Quotes About Medieval

To gibbet is to dip a corpse in tar and suspend it in a flat iron cage (the gibbet) in plain view of townsfolk while it rots and gets pecked apart by crows. A stroll through the square must have been a whole different plate of tamales back then.

Gibbeting—though it hits the ear like a word for happy playground chatter or perhaps, at worst, the cleaning of small game birds—is in fact a ghastly verb. To gibbet is to dip a corpse in tar and suspend it in a flat iron cage (the gibbet) in plain view of townsfolk while it rots and gets pecked apart by crows. A stroll through the square must have been a whole different plate of tamales back then.

The middle ages did not care much for alphabetical order, because they were committed to rational order. To the medieval mind, the universe [is] a harmonious whole whose parts are related to one another. It was the responsibility of the author or scholar to discern these rational relationships -- of hierarchy, or of chronology, or of similarities and differences, and so forth.

The bibliographer in the digital age returns to the revelatory practice of her medieval forebears. Librarians, like those scribes of the Middle Ages, do not merely keep and classify texts; they create them, in the form of online finding aids, CD-ROM concordances, and other electronic texts, not to mention paper study guides and published bibliographies.

There can be no doubt on the basis of the written and archaeological evidence that the Christianization of the Roman Empire and early medieval Europe involved the destruction of works of art on a scale never before seen in human history.

in 1326, an ill-fated laborer by the name of Richard the Raker fell into a cesspool and literally drowned in human shit.

Knights do protect ladies, but only to keep them from being abducted by other knights.

The zero-sum nature of the medieval economy was reinforced by a Christian ideology that was hostile to any commercial practice or technological innovation that might eke more wealth out of a given stock of physical resources.

Como individuos medievales, ni siquiera necesitamos que la persona genere afecto. Con el ícono basta. Pagamos grandes sumas de dinero por prendas de ropa y objetos personales levados o creados por los famosos e infames de nuestro tiempo.

Across the bottom of the last page of many a book is written 'Explicit, Deo Gratias ('Finished, thank god')...Books are kept not on open shelves, but in locked chests.

At mealtime a very broad cloth is laid on the trestle table in the solar. to facilitate service, places are set along one side only. On that side the cloth falls to the floor, doubling as a communal napkin...there are several kinds of knives...but no forks.

Instrumental keys [on organs], introduced in the twelfth century, are so heavy and stiff that they must be played with clenched fists.

Thomas Aquinas is but Aristotle sainted.

An oft-mentioned example in this regard is the Medieval practice of catapulting corpses. The primal scene in this regard is the 14th century Italian trading post at Caffa, on the northern border of the Black Sea. Ongoing skirmishes between Italian merchants and Muslim locals led, in one instance, to the catapulting of plague-ridden corpses by the latter, over the fortress walls of the former.87

If the medieval saints had gone to their deaths as to a wedding, the Earl of Westerholme, thought the kind and scholarly vicar, looked as if he was preparing to invert the trend.

In writing my historical novels, I have to rely upon my imagination to a great extent. I think of it as 'filling in the blanks.' Medieval chroniclers could be callously indifferent to the needs of future novelists. But I think there is a great difference between filling in the blanks and distorting known facts.

I believe very much in a dialogue between buildings - I believe it's always been there. I think buildings have different identities and live very well next to each other. We always have the shock of the new, and that's fine. The renaissance style is totally different from the medieval, and they have a dialogue across time.

When the Great Fire of London destroyed most of the medieval city in 1666, Christopher Wren was invited to design a new one. Within days, he had drawn up an elegant grid of broad boulevards leading to majestic squares, but it came to nothing - the existing landowners wanted things as they had been.

Avrebbe voluto vivere in qualche vecchio maniero, come quelle castellane dal lungo corsetto che passavano le loro giornate sotto i trifogli delle ogive, col gomito sulla pietra e il mento appoggiato sulla mano, a veder arrivare, dall'estremo orizzonte della campagna, un cavaliere dalla piuma bianca galoppante su un cavallo nero!

The Great Charter was sealed with the King's seal.

Free of all responsibility or restraint, in the sheer obliviousness of dreams, he had lived like a happy pagan; and now he must go back to the drear existence of a mediaeval monk, beneath the prompting of an obscure sense of duty.

Exham Priory itself I saw without emotion, a jumble of tottering mediaeval ruins covered with lichens and honeycombed with rooks' nests, perched perilously upon a precipice, and denuded of floors or other interior features save the stone walls of the separate towers.

El juicio sobrio era un arte perdido; aunque no hubo un segundo exodo, reino el vicio y la imprudencia surgida de la desesperacion, similar al fenomeno de los tiempos medievales de la peste

It was not till toward the end of the thirteenth century that the prose romances began to appear.