"Middle Ages" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... likewise we find numerous degraded types in which the rising religion is marred ...... Of this we have eminent instances in the gods of Greece, and in the fairies of the German and Persian tribes ...... Under the same head will be included the grotesque devil-stories and other legends of the Middle Ages ...... Yet the dreadful alternative of gross superstition is this, that the graver view tends to cruel and horrible rites, while the fanciful and sportive sucks out the life-blood of devout feeling." (Ibid. pp. 14-16.) Then comes the sense of beauty: "This was strikingly illustrated ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... that science which even foreign scientists admit to be our specialty, namely the science of criminology. In fact, aside from the two terrible books of the Digest, and from the practical criminologists of the Middle Ages who continued the study of criminality, the modern world opened a glorious page in the progress of criminal science with the modest little book of Cesare Beccaria. This progress leads from Cesare Beccaria, by way of ...
— The Positive School of Criminology - Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901 • Enrico Ferri
... "Pleiade," and of Rabelais and Montaigne. It is a still more significant fact that the members of the "Cenacle," the circle of kindred minds that gathered around Victor Hugo—Alfred de Vigny, Emile Deschamps, Sainte-Beuve, David d'Angers, and others—"studied and felt the real Middle Ages in their architecture, in their chronicles, and in their picturesque vivacity." Nor should we overlook in connection with romanticism Cousin's aesthetic teaching, according to which, God being the source of all beauty as well ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... however, much more to boast of than her clock. The city was founded by the Romans, and in the middle ages was one of the most powerful of the free cities of the German Empire, on the occasions of imperial processions her citizens enjoying the proud distinction of having their banner borne second ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... every sentence he writes of the Middle Ages; always vital, right, and profound; so that in the matter of art, . . .there is hardly a principle connected with the mediaeval temper, that he has not struck upon in those seemingly careless and too rugged rhymes of his. There is a curious ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... Trinity, and in the three divisions, of the threefold state of man, sin, grace, and beatitude. Symbolic meanings reveal themselves, or make themselves suspected, everywhere, as in the architecture of the Middle Ages. An analysis of the poem would be out of place here, but we must say a few words of Dante's position as respects modern literature. If we except Wolfram von Eschenbach, he is the first Christian poet, the first (indeed, we might say the only) one whose whole system of thought is colored ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... the middle ages down to Duerer and Cranach," quite truly remarks Laura Marholm (as quoted by I. Bloch, Beitraege zur AEtiologie der Psychopathia Sexualis, Teil I, p. 154), "we find a very peculiar type which has falsely been regarded as one of merely ascetic character. It represents ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... scrotal compressors," "scrotal clamps," various "rings," and other "jim cracks," than was paid us for a radical and permanent cure. Some of these instruments are so formidable as to suggest the racks and thumbscrews of the middle ages. Such useless appliances often weaken the scrotal muscles by the unnatural compression which they produce and make the discomfort far worse when they are discontinued than ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... brooded over Christian Europe. The darkness of the Middle Ages reached its midnight, and slowly the dawn arose,—musical with the chirping of innumerable trouveres and minnesingers. As early as the Tenth Century, Gerbert, afterwards Pope Sylvester II., had passed into Spain and brought thence arithmetic, astronomy, and geometry; and five hundred years ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... Annals (chiefly from 78-84). *Gildas' History of Britain (whole period). *Bede's Ecclesiastical History of Britain (whole period). Wright's The Celt, the Roman, and the Saxon. Elton's Origins of English History. Pearson's England during the Early and Middle Ages. Scarth's Roman Britain.[1] ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... the most romantic which has been known to me as a visitor, and the most agreeable in the way of an ancestral dwelling, I should, I think, begin with Powis, as it stands with its rose-red walls, an exhalation of the Middle Ages, on a steep declivity among the mountainous woods of Wales—woods full of deer and bracken. Much of its painted paneling had never been, when I stayed there, touched or renovated since the time of the battle of Worcester. In a bedroom which had once been ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... that relates to the famous cave known through the middle ages as the "Purgatory of Saint Patrick", as well as the Story of Luis Enius — the Owain Miles of Ancient English poetry — Calderon was entirely indebted to the little volume published at Madrid, in 1627, by Juan Perez de Montalvan, entitled "Vida y ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... Saxons of Witukind, have been held to be indicated in the war which the Frankish Siegfried, in the "Nibelungen Lied," wages against the Saxons. To all appearance, however, the tale is a mixture of mythological and historical traditions. In the Middle Ages, and still much later, Siegfried was looked upon as an undoubtedly historical figure. His praise was sung through all Germany. His very tomb, one of his weapons, as well as his carved image, were ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... "The Mazarins," and those of the Parliament "The Fronde." The literal meaning of the word fronde is sling. It is a boy's plaything, and when skillfully used, an important weapon of war. It was with the sling that David slew Goliath. During the Middle Ages this was the usual weapon of the foot soldiers. Mazarin had contemptuously remarked that the Parliament were like school boys, fronding in the ditches, and who ran away at the approach of a policeman. The Parliament accepted the title, and adopted ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... in the epic mould. It is probable that they first came into existence in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; and they continued to be produced in various forms of repetition, rearrangement, and at last degradation, throughout the Middle Ages. Originally they were not written, but recited. Their authors were the wandering minstrels, who found, in the crowds collected together at the great fairs and places of pilgrimage of those early days, an audience for long narratives of romance and adventure drawn from the Latin ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... reaches its acme, an acme often represented by extravagances of the most painful kind and sacrifices which strike modern imagination as ferocious and terrible. In Europe asceticism reached its great extremes as you know during the Middle Ages, and especially took the direction of antagonism to the natural sex-relation. Looking back to-day to the centuries in which celibacy was considered the most moral condition, and marriage was counted as little ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... Johnson, "was a fight of men-at-arms in the Middle Ages,—derived from the graphic description of Froissart, in whose narrative there always runs an undercurrent of sly humor when portraying the military extravagances of the age. And it is impossible ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... reflecting—China was awake and thinking hard. Japan's continued civil wars, which caused the almost total destruction of books and manuscripts, secured also the triumph of Buddhism which meant the atrophy of the national intellect. When, after the long feuds and battles of the middle ages, Confucianism stepped the second time into the Land of Brave Scholars, it was no longer with the simple rules of conduct and ceremonial of the ancient days, nor was it as the ally of Buddhism. It came like an armed man in ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... changes which affected the family during the Middle Ages and the still more striking changes which came through the Reformation, we must now devote ourselves to the study of the problems of the family as it exists at present. The religious theory of the family which prevailed during the Middle Ages, but which was more ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... an Irishman by birth, Richard entered the famous abbey of St. Victor, a house of Augustinian canons near Paris, some time before 1140, where he became the chief pupil of the great mystical doctor and theologian whom the later Middle Ages regarded as a second Augustine, Hugh of St. Victor. After Hugh's death (1141), Richard succeeded to his influence as a teacher, and completed his work in creating the mystical theology of the Church. His masterpiece, De Gratia ...
— The Cell of Self-Knowledge - Seven Early English Mystical Treaties • Various
... Robert saw the blue eyes, as blue as his own, twinkling with a humorous light. It was borne upon him with renewed force that here was a champion of romance and high adventure. St. Luc was a survival. He was one of those knights of the Middle Ages who rode forth with lance and sword to do battle, perhaps for a lady's favor, and perhaps to crush the infidel. His own spirit, which had in it a lightness, a gayety and a humor akin to ...
— The Shadow of the North - A Story of Old New York and a Lost Campaign • Joseph A. Altsheler
... rough, working definition may be useful to start with. Romanticism, then, in the sense in which I shall commonly employ the word, means the reproduction in modern art or literature of the life and thought of the Middle Ages. Some other elements will have to be added to this definition, and some modifications of it will suggest themselves from time to time. It is provisional, tentative, classic, but will serve our turn till we are ready ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... the story I last told you, my child, it will have revealed to you the whole mystery of the circulation of the blood, and you are at the present moment wiser than all the learned men of antiquity and the middle ages, for they had none of them the faintest surmise ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace
... of the day when Alexander's sword shall conquer the world; when Plato shall teach the philosophy which all men who think must know; and when Pericles shall bid the arts blossom in a perfection which is the despair of succeeding generations. And so in the Middle Ages there is barbarism enough, with its lawlessness and ignorance; but there is also faith, courage, strength, which tell of youth, and point to a time of mature faculty and high achievement. There is the rich purple dawn which shall grow into the ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... route carried us eastward to Cracow, the old capital of Poland, scattered in ruined grandeur within its brick walls. Beyond it I remember a stronghold of the Middle Ages ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... person, simple and one-sided as was his message, as a product he was singularly complex. He was the typical painter of the transition from Mediaeval to Renaissance. The sources of his feeling are in the Middle Ages, but he enjoys his feelings in a way which is almost modern; and almost modern also are his means of expression. We are too apt to forget this transitional character of his, and, ranking him with the moderns, we ...
— The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance - With An Index To Their Works • Bernhard Berenson
... began to creep through Europe in the middle ages, at a time when hereditary monarchs and the catholic church ruled the world, men placed its safeguards in municipal corporations. The idea of municipal corporations descended from Rome to the rest of Europe, ...
— An Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony • Anonymous
... from the invisible would be received! Some of these rare and regal possessions have gone a little astray, and wandered about in the wilderness of the world, as is confirmed by an anecdote we recently received from good authority. A magnificent volume, illustrated by views of French chateaux of the Middle Ages, presented to a princess of the House of Bourbon, was known to have existed. This manuscript had disappeared, and for more than a hundred years it could not be traced. The Duc d'Aumale, son of Louis Philippe, while in Genoa, was informed (by a person ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... at Tantura, five hours distant, we were obliged to make a short visit, in spite of the invitation of the hospitable Fra Carlo to spend the night there. In the afternoon we passed the ruins of Athlit, a town of the Middle Ages, and the Castel Pellegrino of the Crusaders. Our road now followed the beach, nearly the whole distance to Jaffa, and was in many places, for leagues in extent, a solid layer of white, brown, purple and rosy shells, ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... divinity, so prone to remember that Luther wrote, "We Germans are Germans, and Germans we will remain—that is to say, pigs and brutish animals." This was written in 1528: but "the example of the Middle Ages" is held up to-day by German leaders as the ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... the surgical treatise of al-Zahr[a]w[i] very likely played a significant role in the designing of improved surgical instruments in the Middle Ages. Also, the treatise no doubt promoted the development of improved surgical techniques in Islam and, through its translations, promoted these techniques to an even greater extent in the West, a fact that justifies the fame ...
— Drawings and Pharmacy in Al-Zahrawi's 10th-Century Surgical Treatise • Sami Hamarneh
... with a broad and slightly curved blade, used in the Middle Ages; hence, poetically, any type ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... in each cringing menial you will see a black token of that Asiatic metamorphosis through which we all have passed. What a picture! Look at yourself as you stand there in purple sublimity, trailing clouds of darkness from the middle ages whence you come, planting your imperial foot on all the manly traditions of your own free country, and pleased with the grovelling adulations of your trembling serfs. And now it is not the angels who weep, but the Baboo of Bengal. His pale and earnest brow is furrowed with despair ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... Classic age is generally meant the age of Greece and Rome; and by the Romantic is meant the middle ages.] ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... received the precious shiploads of earth from Calvary, the Pisans of the thirteenth century carried the fragments of ancient sculpture brought from Rome and from Greece; and in the Gothic cloister enclosing the green sward and dark cypresses of the grave-yard of Pisa, the art of the Middle Ages came for the first time face to face with the art of antiquity. There, among pagan sarcophagi turned into Christian tombs, with heraldic devices chiselled on to their arabesques and vizored helmets surmounting their garlands, the great ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... translated as The Waning of the Middle Ages. This is a study of the forms of life and thought in France and the Netherlands in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the last phase of one of the great European eras of civilization. In England, where the Middle Ages had been idealized for generations, some of its leading thoughts did not seem so novel as they did in Holland, where many people regarded the Renaissance and more still regarded the Reformation as a new beginning of a better world; but in England ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... earlier centuries of the Middle Ages little was known of witchcraft. The crime of magic, when it did occur, was leniently punished. For instance, the council of Ancyra (314) ordained the whole punishment of witches to consist in expulsion from the Christian community. The Visigoths punished ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... ritual. The rise of the Indian drama, or the mediaeval and from it the modern stage, would have told us the same tale and served the like purpose. But Greece is nearer to us to-day than either India or the Middle Ages. ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... Plain, skirted on the Left by a Wood. The Pyrenees are visible in the distance. Small knots of Soldiers all in the military Dress of the middle Ages are seen ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... negotiation went prosperously on. The minds of the Indians had been already prepared. In La Salle they saw their champion against the Iroquois, the standing terror of all this region. They gathered around his stronghold like the timorous peasantry of the middle ages around the rock-built castle of their feudal lord. From the wooden ramparts of St. Louis,—for so he named his fort,— high and inaccessible as an eagle's nest, a strange scene lay before his eye. The broad flat valley of the Illinois was spread beneath him like a map, bounded ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... What Middle Ages passionate, O passionless voice! What distant bells Lodged in the hills, what palace state Illyrian! For it speaks, it tells, Without desire, without dismay, Some morrow and ...
— A Father of Women - and other poems • Alice Meynell
... Free (Greece And Rome) III Reason in Prison (The Middle Ages) IV Prospect of Deliverance (The Renaissance and the Reformation) V Religious Toleration VI The Growth of Rationalism (Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries) VII The Progress of Rationalism (Nineteenth Century) VIII The Justification of Liberty of ...
— A History of Freedom of Thought • John Bagnell Bury
... time they were trained to acquit themselves with credit in those encounters celebrated as combats at the barriers. At the sieges of cities, during the middle ages, knights of the besieging army were in the habit of going to the barriers, or grated palisades of the fortress, and defying the garrison to break a lance for the honour of their ladies. Indeed, this was so fashionable, that an army could hardly appear before a town without the siege giving rise ...
— The Boy Crusaders - A Story of the Days of Louis IX. • John G. Edgar
... was able to convert the Greeks and Romans, and afterward Goths, Vandals, Lombards, Franks, Scandinavians, because it came to them, not as a creed, but as a life. But neither Roman Catholics nor Protestants have had these large successes since the Middle Ages. Instead of a life, Christianity became a church and a creed. When this took place, it gradually lost its grand missionary power. It no longer preached truth, but doctrine; no longer communicated life, but organized a body of proselytes into a rigid church. Party spirit took the place of ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... the town are the old and the new castles of the Grand Duke of Baden. The former is of Roman origin, and was occupied by the reigning dukes in the middle ages. The latter is the summer residence of the present sovereign. At the foot of the rocks on which the modern structure is located are the hot springs, thirteen in number, to which the town owes its origin as a health-giving abode. This part of the place is called "Hell" on account of the ...
— Down the Rhine - Young America in Germany • Oliver Optic
... was only a shell and a semblance. The economic condition of the Mexican lower classes was not touched—the process of "nation-building" seemed not to include them. In the shadow of a modern civilization stalked poverty and ignorance worthy of the Middle Ages. And it was notorious that in the capital city itself, under the very eyes of the central Government, was where the very worst conditions and the most glaring extremes of poverty and wealth were to be seen. On the one hand, splendid paseos lined with magnificent ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... was feeble, but not wholly inadequate—in the Middle Ages; for we know by good evidence that the priest was often interrupted ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... Islands; for Pliny notices that the summit of Nivaria was generally covered with snow, which is frequently the case with the peak of Teneriffe, and from this circumstance the name of Nivaria is obviously derived. They appear likewise to have been known in the middle ages to the Arabs of Morocco; as the Nubian geographer mentions two islands, under the names of Mastahan and Lacos, as among the six fortunate islands described by Ptolemy; these probably were Lancerota and Fuertaventura, the latter ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... was opened to the public in 1834. It occupies two of the galleries of the cloister of the ancient convent of Saint-Mary. In the first gallery are the gallic, roman and gallo-roman antiquities, as also those of the middle ages; in the second, those of the period, termed the renaissance. This chronological order has been preserved as much as possible. The searches which have taken place in different parts of the departement, and especially in the roman theatre at Lillebonne, have produced ...
— Rouen, It's History and Monuments - A Guide to Strangers • Theodore Licquet
... are so many paintings and sculptures in Italy is this: in the middle ages, it was the fashion, in all the central parts of Europe, for the people to spend almost all their surplus money in building and decorating churches. Indeed, there was then very little else that they could do. At the present time, people invest their funds, as fast ...
— Rollo in Naples • Jacob Abbott
... to say that such old poems as are quoted in respect to the events of the second and third centuries, are apparently quoted as Virgil's description of Italy under Evander might be quoted by a writer of the Middle Ages. ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... CASPAR BRAUN and FREDERICK SCHNEIDER are now publishing at Munich. These gentlemen are well known to all readers of that excellent comic paper, the Fliegende Blaetter, and here appeal to all who can enjoy humor and have a taste for studies in the history of German life in the middle ages. ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... here with regard to clothes," the Prince continued. "Amongst the men, you find Venetian Doges, Chancellors, gallants of every age, but scarcely a single uniform. In a way, this seems typical of the passing of the militarism of your country. You are beginning to remind me of Venice in the Middle Ages. There is a new type of brain dominant here, fat instead of muscle, a citizen aristocracy instead of ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... are mostly also matters of fashion. We are conscious of a difference between medieval fashions in belief and modern fashions. For instance, though we are more credulous than men were in the Middle Ages, and entertain such crowds of fortunetellers, magicians, miracle workers, agents of communication with the dead, discoverers of the elixir of life, transmuters of metals, and healers of all sorts, as the Middle Ages never dreamed of as possible, yet we will ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... its lack of power of combination and of its defective methods in combination. It has been by combination that the middle class has arisen, and by it that capital has so wonderfully increased. The story of the Middle Ages, familiar to us all, is the story of the rise of the industrial class by combination in guilds. Labor's numbers, now a hindrance, might thus become a help. In a mob men trample upon each other; in an army they brace each other ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... marquisates, counties, duchies, and provinces, which it had matched into one great mosaic, at last, making the kingdom of Italy. Mr. Barrymore loves Italy so much that he likes her for knowing these things, and I think I shall steal that book she bought at Nice, and is always reading—Hallam's "Middle Ages." ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... and it revealed at once her taste and her power of gratifying it. The tapestry that covered two sides of the room could be seen at a glance to be no mere modern imitation, but a priceless relic of the earlier middle ages. The other walls were so thickly hung with pictures that one could scarcely see the pale-green satin beneath; and among these paintings the Count's educated eye recognized the work of Raphael, Botticelli, Turner, and Gainsborough among other masters; while beneath the cornice hung ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... points connected with the history of religion in Europe at the close of the Middle Ages, its decline, revival, and the causes which led to both, have already appeared in print as regards their general outline, although they have for the most part been rewritten, added to, and in each case subjected to a ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... into far-away countries for their subjects: to Sodom and Lesbos. The best known is Michael Kouzmine. This writer, who happily began with stories of the Orient in the Middle Ages, has now acquired a rather sad renown for himself with his story called "The Wings," which appeared at the end of 1906. The scandalous success which this book won, encouraged the author to go on in the same manner. In poor verse, and especially in the story, "The Castle of Cards," Kouzmine has exalted ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... Billy B. Hill admitted. "It's a jump back into the Middle Ages." His note of laughter joined hers as they sat staring owlishly at each other through the dark of ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... shone with pleasure, a humble dignity of bearing. There were some who should have sat below the salt for lack of this good breeding; but they were not many. So, I said to myself, their ancestors may have sat in the great hall of some old French house in the Middle Ages, when battles and sieges and processions and feasts were familiar things. The ministers and Mrs. Blackett, with a few of their rank and age, were put in places of honor, and for once that I looked any other way I looked twice at Mrs. ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... name is, however, of rather vague application, for though generally employed to designate only the ecclesiastical authors of the first six centuries, it is extended, occasionally, to distinguished theologians who flourished in the middle ages. ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... from observation or interference and the tablets were less liable to injury than papyrus or vellum. Tablets were used at a very early period and continued to be used, especially for correspondence, all through the middle ages and into the 16th century. Sometimes a considerable number of them would be fastened with thongs by one edge so as to form a continuous document which was one of the precursors of the modern book. The British Museum has a document of this sort consisting of nine leaves about 7 x 9 inches. ...
— Books Before Typography - Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices #49 • Frederick W. Hamilton
... cannot be said to be the peculiar, still less the universal, characteristic of any period. It is a personal not a periodic distinction; and there are persons who might make out a fair claim to it even in the depths of the Middle Ages or of ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... During the middle ages, when ingenious men exercised infinite subtlety in speculation, and wrote large Latin folios to prove each other wrong in matters about which neither party knew anything at all, there was much dissertation about the possibility of antipodes. Bishops and saints waxed eloquent upon the theme. ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... time he would have saved me from his own Black Decree. And I would have been touched by his clemency? I would have accepted, the grateful tears streaming from my eyes? And thus I would be regenerated? It sounds beautiful. It sounds like the chivalrous Middle Ages, when there were Black Princes along with the Black Decrees. My liege lord he would have been, but my liege Patria, what of her?—Well, well, well, he has three days in which to understand me better, and to think of his own regeneration ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... these names for any other. But a new "Hep Hep" was wanted, and so "Semites" was hauled from the world of books, disfigured, and fastened upon the Jewish gabardine in noble emulation of the barbarism of the Middle Ages. The more senseless, the more welcome it was as a bugbear to frighten the populace and to stir into flames the sparks of fanaticism which are always smouldering in the hearts of the vulgar, whether of low degree or ...
— Zionism and Anti-Semitism - Zionism by Nordau; and Anti-Semitism by Gottheil • Max Simon Nordau
... Teutonic people, finally immortalized in the nineteenth century through the musical dramas of Wagner. Any understanding of English civilization would be similarly incomplete without the semi-historic figure of King Arthur, glorified through the accumulated legends of the Middle Ages and made to live again in the melodic idylls of the great Victorian laureate. And so one might go on. In many ways the mythology and folklore of a country are a truer index to the life of its people than ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... Clark relates this singular story on the authority of 'Disci de Temp.' The writers in the Middle Ages are full of such narrations; see especially the first English book of homilies called ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... buildings; and thus the hydropathic system of the ancients is allied with the practice of the modern Academie de Medecine. No records of the destruction, nor indeed of the existence, of this Roman watering-place have been preserved; probably, the buildings fell into natural decay, and during the middle ages were allowed to remain unrepaired and unheeded. Only foundations, broken shafts of columns, cornices, capitals, and altars are now discernible; but they are enough to add greatly to the interest ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... the early Christian priests of Iceland, who lived about the eleventh century. The other Edda is in prose; it is a collection made about two centuries later. The form given to the myths in these collections is due to the Skalds, who flourished in Iceland in the early Middle Ages; but the legends themselves are older. Nothing is known precisely about their ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... and 2. Various Readings. 3. Digression on the Military Engines of the Middle Ages. 4. Mangonels of Coeur de Lion. 5. Difficulties connected with Polo's Account ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... with a blennorrhoeal infection! The ancient jest which accounts for the shaving of the priest's crown is an inferential substantiation of the fact that the evils of antiquity, like the legal codes, have descended through the generations; survived the middle ages, and been transmitted to the modern world. A perusal of the Raggionamente of Pietro Aretino will confirm this statement, in its first premise, and the experiences of Sir Richard Burton in the India of Napier, and Harry Franck's, in Spain, ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... In the Middle Ages a great and ever-present fear of death coincided with an extraordinary neglect of life. Whole companies, whole classes of men thought of little but death; yet they killed each other for a look or a thought; in war whole cities were put to the sword and fire, as the Black ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... route of the ancient way until we come to Welling. The present road down the hill eastward is said to date from 1739 only. [Footnote: See H. Littlehales, "Some Notes on the Road from Canterbury in the Middle Ages" (Chaucer Society, 1898).] ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... them, get the Royal Antiquarian Society to pay a visit and issue a pamphlet; gaze at them reverently and earnestly, for they are not easily to be matched in London. Iron girders and spacious roofs are the modern fashion; here we have the Middle Ages well-preserved—slam! the door is banged-to, onwards, over the invisible river, more red signals and rain, and finally the terminus. Five hundred well-dressed and civilised savages, wet, cross, weary, all anxious to get in—eager for home and dinner; five hundred ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... pierced with regularly arched passages, leading in various directions, and the trees compelled by the shears to take the shape of obelisks and pyramids, or other fantastic figures, according to the taste of the middle ages. As we drew nearer to Paris, we saw the plant which Noah first committed to the earth after the deluge—you know what that was I hope—trained on low stakes, and growing thickly and luxuriantly on the slopes ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... each the home of civilizations both magnificent and enduring. They did not spring up spontaneously, however. If the rivers helped man, man also helped the rivers by inventing systems of irrigation. Next, from Minoan days right on to the end of the Middle Ages, the Mediterranean basin was the focus of all the higher life in the world, if we put out of sight the civilizations of India and China, together with the lesser cultures of Peru and Mexico. I will consider this second phase especially, because it is particularly instructive ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... captivating and poetical divinity of the heathen theocracy had probably been made; but the original space between the pillars had been filled up with rubbish of a modern date, and the rest of the building was apparently of the architecture of the latter end of the Middle Ages. It was situated at one end of the building which had once been the seat of the Inquisition, and had served, before the erection of the present see, as the residence of ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... worth speaking of, the world worth planning for, the world worth working for, we acknowledge your labors as surpassing those of any of our kind. You seem to us to carry away and maintain in the future the same measure of fame among others that we are told was given in the Middle Ages to Albertus Magnus, the most learned man of those times, whose comprehension of theology, of psychology, of natural history, of politics, of history, and of learning, comprehended more than any man since the classic time certainly; and yet ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser
... become, in modern literature, an Ojibway demigod, son of the West Wind, and companion of the tricksy Paupukkeewis, the boastful Iagoo, and the strong Kwasind. If a Chinese traveler, during the middle ages, inquiring into the history and religion of the western nations, had confounded King Alfred with King Arthur, and both with Odin, he would not have made a more preposterous confusion of names and ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... and set as to enhance, not destroy, the lines and colour of the landscape. To wander from one of these temples to another, to rest in them in the heat of the day and sleep in them at night, is to taste a form of travel impossible in Europe now, though familiar enough there in the Middle Ages. Specially delightful is it to come at dusk upon a temple apparently deserted; to hear the bell tinkle as the wind moves it; to enter a dusky hall and start to see in a dark recess huge figures, fierce faces, glimmering maces and swords that seem to ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... is to rise. It is intended that this edifice shall infinitely surpass in magnificence its predecessor at Nauvoo. The design purports to be a revelation from heaven, and, if so, must have emanated from some one of the Gothic architects of the Middle Ages whose taste had become bewildered by his residence among the spheres; for the turrets are to be surmounted by figures of sun, moon, and stars, and the whole building bedecked with such celestial emblems. Only ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... artist who lived in Italy in the Middle Ages. Everybody in English Literature seemed to know about him, and the whole class laughed because I thought he was an archangel. He sounds like an archangel, doesn't he? The trouble with college is that you are expected to ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... without heat. By noon they would have reached Symon's Yat; before lunch was ended the older man would have been Cynthia's most outspoken admirer. As it was—well, as it was—there used to be a belief in the Middle Ages that the Evil One's favorite nook lay amid the deepest shadow of a cathedral, and modern fact is ofttimes ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... marble columns and tombs, and a colossal wood-carved Calvary, and beside that a small and very rich chapel: indeed, so full is the little town of the undisturbed past, that to walk in it is like opening a missal of the Middle Ages, all emblazoned and illuminated with saints and warriors, and it is so clean, and so still, and so noble, by reason of its monuments and its historic colour, that I marvel much no one has ever cared to sing its praises. The ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... Middle Ages. Some Epic Narratives. Renaissance in the Seventeenth Century. Literature Imitative of the West in the Eighteenth Century. Original ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... point out a prophecy of Masonry in the old orders of builders, following their footsteps—not connectedly, of course, for there are many gaps—through the Dionysiac fraternity of Tyre, through the Roman Collegia, to the architects and Masons of the Middle Ages. Since he wrote, however, much new material has come to light, but the date of the advent of the builders in Rome is still uncertain. Some trace it to the very founding of the city, while others go no further back than King Numa, the friend of Pythagoras.[61] ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... question of time," said he. "It isn't reasonable to expect Pre-Raphaelites in a new country. But give us three or four hundred years, and we'll produce old masters which, if you ladies will excuse the expression, will knock the spots out of the Middle Ages." Poppa is such ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... Ajaccio on the 15th of August, 1769. The family had been of some distinction, during the middle ages, in Italy; whence his branch of it removed to Corsica, in the troubled times of the Guelphs and Gibellines. They were always considered as belonging to the gentry of the island. Charles, the father of Napoleon, an advocate of considerable ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... exculpating by illusory comparisons or captious sophisms excesses which afflict humanity, and which prepare the way for violent convulsions. Do they think that they have acquired the right of putting down commiseration, by comparing* the condition of the negroes with that of the serfs of the middle ages, and with the state of oppression to which some classes are still subjected in the north and east of Europe? (* Such comparisons do not satisfy those secret partisans of the slave trade who try to make light of the miseries of the black race, and to resist every emotion those ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... he said, "are closed only in the historical manuals that are given to pupils to spoil their minds. In reality, barbarians are always barbarians. Israel's mission is to instruct nations. It was Israel which, in the Middle Ages, brought to Europe the wisdom of ages. Socialism frightens you. It is a Christian evil, like priesthood. And anarchy? Do you not recognize in it the plague of the Albigeois and of the Vaudois? The Jews, who instructed and polished ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... in primitive times was no exception. Slavery in a more or less fully typical form was widespread. When the migrations ended in the middle ages, however, the rise of feudalism gave the people a thorough territorial regimentation. The dearth of commerce whether in goods or in men led gradually to the conversion of the unfree laborers from slaves into serfs or villeins ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... judgment, for which Luther and his co-reformers had fought so valiantly, would then have succumbed to the power of authority, as embodied in the Papacy and the Catholic League; and Germany, after its mighty effort at release, would have lapsed back into the Middle Ages. To few men the opportunity is offered to exercise such a far-reaching influence upon the history of mankind; but fewer still are those who see its full significance, and seeing it, seize it, and without one look behind march into the storm ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... the gaol we had another memory of the Middle Ages. Shortly before we got to Coimbra we met one of the great local families, the Pinto-Bastos, travelling along the road, the ladies in litters, each borne by two gaily-caparisoned mules, the gentlemen on horseback, in the costume of the country, and escorted by numerous serving-men, ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... read the following in the Revue du Monde Scientifique: "A curious piece of news comes to us from Rio de Janeiro. Madness, an epidemic of madness, which may be compared to that contagious madness which attacked the people of Europe in the Middle Ages, is at this moment raging in the Province of San-Paulo. The frightened inhabitants are leaving their houses, deserting their villages, abandoning their land, saying that they are pursued, possessed, governed like human ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... juncture tend to discreet legislation. Were the Unionists and Secessionists but as Guelphs and Ghibellines? If not, then far be it from a great nation now to act in the spirit that animated a triumphant town-faction in the Middle Ages. But crowding thoughts must at last be checked; and, in times like the present, one who desires to be impartially just in the expression of his views, moves as among sword-points presented ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... stimulant, and men in India, who never drink in England, there consume "pegs" and cheroots enormously. Of course, tobacco is to be put out of account in relation to great workers and thinkers up to the close of the middle ages, but the experience of antiquity would lead one to infer that the moderate use of wine, at all events, was not unfavourable to the highest brain development and physical force. Bismarck and Moltke are very great smokers; ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... rarer treasures; some beautiful carved work, by Cellini, some ivory carving of the middle ages, and a few rare and costly cameos. Perhaps these may please the taste ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... of the treatise on grammar (the first of the seven arts of the Trivium. and the Quadrivium), which was in use throughout the Middle Ages. ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 3, Paradise [Paradiso] • Dante Alighieri
... butt. The huge mouth seems to dilate as you look upon it. You already begin to fancy you behold the leaden mass—the three-ounce bullet—issuing from its stronghold, like a relentless baron of the middle ages, going forth under his grim archway, seeking only whom he may devour. The sight is apt to diminish the influence of skill. Nerves are necessary to such sportsmen, and nerves become singularly untrue when frowned upon through ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... of Homer was the heroic, in which the Greeks excelled in martial exploits; that of Virgil found the Romans an intellectual and gallant race; the genius of Chaucer, Spencer and Sidney revelled in the feudal halls and enchanted vistas of the middle ages; Shakespeare delineated the British mind in its grave and comic moods; Milton reflected the sober aspect and spiritual aspirations of the Puritanical era; while at later periods Pope, Goldsmith and Cowper pourtrayed ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins
... statue. Maskenzug,(Ger.) - Procession of masked persons. Massenversammlung,(Ger.) - Mass meeting. Mein Freund - My friend. Mein Sohn - My son. Meine Seel',(Ger.) - By my soul. Meisjes,(Flem.) - Girls. Middleolter(Mittelælter) - The Middle Ages. Mijn lief gesellen,(Flem.) - My dear comrades. Mineted - Minded. Minnesinger - Poet of love. A name given to German lyric poets, who flourished from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. Mist-hauf,(Ger.) - Dung-hill. Mit hoontin knife, &c.:- "With her white hands so lovely, She dug the ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... summer stock during the cold season. Hence a portion of it was regularly slaughtered and salted for winter provision. We may suppose, therefore, that when no alternative was offered but these salt meats, even the leanest venison was devoured with relish.—Hallam's Hist. Middle Ages. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction No. 485 - Vol. 17, No. 485, Saturday, April 16, 1831 • Various
... intended in this place. The meaning will be, that no person shall be disseized, &c;., except upon a lawful cause of action, found by the verdict of a jury. This really seems as good as any of the disjunctive interpretatios; but I do not offer it with much confidence." 2 Hallam's Middle Ages, Ch. 8, Part 2, p. 449, ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... the unwary or to the newcomer who thinks our heather-covered moors are all plain sailing! for along them run long lines of ruts, the remains of the old pack-road of the Middle Ages, worn by the traffic of centuries and now covered deep in purple heath. The only way to get over them, unless you stop and walk, is to jump boldly into the middle like the man in the nursery rhyme, and then jump out again: horses that have been in the country for a while ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... often seen. And on the occasion of everything which happens keep this in mind, that it is that which thou hast often seen. Everywhere up and down thou wilt find the same things, with which the old histories are filled, those of the middle ages and those of our own day; with which cities and houses are filled now. There is nothing new: all things ...
— The Thoughts Of The Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius
... all the books treating of a given subject, for instance, geology; or all the books, on whatever subject, cast in a particular form—for instance, poetry; or all the books having to do with a particular period of time—for instance, the middle ages. Few books are devoted exclusively to one subject and belong absolutely in any one class. The classification of books must be a continual compromise. Its purpose is not accurately to classify all printed things, this can't ...
— A Library Primer • John Cotton Dana
... impressions received from within. Every sensation of movement which nature sends through us is a summons to be answered by an action, not only self-culture, not example, not passive good-will toward others, but by the intention an object of activity toward the world and humanity. The Middle Ages summoned up the business of life in the words, 'Ora et Labora.' They are beautiful words, and after this lapse of time we take the meaning out for ourselves, in other words, 'Think ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... chivalry toward a lady, courtesy to the recollection of a hostess, and particularly by the knowledge that his hearer would expect with a certain frigid rigour charity of him, Dr. Middleton paused, spoke and paused: he stammered. Ladies, he said, were famous poisoners in the Middle Ages. His opinion was, that we had a class of manufacturing wine merchants on the watch for widows in this country. But he was bound to state the fact of his waking at his usual hour to the minute unassailed by headache. On the other hand, this was a condition ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... credulity of mankind, and insulted the supreme majesty of the true God by pretending to the power of divination. Hence the law which Moses, by Divine command, promulgated against these criminals; but it did not follow, as the superstitious monomaniacs of the middle ages imagined, that the Bible established the existence of the power of divination by its edicts against those who pretended to it. From the best authorities, it appears that the Hebrew word, which has been rendered venefica ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... spurious legends. That Bede had heard these legends is almost certain; that he did not mention them is probably due to the fact that he considered Arthur to be wholly mythical.] were current in Britain and on the Continent; but they were never written because of a custom of the Middle Ages which required that, before a legend could be recorded, it must have the authority of some Latin manuscript. Geoffrey undertook to supply such authority in his Historia regum britanniae, or History of the Kings of Britain, in which he proved Arthur's descent from Roman ancestors. ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... intend to keep you in that position for some little time unless you will allow me to remove your arms—not your sword," he explained quickly on seeing the look of horror that came over the Prussian's face. "I will allow you to keep that barbaric relic of the Middle Ages and modern Japan, to which you and the Knights k of the Orient attach so much importance. But that very nice automatic I must have. I beg that you will allow me to take it without any unnecessary fuss." He walked around the table and, gently pulling ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... English history has been prodigious. While on the continent a sovereign like Charles the Bold could use his nobility to extinguish the liberties of the merchant towns of Flanders, nothing of the sort was ever possible in England. Throughout the Middle Ages, in every contest between the people and the crown, the weight of the peerage was thrown into the scale in favour of popular liberties. But for this peculiar position of the peerage we might have had no Earl Simon; it is largely through it that representative ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske
... within themselves the entire contribution to human progress of a certain race, a certain nation, a certain organized religion. The glory that was Greece is epitomized and sung forever in the "Iliad,"—the grandeur that was Rome, in the "AEneid." All that the Middle Ages gave the world is gathered and expressed in the "Divine Comedy" of Dante: all of medieval history, science, philosophy, scholarship, poetry, religion may be reconstructed from a right reading and entire understanding of this single monumental poem. If you would know Portugal ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... standing round them, and, in their midst, Pellerin was giving vent to his ideas. The form of government most favourable for the arts was an enlightened monarchy. He was disgusted with modern times, "if it were only on account of the National Guard"—he regretted the Middle Ages and the days of Louis XIV. M. Roque congratulated him on his opinions, confessing that they overcame all his prejudices against artists. But almost without a moment's delay he went off when the voice of ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... to the north-east of the castle stand the remains of one of the few Norman houses that have come down to the present time. It is thus described in the first volume of "The Domestic Architecture of the Middle Ages" by Turner and Parker, pp. 38, 39. This volume was published in 1851. "At Christchurch, in Hampshire, is the ruin of a Norman house, rather late in the style, with good windows of two lights and a round chimney shaft.[6] The plan, as before, is a simple oblong; ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Wimborne Minster and Christchurch Priory • Thomas Perkins
... as such was not Albo's forte, nor was it his chief interest. While it is true that all the Jewish thinkers of the middle ages were for a great part apologetes, this did not prevent a Maimonides or a Gersonides from making a really thorough and disinterested study of science and philosophy; and often their scientific and philosophic conviction was so strong that the apologia was pro philosophia ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik |
