Quotes About Middle Ages

The noun 'spirituality' in the Middle Ages simply meant the clergy. Subsequently it first appeared in reference to 'the spiritual life' during the 17th century. It disappeared for a time but re-established itself at the end of the 19th century in French, of which the modern English word 'spirituality' is a translation.

The 'Middle Ages/Dark Ages' were of course no such thing. Achievement in the Arabian crescent was sensational then.

In another life I would be a medievalist. I loved Chaucer, far more than Shakespeare.

Maimonides, one of the few people in the Middle Ages to deny the validity of astrology, quoted the phrase "Israel has no star of fortune" in support of his argument, while others produced opposing opinions to back their views.

If it were a real effort to live in the Middle Ages, your life would be one perpetual prevarication.

For some time they talked of reformation; those who apparently desired it most favoring it only for their own profit, and the people who were to be the gainers expecting little and saying nothing. For a long time these poor people, either from distrust, incredulity, or despair, hesitated to ask for their rights: it is said that the habit of serving had taken the courage away from those old communes, which in the middle ages were so bold.

It is often hard for an irreligious age to recognize that religion has in fact been capable of dividing men as effectually as political doctrine or economic status, but unless the fact is recognized the history of the Middle Ages will remain a meaningless labyrinth

I have often called attention to the fact that walking through the streets in the Middle Ages was a different experience from nowadays. Right and left, there were house facades that were built out of what the soul felt and thought. Every key, every lock, carried the imprint of the person who had made it.

It flourished with the Saracens, and suffered in the obscure and fanatical days of the Middle Ages.

The year 2008 was a reminder to those who had forgotten that there is such a thing as history and that the cycle of famine and feast in commerce, first identified in antiquity and well understood in the Middle Ages, was not suddenly abolished in modern times.

The history of the Middle Ages is filled with examples of prominent people fulfilling pledges that would seem ridiculous to us. In many cases, the actions proposed involved no objective connection to any benefit other than a vivid demonstration of the importance those undertaking them placed upon the vow itself.

People have used these books for centuries. Their accuracy is beyond dispute." "Well, I have as much respect for ancient learning as you do, but I don't know that I'd want to stake my life on some home remedy from the Middle Ages." "Well, I suppose I can check it somewhere else," he said, without much conviction.

Hence King's Messengers and all that. In medieval days you gave a fellow a signet ring as a sort of open sesame. 'The King's Ring! Pass, my lord!' And usually it was the other fellow who had stolen it. I always wonder why some bright lad never hit on the expedient of copying the ring—making a dozen or so, and selling them at a hundred ducats apiece. They seem to have had no initiative in the Middle Ages.

The philosophers of the Middle Ages demonstrated both that the Earth did not exist and also that it was flat. Today they are still arguing about whether the world exists, but they no longer dispute about whether it is flat.

When learning was monopolized by the monks in the Middle Ages, people specialized only in warfare and statecraft. And even these were not altogether free from the scholastic influence.

That whole heroic notion of the women warriors known as Amazons is extremely appealing. It was appealing in antiquity, and, throughout the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, they're always portrayed as heroic, courageous, and the equals of men, and that's just extremely attractive and has been since antiquity.

To revenge the misdeeds of the ruling class, there existed in the middle ages, in Germany, a secret tribunal, called the "Vehmgericht." If a red cross was seen marked on a house, people knew that its owner was doomed by the "Vehm." All the houses of Europe are now marked with the mysterious red cross. - Speech at anniversary of the People's Paper, April 1856

In the days of Moses and the prophets such a man would have been counted among the wise men of the land; in the Middle Ages he would have been burned at the stake.

The Jews were the money-lenders of the Middle Ages so there's a stereotype of the slightly or more than slightly dishonest business man and this stereotype covers and obscures all the facts.

In Bach there is still too much crude Christianity, crude Germanism, crude scholasticism; he stands on the threshold of European (modern) music, but he looks back from there to the Middle Ages.

If you transported a man from the Middle Ages into this nightclub, thinks Jakob, he would surely believe himself damned to hell, imprisoned among a swaying horde of ill-lit souls who wet the dance floor with their sweat, boys and girls and girls and boys, no couples, everyone dancing together or everyone dancing alone.

For anyone wishing to argue that once things were worse than they are now, the Middle Ages are ideal. It is widely supposed that having gotten out of them was one of the accomplishments of modern civilization. No contemporary scholar, one might think, would make such a mistake in judgment. A one-man multitude, Pinker champions the case to the contrary. "The people of the middle ages were, in a word, gross."31

A caricature of this result," Butterfield adds, "is to be seen in a popular view that is still not quite eradicated: the view that the Middle Ages represented a period of darkness when man was kept tongue-tied by authority—a period against which the Renaissance was the reaction and the Reformation the great rebellion."14

Western music in the Middle Ages was performed in these stone-walled gothic cathedrals, and in architecturally similar monasteries and cloisters.