Quotes About Medieval

Our culture will become like it was during the medieval times when there truly was a cultural elite. The rest of the people will just watch television, which will be their only frame of reference.

The old dream that has tempted man from the beginning, the medieval legend of the man who sells his soul for an inexhaustible purse, which recurs with an enticing insistence through all the changes of civilization, is perhaps in process of being realized, and not a for a single man but all.

Science, which is only another name for truth, now holds religious charlatans, self-deceivers and God agents in a certain degree of check--agents and employees, I mean, of a mythical, medieval, man-made God, anthropomorphic in constitution.

Luther's views were not a medieval relic but a development of it. Even more disturbing, it was not incidental to his theology, a lamentable prejudice taken over from contemporary attitudes. Rather, it was integral to his thought; his insistence that the true Christians—that is, the evangelicals—had become the chosen people and had displaced the Jews would become fundamental to Protestant identity.

The chief extant monument of feudalism is the stone castle.

machicolations.

Romance of Reynard the Fox

this beast epic is throughout a keen satire not only upon medieval society, but upon human nature in all ages.

even a pope who tried to free the Church from feudalism could not free his own mind or government from feudal methods.

prose histories in the Castilian tongue began to appear.

Alfonso the Wise of Castile (1252-1284)

defended his mother tongue in a scholarly Latin treatise, entitled De Vulgari Eloquentia, upholding it even against Latin and further giving us much information about Italian dialects and medieval verse-forms.

relations between the crusaders and the Byzantine emperor were seldom cordial.

It has been said that the medieval universities "affected the progress and intellectual development of Europe more powerfully, or perhaps rather more exclusively, than any schools in all likelihood will ever do again.

The fact that this medieval France was almost entirely surrounded by rivers – for a little stream, la Thève, forms its northern boundary – probably gave rise to the expression, Île de France.

Probably the most lasting result of the crusades was the trade which the Italian cities established with the Orient

Guilhem or William IX, Duke of Aquitaine (1086-1127), was the first known troubadour

Among the oldest craft gilds in Germany were the weavers of Mainz (1099), the fishermen of Worms (1106), the shoemakers of Würzburg (1128), the makers of bed-ticks and the turners of Cologne, and the cobblers, tailors, and painters of Magdeburg from the twelfth century.

medieval English literature reached its height after the plague in the writings of William Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer

Already in the thirteenth century German cities were forming leagues for their mutual protection. Prominent among these were the Rhine League and the Hanseatic League

About the middle of the ninth century were composed the False Decretals, purporting to have been collected from the documents of early popes.

Abbey of Cluny

The Church was the greatest landholder in existence; in the Carolingian period one third of all Gaul belonged to the Church

It was a lavishly decorated medieval manuscript or something that looked like one. The first letters caught the light from the hallway and sparkled in gold. Strange birds and exotic animals hidden in a tangle of foliage and fairy-tale landscapes lined the borders.