Quotes About Medieval

'The White Princess' follows Princess Lizzie, who was forced into marriage with Henry Tudor. It's kind of about how their marriage united the Yorks and the Tudors - the two families do rival but have to unite.

I personally am into the minstrel technique - if I hear someone playing a lute or playing a crumhorn, it just moves me. I don't know why.

Macedonia, the inspiration for the French word for "mixed salad" (macedoine), defines the principle illness of the Balkans: conflicting dreams of lost imperial glory. Each nation demands that is borders revert to where they were at the exact time when its own empire had reached its zenith of ancient medieval expansion.

Most important for our purposes here is that the [Jewish] obsession with learning and cultivating the intellect had no precise parallel in Christian Europe in the early medieval period.

accolade. In medieval times men were knighted in a ceremony called the accolata (from the Latin ac, "at," and collum, "neck"), named for the hug around the neck received during the ritual, which also included a kiss and a tap of a sword on the shoulder. From accolata comes the English word accolade for an award or honor.

Barcelona has always been more a city of capital and labor than of nobility and commoners; its democratic roots are old and run very deep. Its medieval charter of citizens' rights, the Usatges, grew from a nucleus which antedated the Magna Carta by more than a hundred years. Its government, the Consell de Cent (Council of One Hundred), had been the oldest protodemocratic political body in Spain.

Averroes, the last of the great medieval Arab philosophers, was fighting a rearguard defense of philosophy that was under attack from theologians, and, though translations of his works were to be much read in the universities of Christian Europe, he had little influence on later generations of thinkers in the Muslim world.

The colobium begins to disappear by the ninth or early tenth century, however; and from this time, Jesus is more commonly shown, like the thieves, wearing a knotted perizoma, which some medieval interpreters understood to be Mary's veil, given to him in order to cover his nudity.

So much, then, for the "mystery" of how Muslim culture was somehow lost or left behind. The notion that in the medieval era Islamic culture was advanced well beyond Europe is as much an illusion as recent ones about an "Arab Spring." The Islamic world was backward then, and so it remains.

When William the Conqueror had the Domesday Book compiled in 1086, this forerunner of the modern census reported at least 6,500 water-powered mills operating in England, or one for about every fifty families.

Encouraged by the Scholastics and embodied in the great medieval universities founded by the church, faith in the power of reason infused Western culture, stimulating the pursuit of science and the evolution of democratic theory and practice.

The image of medieval piety, of churches filled with devout peasants, has no historical basis.

As the distinguished medievalist Warren Hollister (1930–1997) put it in his presidential address to the Pacific Historical Association, "to my mind, anyone who believes that the era that witnessed the building of Chartres Cathedral and the invention of parliament and the university was 'dark' must be mentally retarded—or at best, deeply, deeply, ignorant."60

that there was no scientific revolution, only the culmination of normal scientific progress over several centuries and, moreover, that science arose only in Christian Europe because only medieval Europeans believed that science was possible and desirable.

As the distinguished medievalist Warren Hollister (1930–1997) put it in his presidential address to the Pacific Historical Association, "to my mind, anyone who believes that the era that witnessed the building of Chartres Cathedral and the invention of parliament and the university was 'dark' must be mentally retarded—or at best, deeply, deeply, ignorant.

Spinoza wrote the last indisputable Latin masterpiece, and one in which the refined conceptions of medieval philosophy are finally turned against themselves and destroyed entirely. He chose a single word from that language for his device: caute – 'be cautious' – inscribed beneath a rose, the symbol of secrecy. For, having chosen to write in a language that was so widely intelligible, he was compelled to hide what he had written.

For Medieval craftsmen, work was an act of piety and was sanctified in their own eyes as in the eyes of their God. For such labourers, end and means are one and he spiritual wholeness of faith is translated into the visual wholeness and purify of their craft. hence their craft was also art, a permanent testimony to the reality on earth of humanity's spiritual redemption.

Thus did I bear Sir Lancelot du Lac to the Keep of Ganelon, whom I trusted like a brother. That is to say, not at all.

medieval scholars made surprising progress, despite living in an age in which people routinely judged the truth of statements not according to empirical evidence but by how well they fit into their preexisting system of religion-based beliefs—a culture that is inimical

medieval scholars made surprising progress, despite living in an age in which people routinely judged the truth of statements not according to empirical evidence but by how well they fit into their preexisting system of religion-based beliefs—a culture that is inimical to science as we know it today.

Our horizon is the creation of a noble society to which, like the medieval builder of those glorious cathedrals, you will have added your conception, your artful piece of stone.

Spiritual sloth, or acedia, was known as The Sin of the Middle Ages. It's the sin of my middle age, too.

Like the sea, the Web is volatile: 70 percent of its communications last less than four months. Its virtue (its virtuality) entails a constant present-which for medieval scholars was one of the definitions of hell.23

The impersonal forces of over-population and over-organization, and the social engineers who are trying to direct these forces, are pushing us in the direction of a new medieval system.