosmos como un gran edificio» —quizás como la catedral de Chartres— «que nos sobrecoge con su grandeza y al tiempo nos tranquiliza con su armonía».

Medieval metaphysicians believed nature pointed to God. Nominalists did not.

Urban formally announced what would become the First Crusade in the town of Clermont Ferrand

Slavery ended in medieval Europe only because the church extended its sacraments to all slaves and then managed to impose a ban on the enslavement of Christians (and of Jews). Within the context of medieval Europe, that prohibition was effectively a rule of universal abolition.

No doubt it was "unenlightened" of the crusaders to have been typical medieval warriors, but it seems even more unenlightened to anachronistically impose the Geneva Conventions on the crusaders while pretending that their Islamic opponents were innocent victims.

Now, shouts of "Dieu li volt!" (God wills it!) began to spread through the crowd, and men began to cut up cloaks and other pieces of cloth to make crosses and sew them against their chests. Everyone agreed that the next year they would set out for the Holy Land. And they did.

The Byzantine governor assembled an army considerably larger than that of the Normans and rebels. He then sent a herald to the opposing camp offering either the Normans' safe return to Lombard territory or battle. In response, an enormous Norman knight smashed his mailed fist on the head of the Byzantine herald's horse; the horse fell dead on the spot. (Yes, this actually happened, historians agree.)23 The battle began the next day.

En el mundo burgués en vías de constitución, el vicio mayor, el pecado por excelencia, no es ya el orgullo o la avidez, como en el mundo medieval, sino la ociosidad.