Quotes About Medieval

Alienor raised her eyebrows. "I can see straight through your ruse," she said. "Even if it is not plain on your face, Aimery de Niort is giving the game away." She glanced toward the young knight who was holding his own horse at the ready, his expression expectant and smug.

Bishops of Rouen, Fécamp and Jumièges. A

talking to the knights—jesting

They gazed at her with awe, feeling to the full that medieval reverence for someone obviously touched in the head.

This sounds very Stoic. But Antisthenes took his Cynic doctrines to the next radical step. He rejected any and all social conventions, including all forms of property and government. He also violently turned his back on Plato's theology and even more violently his theory of Forms. "A horse I see," Antisthenes is supposed to have exclaimed, "but not horseness": words that would echo in the works of the medieval philosopher William of Ockham.

Why use two (or more) when one (or fewer) will do, is the principle that William of Ockham introduced into the medieval thought process. It grew out of his refinement of Aristotle's logic and set off a revolution not only in philosophy, but in politics and religion. Before he died, Ockham's razor would undercut the foundations of the medieval Church.

If these words have a familiar sound, it is because they are not from Ockham or Gerson, but from Thomas Jefferson. They come from the most influential summary of medieval conciliarist doctrine in its secular form: the American Declaration of Independence.

By 1400, the authority of Aristotle closed virtually every argument. Once a student learned his view on a subject, whether it was a fine point in logic or the number of planets or the functions of body organs, there was no point in going any further. Someone wanting to know how many udders a cow had would be pointed to the relevant passage in Aristotle instead of being sent out to a field to count for himself.

Italy's cities had been left largely to govern themselves since the Dark Ages.

The coming of the Crusades had made them rich as well as independent

The printed book doomed the Aristotle of the medieval schoolmen. It ended his intellectual monopoly first of all because now authors appeared in print almost with the same relative ease as they appear online today. These included not only Plato but intriguing and hitherto remote figures like the poet Lucian; dramatists Terence and Sophocles; historians Plutarch and Tacitus and Josephus; and philosophers such as the Stoic Seneca and the Skeptic Sextus Empiricus.

For medieval thinkers, this was an eye-opening revelation. Side by side with divine truth, Averroës was saying, lay another truth, that of the natural world. This insight earned Averroës an admiration equaled by no other living non-Christian. It is why Dante praises him in his Divine Comedy and why Raphael gives him a prominent place in his School of Athens.

Now in the privacy of your own home, you had the text correct, complete, and whole—pure and uncorrupted, as Renaissance scholars liked to say. The era of having to rely on untrustworthy handwritten manuscripts, or some medieval glossator who spent a lifetime trying to make sense of an often muddled or even counterfeit manuscript of Aristotle, was over.

In 1210, it issued its first condemnation of Averroës and his disciples in the West; for good measure, it extended the ban to the works of Aristotle. It was already too late. Just fifteen years after the ban was issued, Aristotle's greatest medieval expositor was born. To his family and neighbors, he was Tommaso D'Aquino. To history, he is Saint Thomas Aquinas, the single greatest creative mind of the Middle Ages.

In truth, a good master mason could build an entire Gothic cathedral with just a compass and a T square, a device he borrowed from Greek mathematicians for lining up perfect vertical and horizontal lines. This dazzling command of practical geometry made the cathedral builders of the Middle Ages truly independent businessmen. By the fourteenth century, they were already calling themselves free masons.

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, might imply. Contemporaries viewed him with awe as the last Roman. We can think of him as the first medieval man, and the man who reintroduced Aristotle to the West. Boethius was born fifty years after Augustine's death

was Gerbert who made Boethius "the schoolmaster of medieval Europe" and made Aristotle's logic the centerpiece of an education based on the seven liberal arts.15 The idea of the "liberal arts" (so called because it was the education fit for liberi, or free men, as opposed to slaves) was a late Roman invention.c16

Gerbert's first loves were the subjects of the trivium, especially rhetoric and logic. His insistence that students learn the rules of logic before embarking on anything else made Aristotle the founder of the medieval university curriculum.18

And which devil do you prefer? Dante's?" "No. Much too terrifying. Too medieval for my taste." "Mephistopheles?" "Not him, either. He's too pleased with himself. Too much a trickster, like a crooked lawyer ... Anyway, I never trust people who smile a lot." "What about the one in The Karamazovs?" "Petty. A civil servant with dirty nails. I suppose the devil I prefer is Milton's fallen angel.

Dante compares this language—which is like yours, when you come back to me intangibly—to the "perfumed panther," the mythical animal of medieval bestiaries. He adds, and I quote for all three of you: "Hearing the call of the panther, the other animals follow it wherever it goes, attracted by so much fragrant softness.

A generation of lawyers and statisticians cut their teeth on the to-hit and damage tables of medieval fantasy. File it under yet another ridiculous thing that probably saved somebody's life.

I like high fantasy as much as the next guy, but I also like a bit of grit and grime with my faux-medieval trappings.

Youre tale anoyeth al this compaignye. Swich talkyng is nat worth a boterflye

Then the Miller fell off his horse.