Quotes About Medieval

At Treviso in 1214 was held a Court of Solace and Mirth. A Castle of Love was built, and defended by ladies against an assault by two rival bands of gentlemen from Padua and Venice, who used cakes, fruits, and flowers as missiles. But the mimic war turned into a real battle between the Paduans and the Venetians, and the police had to intervene to stop it. In Florence were brigades of young gallants, dressed in white, with their leader, a Lord of Love.

Charlemagne's educational and cultural campaign was momentous for its preservation of the classical past and for its effects on medieval society. The level of literacy never again sank as low as it had in pre-Carolingian times.

The crusades began with grotesqueries, comic and horrible. A band of Germans followed a goose they held to be God-inspired. Peter the Hermit, a fanatic, filthy, barefoot French monk, short and swarthy, with a long, lean face that strangely resembled that of his own donkey, preached a private crusade - known as the Peasants' Crusade - and promised his followers that God would guide them to the Holy City.

Conscious symbolism governed medieval representation. Grammar, for instance, was pictured as an old woman with a knife and file to operate on students' mistakes. Rhetoric was an imposing woman whose dress was ornamented with the figures of speech.

In the thirteenth century, Bishop Henry of Liege had sixty-one children, fourteen of them within twenty-two months, setting perhaps a record of clerical philoprogenitiveness.

The first datable stone donjon, or keep, was built in France at Langeais, overlooking the Loire, in 994.

Although modern scholars may sneer at medieval latinity, the training produced a world of clerks who could converse at ease in Latin and write it with a fluency and vigor beyond the reach of our Classics majors.

Another curious aspect of medieval justice was the method of impressing dates and decisions on witnesses' memories, since written records were scanty or inaccessible. Boys who served as witnesses were solemnly cuffed and flogged to vivify their memory until old age.

Love will always suffer. If the church tries to win victories either all in a rush or by steps taken in some other spirit, it may appear to succeed for a while. Think of the pomp and "glory" of the late medieval church. But the "victory" will be hollow and will leave all kinds of problems in its wake.

Sanders argued, basically, that the normal Christian, and especially Protestant, readings of Paul were seriously flawed, because they attributed to first-century Judaism theological views which belonged rather to medieval Catholicism. Once we described Judaism accurately, Sanders argued, we were forced to rethink Paul's critique of it, and his whole positive theology in its turn.

Donn Welton summarizes the effects of the Reformation by saying, "Perhaps nothing sets it in contrast to medieval Christendom more than the Reformation's rejection of its denigration of the body. Within certain moral boundaries, the powers of the body were fully celebrated.

Etty saw Rowan, daughter of Robin Hood, lifting her green kirtle, her brown braid lashing like a wildcat's tail as she tried to run.

One of the nice things about time, Crowley always said, was that it was steadily taking him further away from the fourteenth century.

Typography fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration

Another possible conclusion was expressed by George Bernard Shaw, also about fifty years ago, when he wrote that the average person today is about as credulous as was the average person in the Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages, people believed in the authority of their religion, no matter what. Today, we believe in the authority of our science, no matter what.

Hild unpinned her sleeves to show arms tan and tight as a stripling's wore a light cloak in royal blue flung back from her shoulder gesith-style, and tucked her hair behind her ears, to remind them of fighting man with greased-back hair

Just inside the tent, the king, unhelmed, stood with his naked sword in one hand, point resting on the floor, and a goblet in his other.

Arturus looked at Peretur as though looking at an enemy, through his visor.

Hild forgot about the princess's eyes when she saw the beads: seventy-three faced carnelians.

To discover the fool there is no better reagent than the word "medieval." He immediately sees red.

Marx reproduced medieval and Reformation millenarian expectations in his utopia of a classless, stateless society.

I knew of this: Provost Lockhart sent word. You'd think we dwelt in the Marches.

some of the original authors like Hartman von Aue or Wolfram von Eschenbach.

Actually, I've never read de Troyes." Probably the most famous of the medieval authors of Arthurian tales. "I took a class in German medieval lit and de Troyes was French." He shrugged…