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Mediaeval   Listen
adjective
Mediaeval  adj.  (Written also medieval)  Of or relating to the Middle Ages; as, mediaeval architecture.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Mediaeval" Quotes from Famous Books



... of that first black "Good Friday," the tragedy in which all humanity was involved, Friday was the day of Freya, "The Beloved," gentle protectress, and most generous giver of all joys, delights, and pleasures. From her, in mediaeval times, the high-born women who acted as dispensers to their lords first took the title Frouwa (Frau), and when, in its transition stage, the old heathenism had evolved into a religion of strong nature worship, overshadowed by fatalism, only thinly veneered by Christianity, the minds ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang

... civilization has now reached the mediaeval stage and you see the Crusader with cross on breast and sword in hand. He has reached this lofty position thru faith (represented by the priest) and war (suggested by the rude warrior). The spiritual has now been added to ...
— Palaces and Courts of the Exposition • Juliet James

... story is mediaeval Germany in the time of the feuds and robber barons and romance. The kidnapping of Otto, his adventures among rough soldiers and his daring rescue make up a spirited and thrilling ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton

... matter of fact, is almost impossibly beautiful, and incredibly romantic. It is an almost perfectly mediaeval place, with the enormous advantage that it is also old, a quality which we are apt to forget that mediaeval places, when first built, did not possess. I do not think that Wells, when first built, was probably more than just a beautiful place. But it has now all grown old ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson

... knew what the rest of the world did not. That his charming, irrepressible protegee would have snapped her fingers lightly at the mere suggestion of either. The days of mediaeval suppression of females had come to an end even in Mexico. Moreover, there existed a perfect understanding between ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown

... anything which betokened physical or mental disorder. A mediaeval doctor would have called him saturnine. His face, which carried the entire tale of his years, was of the brown tint of Dublin streets. On his long and rather large head grew dry black hair and a tawny moustache did not quite cover an ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce

... overlooking the city of Warwick, was still silent and tenantless, though the long vacation was drawing to a close. To a stranger passing that way for the first time, the building and the surrounding country would doubtless have suggested the old England rather than the new. There was something mediaeval in the massive, castellated tower that carried the eye upward past the great, arched doorway, the thin, deep-set windows, the leaded eaves and grinning gargoyles, into the cool sky of the ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins

... opinion was, and is, that all this trouble is superfluous. The true liberation must come from the enlargement of the mind by wider and more accurate views of the natural universe. As this takes place, the mediaeval beliefs must drop away of themselves, and we now see that this process is actually in operation. So far from devoting a life to the refutation of theological error, I would not bestow upon such an unnecessary and thankless toil the labor of a ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al

... mediaeval philosophy expressed itself in Descartes. The incompetence of philosophers to solve the problems they occupied themselves with—the anarchy which reigned in the scientific world, where no two thinkers could agree upon fundamental points—the extravagance of the conclusions ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various

... and Mediaeval Philosophy. By Dr. Friedrich Ueberweg. Translated from the fourth German edition by George S. Morris, A.M., with additions by Noah Porter, D.D., LL.D., President of Yale College, and a general Introduction by the editor of the Philosophical Library. ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge

... over Europe, the inner thought of its leaders was deeply tinctured with this truth. The Church tried ineffectually to eradicate it, but in various sects it kept sprouting forth beyond the time of Erigina and Bonaventura, its mediaeval advocates. Every great intuitional soul, as Paracelsus, Boehme, and Swedenborg, has adhered to it. The Italian luminaries, Giordano Bruno and Campanella. embraced it. The best of German philosophy is enriched by it. In Schopenhauer, Lessing, Hegel, Leibnitz, Herder, and Fichte, the younger, it is ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka

... as in the Tintoretto, that of the suspended nude model, it would be safe to say that no modern painter would have employed such a figure. This touch of realism, even among the transcendental painters, denotes the clean-cut separations between the modern and mediaeval art sense. ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore

... thirteenth-century cathedral towered above a sixteenth-century mass of tiled roofs, ending abruptly in walls and a landscape that had not changed. The taste of the town was thick, rich, ripe, like a sweet wine; it was mediaeval, so that Rubens seemed modern; it was one of the strongest and fullest flavors that ever touched the young man's palate; but he might as well have drunk out his excitement in old Malmsey, for all the ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams

... of the long vault, under which were the offices of Hemerlingue and Sons, the black tunnel which Joyeuse had for ten years adorned and illuminated with his dreams, a monumental staircase with a wrought-iron balustrade, a staircase of mediaeval time, led towards the left to the reception rooms of the baroness, which looked out on the court-yard just above the cashier's office, so that in summer, when the windows were open, the ring of the gold, the crash of the piles of money ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet

... are curiously mediaeval. The steam-tram has been rushing along for some miles, past beer gardens and villas, when suddenly it slows to walking pace as we twist in and out over the bridges of a moat, and creeping through the tunnel of a rampart are in the ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas

... church opposite the market place, and a broad stone wall that dated back to the days of Roman supremacy. It was still in perfect preservation, and completely surrounded the town giving it the appearance of a mediaeval fortress, rather than a twentieth century village. Two roads led to it, one from the south through the Porto Romano, and one from the north, up-hill and from the valley below. It was up the latter that Lucia ...
— Lucia Rudini - Somewhere in Italy • Martha Trent

... done. But man has added his deepening touch in one direction and his enlivening touch in another. The early fathers—Spanish—erected Missions from one end of the State to the other. These are time-mellowed, mediaeval structures with bell-towers, cloisters and gardens, sunbaked, shadow-colored; and in spots they make California as old and sad as Spain. Later emigrants—French—have built in the vicinity of San Francisco many tiny roadside inns where one can drink the soft wines of the country. Framed in hills ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin

... the 'mezzo-tint' study yonder, the mediaeval picture over there, rocking her infant, back ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene

... never sought to win proselytes; the annals of ancient India record none of those atrocious persecutions which stained mediaeval Christianity. It competed with rival creeds by offering superior advantages: and the barbarous princes of India were kept under the priestly heel by an appeal to their animal instincts. A fungoid literature of abominations ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea

... always held themselves to be divinely appointed agents of the Judge of all the earth: His creatures chosen to punish His creatures. And so behind those professors, away back in history, were ranged Catholic popes and Protestant archbishops, and kings and queens, Protestant and Catholic, and great mediaeval jurists, and mailed knights and palm-bearing soldiers of the cross, and holy inquisitors drowning poor old bewildered women, tearing living flesh from flesh as paper, crushing bones like glass, burning the shrieking ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen

... fixed look, in the will to fascinate. More than once Keyork Arabian had scoffed at what he called her superstitions, and had maintained that all the varying phenomena of hypnotism, all the witchcraft of the darker ages, all the visions undoubtedly shown to wondering eyes by mediaeval sorcerers, were traceable to moral influence, and to no other cause. Unorna could not accept his reasoning. For her there was a deeper and yet a more material mystery in it, as in her own life, a mystery which she cherished as an inheritance, which impressed her with a sense of her own ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford

... that sort of thing with simplicity? They will ask, pointing to drawings of little mocking satyrs and twisted dwarfs and grotesques and extravagant forms and leering faces and a suggestion of one can hardly say what. But it might as well be asked why the mediaeval artist delighted to carve homely, familiar scenes and incidents, and worse, in the holiest places, to lavish his ingenuity upon the demons and devils above the doors leading into his great churches; why a philosopher like Rabelais chose to express the wisest thought ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell

... animals and had horns on them, while their wearers were adorned with skins and tails. To describe them in their infinite variety would be impossible; indeed the recollection that Alan carried away was one of a mediaeval hell as it is occasionally to be found portrayed upon "Doom pictures" in ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard

... rows of gleaming soldiers. They came from a misty distance at the top of the shop window, came marching from the gates of some dark, mediaeval castle. Their swords caught the lamplight, shining in a line of silver and the precision with which they marched, the certainty with which they trod the little bridge ... ah, these were the fellows! He would be a Boy ... soldiers would enchant him! He should ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole

... his places of sojourn during his joyous and shining pilgrimage through the world, Trinity, and Trinity alone, had any share with his home in Macaulay's affection and loyalty. To the last he regarded it as an ancient Greek, or a mediaeval Italian, felt towards his native city. As long as he had place and standing there, he never left it willingly or returned to it without delight. The only step in his course about the wisdom of which he sometimes expressed misgiving was his preference of ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan

... insignificant that, in 1613, the cloth hall of the town was ceded to the society of the "Fencers of St. Michael." Rural industry and capitalist organization, which had made such strides at the beginning of the sixteenth century, had now definitely superseded mediaeval institutions. ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts

... the form of Faustus' Titanism is the revolt against theology. From the early days of the Christian persecutions, there had been a tendency to divorce the sacred from the secular, and to regard all that was secular as being of the flesh and essentially evil. The mediaeval views of celibacy, hermitage, and the monastic life, had intensified this divorce; and while many of the monks were interested in human secular learning, yet there was a feeling, which in many cases became a kind of conscience, ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman

... fore-and-aft-trimmed sails were invented in 1539, the modern age began. This has three distinctive eras of its own. The first lasted for about a century after the time of Jacques Cartier; and its chief work was to free itself of ancient and mediaeval limitations. ...
— All Afloat - A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways • William Wood

... Webb were conversant with these refinements of mediaeval hydraulics. In fact when Webb, the sturdier of the two, hauled up the bottom-stone all dripping, Cleghorn promptly declared that in the sense of the contract it was a bucketful; hence his first go at the now uncovered pots. So heated ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather

... effect was a bizarrerie of half-weird sheen and gloom. Flemish sepulchral brasses companied strangely with runic tablets, miniature paintings, a winged bull, Tamil scriptures on lacquered leaves of the talipot, mediaeval reliquaries richly gemmed, Brahmin gods. One whole side of the room was occupied by an organ whose thunder in that circumscribed place must have set all these relics of dead epochs clashing and jingling in fantastic dances. As I entered, the vaporous atmosphere was palpitating ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel

... other instances with such lack of honor and probity that he became an object of the deepest popular contempt and execration. His name was derided in the popular ballads, and he came to be looked upon as the scapegoat of the avarice and licentiousness of the church in that irreligious mediaeval age. Among the legends concerning him is one relating to Henry, the son of his ally, Otho of Saxony, who died in 912. Henry had long quarrelled with the bishop, and the fabulous story goes that, to get rid of his high-spirited enemy, the cunning churchman sent him a gold chain, so ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris

... had some opportunities of studying mediaeval art and manners in the library and private museum at Endelstow House, and I thought I should like to try my hand upon a fiction. I know the time for these tales is past; but I was interested in it, very ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy

... section to another, from hall to hall, chamber to chamber, lingering with busy thoughts amid the faded glory, the very atmosphere teems with historical reminiscences of that most romantic period, the mediaeval days, when the Moors held regal court in Andalusia. A lurking sympathy steals over us for that exiled people who could create and give life to such ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou

... a very early date, for she began her existence just after the year one thousand when men, finding out surely that the end of the world was not come, took as it were a new lease of life. The thing she does boast is that her character as a mediaeval town has been almost perfectly preserved up ...
— Great Artists, Vol 1. - Raphael, Rubens, Murillo, and Durer • Jennie Ellis Keysor

... year 1860, when the question of abolition was shaking the Bear from head to tail, that this unique movement began. By some obscure trait of national heritage, there sprang up, almost at the same hour, through the mediaeval gloom that still enveloped Peter's Empire, a thousand points of unwonted light. They were to be found burning at once in the twilight of isolated manors and the midnight of the serf's hut: in the city palace, and its neighboring tenement. Yet they sprang up among one class only—the young ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter

... and Sunshine. Small mediaeval Italian Castle on the shores of the Mediterranean to be Let furnished for the month of April. Necessary servants remain. Z, Box 1000, ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim

... the ravages of Democracy have been less felt here than abroad, because there is a good deal of the mediaeval building left standing over here, because things have never been carried to that excess which invariably brings a reaction with it—this reaction has not set in in this country, and no strong desire for the necessity of it, no craving for the counterbalancing ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche

... lapis-lazuli—that belongs alone to the basements of Italian mountains. Higher, the roseate whiteness of ridged snow on Alps or Apennines. Highest, the blue of the sky, ascending from pale turquoise to transparent sapphire filled with light. A mediaeval mystic might have likened this chord to the spiritual world. For the lowest region is that of natural life, of plant and bird and beast, and unregenerate man; it is the place of faun and nymph and satyr, the plain where wars are fought and cities built, and work is done. Thence we climb ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds

... of enchanted forest cut from an old black-letter legend, in which one half expected to meet mediaeval knights on foaming steeds—every-day folk ride jogging horses—threading their way through the mysterious forest aisles in search of those romantic adventures which were necessary to give knights of ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett

... that mediaeval building, half monastic, half military, exposed even then to the searching winds many bare and roofless chambers; broken vaults filled with driven sands; more than one spiral stair with hanging steps leading into space. But the massive square keep had been substantially restored. ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle

... unhistorical than to suggest that the father and source of all Western Puritan theology "neglected dogma," and was more of a moralist than a divine? It is not even true that he "swept away at once the sacramental machinery" of mediaeval and Lutheran teaching; Calvin writes of the Eucharist in terms which would astonish some of his later followers. But what is the reason why Mr. Pattison attributes to the historical Calvin so much that does not belong to him, and, in spite of so much that repels, is yet induced ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church

... better class of young gentlemen in England are seized with a mediaeval mania, to which Ruskin has contributed much. The chief reason for regretting it is that taste is made to supersede benevolence. The money that would save thousands from perishing or suffering must be applied to raise the Gothic ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... Quoted by I. Cooper Oakley in Traces of a Hidden Tradition in Masonry and Mediaeval Mysticism, a very interesting work on the sects which connect the early centuries ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal

... palm rising from among them, they made a truly African picture. On the brown ridge above the village were fourteen huge windmills, nearly all in motion. I found a road leading, along the brink of the overhanging cliffs, toward the castle of Belver, whose brown mediaeval turrets rose against a gathering thunder-cloud. This fortress, built as a palace for the kings of Majorca immediately after the expulsion of the Moors, is now a prison. It has a superb situation, on the summit of a conical hill, covered ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various

... of our race which was most living and progressive, was baptized into a death; and endeavoured, by suffering in the flesh, to cease from sin. Of this endeavour, the animating labours and afflictions of early Christianity, the touching asceticism of mediaeval Christianity, are the great historical manifestations. Literary monuments of it, each, in its own way, incomparable, remain in the Epistles of St. Paul, in St. Augustine's Confessions, and in the two original and simplest books of ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold

... was very capable of writing a ballad, I admit; also that, through Blind Harry's Wallace, he may have known all about "sowies," and "portculize," and springwalls, or springald's, or springalls, mediaeval balistas for throwing heavy stones and darts. But Hogg did not know or guess what a springwall was. In his stanza xiii. (in the MS. given to ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang

... the sufficient defence of Protestantism. It was the cry of the soul to know God, and not merely to assent to what the Church taught concerning him; it was the longing to know Christ, and not to repeat by rote the creeds of the first centuries, and the definitions of mediaeval doctors in regard to him. In a subsequent chapter we shall consider the truth and error in the Protestant principle of justification by faith. Our purpose here is to show that the truth in Orthodoxy is identical with ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke

... than his grasp of the singular entirety of mediaeval civilization, is Mr. Adams's power of merging himself in a long dead time, of thinking and feeling with the men and women thereof, and so breathing on the dead bones of antiquity that again they clothe themselves with flesh and vesture, call back their severed ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams

... her desirable qualities and attractive features, Bournemouth is not to everyone's taste, particularly those whose holidays are incomplete without mediaeval ruins on their doorsteps. The town, however, is somewhat fortunate even in this respect, since, although she has no antiquities of her own, she is placed close to Wimborne and Poole on the one hand, and to Christchurch, with its ancient Priory, on the other. Poole itself is not an ideal ...
— Bournemouth, Poole & Christchurch • Sidney Heath

... it, Carrick. Certainly. Zulka is a Krovitzer. Has a mediaeval castle at Schallberg. Capital, I think it is. Saunderson the newspaper fellow let fall a hint that there was going to be a big fight over there. That was after Zulka went abroad so suddenly. They're going to try and restore the ancient ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton

... miniature in a medallion. I wore it over my heart, a practice much affected by men; but one day, while idly rummaging about a shop filled with curiosities, I found an iron "discipline whip" such as was used by the mediaeval flagellants. At the end of this whip was a metal plate bristling with sharp iron points; I had the medallion riveted to this plate and then returned it to its place over my heart. The sharp points pierced my bosom with every movement and caused ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset

... silent road he still bewailed, the fate that had called him to such an uneventful life as a pedagogue's. What a prosaic existence he led, so stagnant, so colourless! Secure, methodical, year in year out, what call was there for bravery? He thought enviously of those roving, mediaeval days, so near and so remote, of quests and spies and condottieri and many a risky blade-drawing business. And suddenly came a doubt, a strange doubt, springing out of some chance thought of tortures, and destructive altogether of the position he ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells

... from shore to shore. Our two vehicles being thus placed on the other side, we resumed our drive,—first glancing, however, at the old woman's antique cottage, with its stone floor, and the circular settle round the kitchen fireplace, which was quite in the mediaeval English style. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various

... their snowy summits preach sermons on purity to Quitonian society, but in vain; and the great thoughts of God written all over the Andes are unable to lift this proud capital out of the mud and mire of mediaeval ignorance and superstition. The established religion is the narrowest and most intolerant form of Romanism. Mountains usually have a more elevating, religious influence than monotonous plains. The Olympian mythology of the Greek was far superior ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton

... very sounds of which these several languages are composed are so different that the speakers of some are unable to distinguish with the ear certain sounds in others, still less able to reproduce them, the search for one common parent language is more difficult than was supposed by mediaeval ignorance. ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery

... to arms by a nation, when right cannot otherwise be enforced, corresponds, or should correspond, precisely to the acts of the individual man which have been cited; for the old conception of an appeal to the Almighty, resembling in principle the mediaeval trial by battle, is at best but a partial view of the truth, seen from one side only. However the result may afterwards be interpreted as indicative of the justice of a cause,—an interpretation always questionable,—a state, ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan

... girls were destined for the cloister, and in that case they received their education in a convent. But there was one person who had absolutely no voice in the matter, and that was the unfortunate girl in question. The very idea of consulting her on any point of it, would have struck a mediaeval ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt

... there with admixtures of Christian chivalry. In the Edda and other Scandinavian sources, the tale appears in fragmentary and lyrical shape, but in a purer version, without additions from the new faith or from mediaeval chivalry. It is in the Sigurd-, Fafnir-, Brynhild-, Gudrun-, Oddrun-, Atli-, and Hamdir Lays of the Norse Scripture that the original nature of the older German songs, which must have preceded the epic, can best be guessed. Rhapsodic lays, referring to Siegfried, were, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various

... to St. Michael's Church, one of the three famous spires of Coventry, you behold a mediaeval edifice, in the basement of which is such a venerable and now deserted kitchen as I have above alluded to, and, on the same level, a cellar, with low stone pillars and intersecting arches, like the crypt of a cathedral. Passing up a well-worn staircase, the oaken ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... the architect who was "restoring'' it. After my purchases were made, he went with me to this great edifice, one of the finest in Europe; and there I found that, on each side of the high altar, the architect had taken out several brackets, or corbels, of the best mediaeval work, and substituted new ones designed by himself. One of these corbels thus taken out the government photographer had in his possession. It was very striking, representing the grotesque face of a monk in ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White

... and in what form, ought woman's work in the Church to be organized? What was the deaconess of St. Paul's epistles? What light on this subject do the primitive and the mediaeval Churches yield us? Can "sisterhoods" be established without weakening the sense of personal responsibility in those Christian women who are not thus wholly set apart to charitable and spiritual work? Can they be multiplied without danger of introducing ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft

... preference in epic poetry, Johnson was its persistent foe, and regarded it as little short of immoral. But for that matter, Gray could endure no blank verse outside of Milton. This is curious, that rhyme, a mediaeval invention, should have been associated in the last century with the classical school of poetry; while blank verse, the nearest English equivalent of the language of Attic tragedy, was a shibboleth of romanticizing poets, like Thomson and Akenside. ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... or rules of professional etiquette, which its members can only infringe on pain of ostracism, or, at least, of loss of professional reputation. The same is the case with trades, and is specially exemplified in the instance of trades-unions, or, their mediaeval prototypes, the guilds. A college or a school, again, has its own rules and traditions, which the tutor or undergraduate, the master or boy, can often only violate at his extreme peril. Almost every club, ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler

... the scope of this piece to give anything like a connected story, even of the slightest, of the course of events between the conquest of Duke William and the fully developed mediaeval period of the fourteenth century, which is the England that I have before my eyes as Mediaeval or Feudal. That period of the fourteenth century united the developments of the elements which had been stirring in Europe since the final ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris

... with horror from even the sins that they are willing to do, when they are put plainly and bluntly before them. As an old mediaeval preacher once said, 'There is nothing that is weaker than the devil stripped naked.' By which he meant exactly this—that we have to dress wrong in some fantastic costume or other, so as to hide its native ugliness, in order ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren

... sweeter, With birds that gossip in the tune, And windy bough-swing in the metre; Or else the zigzag fruit-tree arms Recall some dream of harp-prest bosoms, Round singing mouths, and chanted charms, And mediaeval orchard blossoms,— ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie

... favourite mediaeval legend depicted in one of the windows of the cathedral at Bourges, which exposes in a characteristic fashion this weakness of the Stoic's creed. The Evangelist St John, when at Ephesus, remarked in the ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith

... who were free, and, although dependent on them, had certain rights guaranteed by contract. The absolute monarchy found in nearly all nations, at the opening of modern times, was forced by its struggle with the mediaeval aristocracy to favor the emancipation of the serfs and of the lower classes. Even in Russia, Iwan III. (1462-1505) seems to have restored to the peasantry the right of migration, of which they had been deprived by the invasion of the Mongols, nor did they lose it again until ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher

... literature that is not orthodox will reach the printing press. It is so easy to make the excuse of lack of paper and the urgent need for manifestoes. Thus there may well come to be a repetition of the attitude of the mediaeval Church to the sagas and legends of the people, except that, in this case, it is the folk tales which will be preserved, and the more sensitive and civilized products banned. The only poet who seems to be much spoken of at present in Russia is one ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell

... money also. But in him the craving arose from a more domineering ambition. He wished to rule men, to be first every-where. He despised the simple provincial title to which he was born, and the hall, with all its sweet gray antiquity, was only a dull prison. He compared its mediaeval strength, its long narrow lattices, its low rambling rooms, its Saxon simplicity, with the grand mansions of modern date in which he visited. It must be remembered that it is only recently old houses and old furniture and early English have become fashionable. Antony's ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr

... and as definite after the other cities of this continent as an immortal among a crowd of stockbrokers. She has, indeed, the radiance and repose of an immortal; but she wears her immortality youthfully. When you get among the streets of Quebec, the mediaeval, precipitous, narrow, winding, and perplexed streets, you begin to realise her charm. She almost incurs the charge of quaintness (abhorrent quality!); but even quaintness becomes attractive in this country. You are in a foreign land, for the people ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke

... customs, with the embellishments of pure fancy, which grouped itself round the apocryphal statues of the seven kings in the Capitol, aptly compared by Arnold to the apocryphal portraits of the early kings of Scotland in Holyrood and those of the mediaeval founders of Oxford in the Bodleian. We must clear our minds altogether of these fictions; they are not even ancient: they came into existence at a time when the early history of Rome was viewed in the deceptive light of her later achievements; when, under the influence of altered ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith

... of the Graces in the centre of the main hall. The glory and beauty of ancient sculpture refresh and satisfy beyond expression a sense wholly wearied and well-nigh nauseated with contemplation of endless sanctities and agonies attempted by mediaeval art, while yet as handless as accident or barbarism has left the ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... the material and art is more common now than in the days of ancient Greece, who recorded its cures by simple inscription in laconic terms. Modern medicine labors under the disadvantage of presuming that the people are endowed with an intelligence that was unknown to ancient or mediaeval people, when, in fact, the people are as credulous and as subject to imposition as they were in the earlier centuries of the present era. With all its supposed superior intelligence, there is no fatter ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino

... the conditions of Byzantine Society all my life, and here comes a Scotch lawyer who makes the whole thing clear to me in a flash!" Many men could draw with more or less success Norman England, or mediaeval France, but to reconstruct a whole dead civilization in so plausible a way, with such dignity and such minuteness of detail, is, I should think, a most wonderful tour de force. His failing health showed itself before the end of the novel, but had the latter half equalled the first, and ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle

... be divided into three classes. There is the "old" farmer, there is the "new" farmer, and there is the "mossback." The old farmer represents the ancient regime. The new farmer is the modern business agriculturist. The mossback is a mediaeval survival. The old farmer was in his day a new farmer; he was "up with the times," as the times then were. The new farmer is merely the worthy son of a noble sire; he is the modern embodiment of the old farmer's progressiveness. The mossback is the man who tries to use the old methods under the ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield

... fowl, nor good red herring," the professor declared. "If Mr. Hodder were cornered he couldn't maintain that he, as a priest, has full power to forgive sins, and yet he won't assert that he hasn't. The mediaeval conception of the Church, before Luther's day, was consistent, at any rate, if you once grant the premises on ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... there existed more than a thousand commentaries on them. Since then, the number has been doubled; so great and universal is the reverence and esteem in which this book of Scripture is held. To conclude this very long note on the Psalms I quote the quaint words of a mediaeval poet. It shows how the saints of old found their Master in the ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley

... strange devices and inscriptions in long thin Arabic characters. Few rooms in the Kasbah were decorated in this manner, and it had instantly occurred to me that, concealed somewhere, was one of those secret ways which, whether in the Oriental palace, or the mediaeval European castle, are so suggestive ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux

... was the next Imperial race, boasted no city and no self-conscious superiority of laws or race. He subdued the nations only in the name of God, and to all who accepted God he nobly extended the vision of Paradise and a complete equality of earthly squalor. The motives of mediaeval and more recent conquests were the strangest of all. They were usually dynastic. They depended on the family claim of some family man to a title implying actual possession of another country and all its population. There was always one claimant contending against another claimant, ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson

... remains or memories of the past, which he cannot find in cities, and giving hope of Praetorian mound or knight's grave in every green slope and shade of its desolate places; dear, secondly, in its moorland liberty, which has for him just as high a charm as the fenced garden had for the mediaeval;... and dear to him, finally, in that perfect beauty, denied alike in cities and in men, for which every modern heart had begun at last to thirst, and Scott's, in its freshness and power, ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott

... country town; small, clean, with an air of sober preservation, reminding one of a well-kept, dignified, healthy old age. It wore its antiquity with a sort of pride, as if its quaint streets, intersecting one another in cruciform shape, still kept the impress of mediaeval feet, baron's or priest's, in the days when Kingcombe had sixteen churches and a castle to boot—as if the Roman walls which enclosed it lay solemnly conscious that, at night, ghosts of old Latin warriors glided over the smooth turf of those great earthen mounds where the town's-children played. ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)

... that Ulick had remarked that the jewels were not "the ropes of pearls we are accustomed to, but strange, mediaeval jewels, long, heavy earrings and girdles and broad bracelets." Owen had given her these. She remembered how she had put them on, just as Ulick said, with the joy of a child and the musical glee of a bird. "She ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore

... Europe, carried their causes, in those days when the Pope was really a grand authority, and ruled Christendom. Having now little business as regards monarchs and the international quarrels of kingdoms, it has been converted into a tribunal for private suits. It still shrouds itself in its mediaeval secresy, which, if it robs its decisions of public confidence, at least screens the ignorance of its judges from public contempt. There are, besides, the tribunals of the Signatura and of Cassation, in which partiality examines, incompetence pronounces judgment, ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie

... this is known for a church with a most elegant spire rising from a tower, but of this we can only have a glimpse. And, on the road to Bergues, I had noted that strange, German-named little town—Cassel—perched on an umbrageous hill, which has its quaint mediaeval town-hall. But I may not pause to study it. The hours are shrinking; but little margin is left. By midnight I am back in Calais once more, listening to its old wheezy chimes. It seems like an old friend, to which I have returned after a long, ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald

... sportive thing. He disliked functions; speech-making was to him a matter for prayer and fasting. The Indian's address was therefore more or less gratuitous, and he hastened to remark: "Thank you, Shangi; that's very good, and you've put it poetically. You've turned a shooting-excursion into a mediaeval romance. But we'll get down to business now, if you please, and make the romance a fact, beautiful enough to send to the 'Times' or the New York 'Call'. Let's see, how would they put it in the Call?—'Extraordinary Discovery —Herd of buffaloes ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... themselves the aid which the Church officials had it in their power to render, for not only could bishops bring to the support of their suzerain the physical succour of armies, but they could also launch against his enemies that terrible bolt of mediaeval times, excommunication, which, "rendered formidable by ignorance, struck terror into the boldest and most resolute hearts" (p. 174). In these latter gifts we see the origin of the temporalities and titles attached ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant

... particularly consider. [Footnote: Matrimony and Holy Orders are discussed in different connexions elsewhere in this book. The sacrament of Unction, by which is meant the Anointing of the Sick with oil in the name of the Lord with a view to their recovery (to be distinguished from the mediaeval and modern Roman use of "Extreme Unction" as a preparation for death), has been revived sporadically within the Church of England in recent times, but is not usually for the plain man of more ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson

... destroyed, appealing, as it does to the strongest of human instincts, is the theme of many popular fictions from India to Iceland. With a malignant mother-in-law in place of the two sisters, it is the basis of a mediaeval European romance entitled "The Knight of the Swan," and of a similar tale which occurs in "Dolopathus," the oldest version of the "Seven Wise Masters," written in Latin prose about the year 1180: A king while hunting loses his way in a forest and coming to a fountain perceives a beautiful ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton

... below the wide light blue eyes two ethereal shadows brushed themselves. Under the intentness of their gaze she made as if she would pass out without speaking; and the tender curves of her limbs, as she wavered, could not have been matched out of mediaeval stained glass. But her courage, or her conviction, came back to her at the door, and she raised her hand and ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)

... you that whatever is good or great in Egypt, and Syria, and India, is just good or great for the same reasons as the buildings on our side of the Bosphorus. We Europeans, then, have had three great religions: the Greek, which was the worship of the God of Wisdom and Power; the Mediaeval, which was the Worship of the God of Judgment and Consolation; the Renaissance, which was the worship of the God of Pride and Beauty; these three we have had—they are past,—and now, at last, we English have got a fourth religion, and a God of our own, about which ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... a wholly unreformed Oxford to which Froude came. If it "breathed the last enchantments of the Middle Age," it was mediaeval in its system too, and the most active spirits of the place, the leaders of the Oxford Movement, were frank reactionaries, who hated the very name of reform. Even a reduction in the monstrous number of Irish Bishoprics pertaining to ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul

... had been found. Efforts to conquer these diseases were tardy because men were taught that some unseen power was punishing men and governments for their sins. The difference between the old and the new way is shown powerfully by a painting in the Liverpool Gallery entitled "The Plague." A mediaeval village is strewn with the dead and dying. Bloated, spotted faces look into the eyes of ghouls as laces and jewelry are torn from bodies not yet cold. In the foreground a muscular giant, paragon of conscious virtue, clad like John the Baptist and Bible in hand, finds his way among ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen

... fed without fear of man upon its acorns. Troubadours had sung beneath it to lords and ladies seated round, or walking on the grass and commenting the minstrel's tales of love by exchange of amorous glances. Mediaeval sculptors had taken its leaves, and wisely trusting to nature, had adorned churches with those leaves ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade

... purpose; he has had pupils of great merit, and he must be considered the master of the whole generation of modern wood-engravers, just as Cheret is the undisputed master of the poster. Lepere's ruling quality is strength. He seems to have rediscovered the mediaeval limners' secrets of cutting the wood, giving the necessary richness to the ink, creating a whole scale of half-tones, and specially of adapting the design to typographic printing, and making of it, so ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair

... little suppers—But no matter—my supper time is past—"Too late, too late, you cannot enter here," ought to be the warning inscribed over every Club or other supper-room, addressed chiefly to those who are of the Middle Ages, as is the mediaeval ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, October 4, 1890 • Various

... not been for the fact that Dr. Johnson mentions Morohof as the author to whom he was specially indebted.—more, I think, than to any other. It is a grand old encyclopaedic summary of all the author knew about pretty nearly everything, full of curious interest, but so strangely mediaeval, so utterly antiquated in most departments of knowledge, that it is hard to believe the volume came from the press at a time when persons whom I well remember were living. Is it possible that the books which have been for me what ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... of his generation, those derived from the authority of the Scriptures and of divines. In one of his principal points all Protestants and philosophers will confess him to be right, his reference of the matter to Scripture and reason, and repudiation of the mediaeval canon law. It is not here, nevertheless, that Milton is most at home. The strength of his position is his lofty idealism, his magnificent conception of the institution he discusses, and his disdain for whatever degrades it to conventionality or mere expediency. "His ideal of true and perfect ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett

... in the Russian Standard and Zemshchina with the anti-Semitic literature of the West, such as Drumont's books, or similar German works,—and it becomes apparent that in the latter the entire anti-Semitic arsenal of our nationalists is to be found ready-made. It is from thence that mediaeval legends of ritual murders and law projects concerning the slaughter of cattle, and such-like inventions, ...
— The Shield • Various

... would have been, had it seen Johnson and Boswell and Baretti all fused into one man. The incongruity is heightened by familiarity with Borrow's tall, blonde, Scandinavian figure, and the reader is reminded of those roving Northmen of the days of simple mediaeval devotion, who were wont to signalise their conversion from heathen darkness by a Mediterranean venture, combining the characters of a piratical cruise and ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow

... these very positive protagonists of Latin Christianity, let him read the Anglican chapters in A Spiritual AEneid. Father Knox was once a member of this party and something of a disciple of Dr. Gore, who, however, always regretted his "mediaeval" theology. ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie

... give attention to certain phases of Greek and of Oriental thought which were destined to play a most important part in the development of the Western mind—a more important part, indeed, in the early mediaeval period than that played by those important inductions of science which have chiefly claimed our attention in recent chapters. The subject in question is the old familiar one of false inductions or pseudoscience. In dealing with the early development ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... him in his letter to Mr. Watt to talk of the old monks, and the spots they selected for their establishments. He goes on to write lovingly of what was good in some of the old fathers of the mediaeval Church, despite the strong feeling of many to the contrary; indicating thus early the working of that catholic spirit which was constantly expanding in later years, which could separate the good in any man from all its evil surroundings, and think of it thankfully and admiringly. ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie

... and nourishes a public spirit and a universal acquaintance with matters of public interest such as has probably never before been seen in any great country. Public spirit of equal or greater intensity may have been witnessed in small and highly educated communities, such as ancient Athens or mediaeval Florence, but in the United States it is diffused over an area equal to the whole of Europe. Among the leading countries of the world England is the one which comes nearest to the United States in the general diffusion of enlightened public ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske

... whatever battle is fought, must be fought by the men themselves. The present dodge of the Manchester school is to cry out against us, as Greg did. 'These Christian Socialists are a set of mediaeval parsons, who want to hinder the independence and self-help of the men, and bring them back to absolute feudal maxims; and then, with the most absurd inconsistency, when we get up a corporation workshop, ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al

... that lofty energy which communicates itself to every channel that carries inspiration to life and to art. Religion is the influence that redeems the mere shallow, surface presentation,—the petty trick to capture popularity, and holds art true to its real purpose. The glory of the mediaeval art of Italy owed its greatness to religion. Cimabue and Giotto were directly inspired by that spring of a diviner life given to Italy and later to the world of that "sweet saint," Francis of Assisi. In an age of ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting

... Ages to the modern imagination. No other Italian city could have been more interesting to an observer fond of reconstructing obsolete manners. This was a taste of Bernard Longueville's, who had a relish for serious literature, and at one time had made several lively excursions into mediaeval history. His friends thought him very clever, and at the same time had an easy feeling about him which was a tribute to his freedom from pedantry. He was clever indeed, and an excellent companion; but the real measure ...
— Confidence • Henry James

... can be imagined. All the old dresses which can be rummaged out of the studios or theatres, or pieced together from masking wardrobes, are now in requisition. Indians and Chinese, ancient warriors and mediaeval heroes, militia-men and Punches, generals in top-boots and pigtails, doctors in gigantic wigs and small-clothes, Falstaffs and justices "with fair round belly with good capon lined," magnificent foolscaps, wooden swords with terrible inscriptions, gigantic chapeaus ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various

... book is like that of the Russian mujik on the Neva. I simply try to aid in letting the light of historical truth into that decaying mass of outworn thought which attaches the modern world to mediaeval conceptions of Christianity, and which still lingers among us—a most serious barrier to religion and morals, and a menace to the whole ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... in front of a stone apartment house; and Jill, getting out, passed under an awning through a sort of mediaeval courtyard, gay with potted shrubs, to an inner door. She was impressed. The very atmosphere was redolent of riches, and she wondered how in the world Uncle Chris had managed to acquire wealth on this scale in the extremely short ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse

... Amadis . . . du Guesclin—mediaeval heroes. Amadis de Gaul was the title hero of a 14th century romantic novel, probably first written in Spanish, which was popular throughout Europe. Bertrand du Guesclin was a historical figure, a fourteenth century French soldier ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope

... record of another Christmas roast that now and then was served at the tables of the rich in Provence in mediaeval times. This was a huge cock, stuffed with chicken-livers and sausage-meat and garnished with twelve roasted partridges, thirty eggs, and thirty truffles: the whole making an alimentary allegory in which the cock represented the year, the partridges ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier

... Librarian to the Bishopsgate Institute, for their skilful guidance in the literature of the subject; Mr. F. C. Eeles, Secretary to the Alcuin Club, for the Elizabethan Inventory and account of the Mediaeval Bells; and Messrs. Wm. Hill and Son, the famous builders, for particulars of ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Priory Church of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield • George Worley

... neck to "the family"; but he did know how to stop a dog fight. From the first moment of his intervention calm began to steal over the scene. He had the same effect on the almost inextricably entwined belligerents as, in mediaeval legend, the Holy Grail, sliding down the sunbeam, used to have on battling knights. He did not look like a dove of peace, but the most captious could not have denied that he brought home the goods. There was a magic in his soothing hands, a spell in his voice: and in a shorter time than one ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse

... he said reluctantly. "I will go away, but not to worry about you—that is impossible. You seem to be surrounded by all the mediaeval terrors which confronted the emancipation of princesses in our fairy books. Only a short time ago Duncombe implored me to follow his example, and leave you and Paris alone. The detective whom I brought with me has been shadowed ...
— A Maker of History • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... they were all killed, that would be no satisfaction for the Burgundian nobles who might fall in the war. If the Duke got possession of all Switzerland without a struggle, his income would not be 5,000 ducats the greater.' The mediaeval features in the character of Charles, his chivalrous aspirations and ideals, had long become unintelligible to the Italians. The diplomatists of the South. when they saw him strike his officers and yet keep them in his service, when he maltreated his troops to punish them for ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt

... one gleam of patriotism to glorify the drudgery; there is positively no ideal, even dim-descried. The officers are a collection of hideously selfish, brutal, drunken, licentious beasts; their mental horizon is almost inconceivably narrow, far narrower than that of mediaeval monks in a monastery. The soldiers are in worse plight than prisoners, being absolutely at the mercy of the alcoholic caprices of their superiors. A favourite device of the officer is to jam the trumpet against the trumpeter's mouth, when he ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps

... back to the beginning of the Hanoverian Succession; and thence back to the quarrel between the King and the lawyers which had issue at Naseby; and thence again to the angry exit of Henry VIII. from the mediaeval council of Europe. It is easy to exaggerate the part played in the matter by that great and human, though very pagan person, Martin Luther. Henry VIII. was sincere in his hatred for the heresies of the German ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton

... set in aristocratic circles in the fifteenth century. For that reason there is a great deal of mediaeval English. However, most of the unusual words are explained as they occur, so there is no problem with comprehension. The last chapter is headed "Historical Appendix", and contains potted lives of most of the people whom ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt

... Greek statue lives to this day, and has the highest use of all, the use of true beauty. The Greek and Roman philosophers have the value of furnishing the mind with material to think from. Egyptian and Assyrian, mediaeval and eighteenth-century culture, miscalled, are all alike mere ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies

... publication of civil law is an era in civilization. Just as the chancellorship and primacy of England were often in the hands of one person and that an ecclesiastic, so in Rome the pontifices had at first the making of almost all law. What a canonist was to Mediaeval Europe, a pontifex was to senatorial Rome. In the time of which we are now speaking (133-63 B.C.), the secular law had fully asserted its supremacy on its own ground, and it was the dignity and ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell

... battlemented mediaeval castle. Gallant men in mail ride over the drawbridge, and kiss their gauntleted fingers to fair ladies, who wave their lily hands in return. I see fight and fray and tournament. I hear roaring heralds bawling the charms of delicate ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte

... and two occurrences of "Paestum" in the main text, all "ae" ligatures have been maintained: "aedile" (and "aedile"), "archaeologist" (and "archaeologist"), "aesthetic", "Cannae", "Mediaeval" (in a quotation, otherwise "medieval"), ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan

... of Louis le Grand, imitated its stately step. In the days of chivalry the most solemn oath was taken on the peacock's body, roasted whole and adorned with its gay feathers, as Shallow swore "by cock and pie." I saw the fairest of all the fair dames at a grand mediaeval banquet proudly bearing the bird to the table. The woman who hesitates is lost. I bought the pair, and ordered ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn

... Roland might have summoned his uncle Charlemagne by blowing his magic horn, but this his valour prevented him from doing till too late. He was fatally wounded, and the 'Song of Roland,' telling of his worth and prowess, is one of the best of the mediaeval romances. Olivier was also a distinguished paladin, and the names of the two are immortalized in the proverb 'A Rowland for an Oliver.' Fontarabia is on the coast of Spain, about thirty miles from Roncesvalles. See ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott

... Troilus and Creseide, a mediaeval tale, already attempted by Boccaccio in his Filostrate, but borrowed by Chaucer, according to his own account, from Lollius, a mysterious name without an owner. The story is similar to that dramatized by Shakspeare in his tragedy ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee

... needed to establish this general view of the situation. It is well known how the poetic career of Chaucer, the earliest of great English poets, was begun under French masters. The greatest poem of mediaeval France, the Roman de la Rose, was turned into English by his youthful pen, and the chief French poet of the day, Eustace Deschamps, held out to him the hand of fellowship in the enthusiastic balade, in which he apostrophised "le grand translateur, ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee

... doubly interesting because it is found not only in the mediaeval collection last mentioned, but also in Greek literature, being told of Rampsinitus, King of Egypt, by Herodotus (II. 121), and by Pausanias of the two architects Agamedes and Trophonius who robbed the treasury of Hyrieus.[29] There are four versions in Italian: two from Sicily (Pitre, Nos. ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane

... once, to speak English, and said that he would prefer to speak that language, for the sake of practice. His pronunciation, although queer, was fairly intelligible, and I had little difficulty in understanding him; but his talk had a strange, mediaeval flavour, due, apparently, to the use of obsolete idioms and words. In the course of half an hour, I became satisfied that he was talking the English of the fifteenth century—the English of Shakespeare, Beaumont, ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan

... home. He said that England was a hundred, five hundred, years behind in such matters; and I could not deny that, even when cowering over the quart pot to warm the hands and face, one was aware of a gelid mediaeval back behind one. To be warm all round in an English house is a thing impossible, at least to the traveller, who finds the natives living in what seems to him a whorl of draughts. In entering his own room he is apt to find the window has ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells

... Favelle was the mediaeval name for a chestnut horse, as Bayard for a bay, and Lyard for a grey. From this proverb has been corrupted our modern phrase "to curry favour." The word is sometimes ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt

... priest-ridden country in which strangers are not welcome. The hardships which it is necessary to face deter all but the most adventurous even of the Italians, familiar with the language and manners of the people. Architects seldom visit this neighborhood, and little is known of its rich treasure of mediaeval buildings, except through the few published works treating of it. Signor Boni expressed himself as surprised at the great amount of beautiful work scattered through this region, of which he previously had no knowledge. The opinion of Fergusson has already been quoted ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Volume 01, No. 04, April 1895 - Byzantine-Romanesque Windows in Southern Italy • Various

... strikingly displayed. Japan made use of the lessons which it had well learned in its forty years of intercourse with Europe. China fought in the obsolete fashion of a past age. As a result, the cumbersome mediaeval giant went down before the alert modern dwarf, and the people of Eastern Asia were taught a new and astounding lesson in the ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... told to go to the beach, and he would see it. He did so, leaving his sea-chest behind him, and there, about two hundred paces from the land, and built upon a solitary mountain of rock, measuring half a mile or so round the base, he perceived a vast mediaeval pile of fortified buildings, with turrets towering three hundred feet into the air, and edged with fire by the setting sun. He gazed on it with perplexity. Could it be that this enormous island fortress belonged to him, and, if so, how on earth did one get to it? For some little time he ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard

... Above stairs, a mediaeval maze of corridors long and short, complicated by many unexpected steps and staircases and turns and enigmatic doors, ran every-which-way and as a rule landed one in the wrong room, linking together, in all, some two-score bed-chambers. There were ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance

... licking her spoon as in duty bound before she plunged it in the jelly—a piece of etiquette in which young ladies at that date were carefully instructed. The idea of setting a separate spoon to help a dish had not dawned upon the mediaeval mind. ...
— The White Lady of Hazelwood - A Tale of the Fourteenth Century • Emily Sarah Holt

... count was fully charged. Maggie, that strange girl found in the heart of London's darkness, alone, without friends or parents, was a witch, a devilish, potion-dealing witch, who might, at any time, fly through the night-sky on a broom-stick as surely as any mediaeval old hag. These visions might be exaggerated for many human beings, not so for Grace. Having no imagination she was soaked in superstition. She clung to a few simple pictures, and was exposed to every terror that ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole

... well-policed city, through which one may walk from end to end without encountering adventure; the other, a city as full of sinister intrigue, of whisperings and conspiracies, of battle, murder, and sudden death in dark byways, as any town of mediaeval Italy. Given certain conditions, anything may happen in New York. And Smith realized that these conditions now prevailed in his own case. He had come into conflict with New York's underworld. Circumstances had placed ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse

... trotted out part of his collection of mediaeval musical instruments, and some professionals are going to play them. Waldemar is at our table. Come and ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... temples, which give the streets of its suburbs a character of antiquity unexampled elsewhere, except in Rome itself. But it contains, in the next place, what Rome does not contain—perfect examples of the great twelfth-century Lombardic architecture, which was the root of all the mediaeval art of Italy, without which no Giottos, no Angelicos, no Raphaels would have been possible: it contains that architecture, not in rude forms, but in the most perfect and loveliest types it ever attained—contains those, not in ruins, nor in altered and hardly decipherable fragments, ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin

... groans under the weight of a mediaeval religion which has little to do with spiritual life. In Spain and Portugal, perhaps the two most deluded of European lands, I have seen great darkness, but even there the priest is often good, and at least puts ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray

... been the effect of such teaching on humanity? It is impossible to doubt that it has led to results deplorably, indescribably wicked. Whence, for instance, arose the horrors of the mediaeval inquisition, the insensate tortures inflicted upon men like Huss and Bruno solely for theological errors, if not from belief in this demon-deity whom the Church worshipped? If their practices were but a shadow of the horrors ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan

... the most valuable reference works of recent publication is The Epitome of Ancient, Mediaeval, and Modern History. By Carl Ploetz. Translated from the German, with extensive additions, by William H. Tillinghast, of the Harvard University library. One volume. pp. 618. Houghton, Mifflin, ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 5, May, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various

... upon shaving-glasses; and gleaming brass cans; upon all the jolly trappings of the day; the bright, inquisitive, armoured, resplendent, summer's day, which has long since vanquished chaos; which has dried the melancholy mediaeval mists; drained the swamp and stood glass and stone upon it; and equipped our brains and bodies with such an armoury of weapons that merely to see the flash and thrust of limbs engaged in the conduct of daily life is better than ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf

... for it from the rough-handed folks of that place. Then he came back to Squaw Gulch, so named from that day, and discovered the Bully Boy. Jim humbly regarded this piece of luck as interposed for his reward, and I for one believed him. If it had been in mediaeval times you would have had a legend or a ballad. Bret Harte would have given you a tale. You see in me a mere recorder, for I know what is best for you; you shall blow out this ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin

... argued, but was the victim of some harmless delusion that had gradually grown upon him as a result of his solitary mode of life; and from the books he used, I judged that it had something to do with mediaeval magic, or some system of ancient Hebrew mysticism. The words he asked me to pronounce for him were probably 'Words of Power,' which, when uttered with the vehemence of a strong will behind them, were supposed to produce physical results, or set ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood

... primitive feelings of fear before the great unknown, they tower above the human form with a colossal imperturbability which withers our importance and confuses our standards of value. Victor Hugo never quite freed himself from the mediaeval dread of the mountains or the mediaeval speculation on their meaning. His letters to his wife from the Alps and Pyrenees record his impressions with a painstaking and detailed accuracy which does not forget the black-and-yellow spider performing somersaults ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby

... the Jewish and mediaeval traditions and theories which so easily beset us, we ask, What is the real nature of the Old Testament as it is revealed in this new and clearer light? The first conclusion is that it is a library containing a large and complex literature, recording the varied experiences, political, ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent

... substituted by a placard nailed to the cross with the letters I. N. R. I. inscribed upon it, which are the initials of the Latin words conveying the same meaning. But if we would learn how the figure of a man came to be suspended upon this form of the cross, we must refer to Mediaeval History, which teaches that in the year 680, under the Pontificate of Agathon, and during the reign of Constantine Pogonat, at the sixth council of the church, and third at Constantinople, it was ordered in Canon 82 that "Instead of a lamb, the figure of a man nailed ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill

... rejoicing such as the people, humiliated and impoverished as it had habitually been by its internal and external troubles, had not known for very many years. At last Serbia and Montenegro had joined hands. At last Old Serbia was restored to the free kingdom. At last Skoplje, the mediaeval capital of Tsar Stephen Du[)s]an, was again in Serbian territory. At last one of the most important portions of unredeemed Serbia had been reclaimed. Amongst the Serbs and Croats of Bosnia, Hercegovina, Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, and southern Hungary the effect of the Serbian victories was electrifying. ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth

... by language which certainly, as Tom had said, came under the law against profane cursing and swearing. He described the next world in language which seemed a strange jumble of Virgil's Aeneid, the Koran, the dreams of those rabbis who crucified our Lord, and of those mediaeval inquisitors who tried to convert sinners (and on their own ground, neither illogically nor over-harshly) by making this world for a few hours as like as possible to what, so they held, God was going to make the world to ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley

... several mouths, and from many seaports Egypt carried on its trade with the outside world. To-day only Rosetta and Damietta remain to give their names to the two branches by which alone the Nile now seeks the sea. These interesting seaports, mediaeval and richly picturesque, are no longer the prosperous cities they once were, for railways have diverted traffic from the Nile, and nearly all the seaborne trade of Egypt is now carried from Alexandria or Port Said, the northern entrance ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly

... are households in which two members suggest the single canvas of a mediaeval painter, depicting scenes that represent a higher and a lower world: above may be peaks, clouds, sublimity, the Transfiguration; underneath, the pursuits and passions of local worldly life—some story of ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen

... in the mediaeval days there were knights who rode over the world, looking for adventure. They fought with giants and dragons, and do you know that each one had his lady, whom ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... which consisted only of a series of brief treatises, were collected (16 vols., 1851-60) by his most important adherent, Franz Hoffman[1] (at his death in 1881 professor in Wuerzburg). Baader may be characterized as a mediaeval thinker who has worked through the critical philosophy, and who, a believing, yet liberal Catholic, endeavors to solve with the instruments of modern speculation the old Scholastic problem of the reconciliation of ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg

... missal, the latter with all the dignity of a Roman inscription. One is asked to compare these ages so delightfully conceived, with a patent medicine vendor's advertisement or a Lancashire factory town, quite ignoring the iniquity of mediaeval law or the slums and hunger and cruelty of ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells

... belong to the Romantic School, chief of whose exponents in Spain were Zorilla and Espronceda. The choice of mediaeval times as the scene of his stories, their style and treatment, as well as the personal note and the freedom of his verse, all stamp him as ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer

... continuous growth. The process of deciphering these bundles of arrows by means of Zend and Sanskrit has been very much like deciphering an Italian inscription without a knowledge of Italian, simply by means of classical and mediaeval Latin. It would have been impossible, even with the quick perception and patient combination of a Grotefend, to read more than the proper names and a few titles on the walls of the Persian palaces, without the aid of Zend and Sanskrit; and it seems almost providential, as Lassen remarked, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller

... not denuded of their historical identity by the druggists who reduced their time-honored remains to a powder. Their dust was made merchandise, but their characters were respected. Moreover, there was an object and a motive, even if mistaken ones, on the part of the mediaeval charlatans. But what ointment, what soothing syrup, what panacea has been the result of all this pulverizing of Semiramis and Sardanapalus, Mucius Scaevola and Junius Brutus? Are all the characters graven so deeply ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... alterations is still used in the Church of England, soon replaced the Missal and Breviary from which its contents are mainly drawn. The name "Common Prayer," which was given to the new Liturgy, marked its real import. The theory of worship which prevailed through Mediaeval Christendom, the belief that the worshipper assisted only at rites wrought for him by priestly hands, at a sacrifice wrought through priestly intervention, at the offering of prayer and praise by priestly lips, was now set at naught. "The laity," it ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green

... in their incantations was the sea or horned poppy, known in mediaeval times as Ficus infernolis; hence it is further noticed by Ben Jonson in ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer

... broken angular back bends into sharper angles and corners, his pointed elbows dig beds for themselves in the oak table, his skinny fingers bury themselves in his cheeks, his piggish grey eyes get redder over manuscripts, Latin, Greek, or mediaeval. He falls into raptures, he smacks his lips, he licks his chops like a cat over a dainty dish, and then he throws himself upon that dirty litter, with his knees up to his chin, and he thinks he has had a delightful day! Oh, Providence of God, is a man's duty best done, are his responsibilities ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian

... occurrence of the supra-condyloid foramen in the human humerus; anthropomorphous apes more bipedal than quadrupedal; on the capacity of Parisian skulls at different periods; comparison of modern and mediaeval skulls; on tails of quadrupeds; on the influence of natural selection; on hybridity in man; on human remains from Les Eyzies; on the cause of the difference between ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin



Words linked to "Mediaeval" :   Middle Ages, nonmodern



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