Quotes About Medieval

Norfolk is full of medieval churches—it has 659 of them, more per square mile than anywhere else in the world

significance), 600,000 known archaeological sites (and more being found every day; more being lost, too), 3,500 historic cemeteries, 70,000 war memorials, 4,000 sites of special scientific interest, 18,500 medieval churches, and 2,500 museums containing 170 million objects. Having such a fund of richness means that it can sometimes be taken for granted to a shocking degree, but

It is often written that a kind of medieval footstool was called a tuffet—a presumption based entirely on the venerable line "Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet." In fact, the only place the word appears in historic English is in the nursery rhyme itself. If tuffets ever actually existed, they are not otherwise recorded.

different era." "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

It is remarkable that chivalry, no matter how actual or merely aspirational it was in its own day, appeared when it did—that it appeared at all!

those people who believe in previous lives always think they were dukes or queens or something, ignoring the fact that most people back then spent their whole lives up to their knees in shit before dying of toothless old age at thirty.

Yes, look," said Martine. "The Other has played his knight.

After Chaucer's death, Henry IV offered his position to Christine de Pizan, no doubt hoping that as she was a widow and her only child, her sixteen-year-old son, was effectively a hostage in his household, she could be persuaded to agree. If so, he completely misjudged this redoubtable woman, who had once replied to criticism "that it was inappropriate for a woman to be learned, as it was so rare . . . that it was even less fitting for a man to be ignorant, as it was so common.

The idea that medieval people rarely washed is a nineteenth-century fallacy. Every courtesy book stressed the need to wash one's hands and face daily and it was also customary to wash the hands before eating: guests might be offered water scented with garden herbs or flowers or even, in the wealthiest households, with perfume imported from the east.

For Oscar, high school was the equivalent of a medieval spectacle, like being put in the stocks and forced to endure the peltings and outrages of a mob of deranged half-wits, an experience from which he supposed he should have emerged a better person, but that's not really what happened—and if there were any lessons to be gleaned from the ordeal of those years he never quite figured out what they were.

little-known fact, though not unacknowledged by my scientist's eye, is that the ceiling of Grand Central is actually backward. It is a mirror image of the night sky; lore holds that the artist was working from a medieval manuscript that showed the heavens not from within but from without—not mankind's view but God's. I

Essentially, Robin Hood put a smackdown on the medieval equivalent of the IRS.

If I can't face my accusers, that's a joke. We did that in medieval times.

The concept of modernity in literary history was also related to the relation each Indian language and literature developed with English. Sanskrit and Persian literary models were labelled as traditional and medieval, and those found in English, irrespective of any period, as modern (page 22)

Asses, fools, dolts! chaff and bran, chaff and bran! porridge after meat! TROILUS AND CRESSIDA, 1.2 ...................................... The English ate soup, or porridge as they called it, with the first course and considered it absurd to serve it following the meat course. However, for the rest of Europe, pottage accompanied the second or third course of roast meats. In general, pottage and broth were more popular in England than in the warmer Mediterranean countries.

Its insistence upon "knowledge" has no doubt made medieval Muslim civi lization one of great scholarly and scientifi c productivity, and through it, Muslim civilization made its most lasting contribution to mankind.

Deeply rooted in the universalist Western tradition of the Stoics and the the early medieval Christians, Tolkien created a myth to explore the nature of the human person against the avaricious dreams of the capitalists and the diabolical schemes of the national and international socialists, all of whom would replace God with man.

travels as slowly through centuries of monkish dulness, when the world seems to have been asleep

Before me and beside me sat a row of the comeliest young men, clad in black gowns and wearing on their shoulders long hoods trimmed in white fur. Who and what they were I know not, for I preferred not to learn, lest by chance they should not be so mediaeval as they looked.

arcipreste de Hita, en cuyo Libro de Buen Amor supo presentar (como Chaucer con sus obras en Inglaterra) una imagen fiel, a la vez que cargada de ingenio, de la vida de su tiempo.

Europe – medieval, grotesque, monstrous: a symphony in B-mol.

It was then, I think, that I discovered that the best way of bringing a medieval subject home to my generation was not to be medieval in its treatment.

There are Arthurian legends in 14 or 15 medieval European languages. They are the product of no one time or place. On the contrary, in sum they represent a tremendous mine of human understanding, rather as the Bible does.

Afghanistan is a rural nation, where 85 percent of people live in the countryside. And out there it's very, very conservative, very tribal - almost medieval.