"Middle Ages" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... witches, knights and ladies and giants entice him, and unless, like Theseus of old, he follows closely his guiding clue, he will find that he reaches no goal, attains to no clear vision, achieves no quest. He will remain spell-bound, captivated by the Middle Ages— ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... The Cithara of the Middle Ages was a poor thing enough, in the form of a large P, with ten strings in the oval part; but it had movable pegs, and could be easily tuned. It was, therefore, a step toward the piano of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... very old variation of Emma, and sometimes spelt Emmot; Sens is a corruption of Sancha, naturalised among us in the thirteenth century; and Collet or Colette, the diminutive of Nichola, a common and favourite name in the Middle Ages. ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... see no reason for concluding that this was the only Ophir. Had it been a single large emporium on the Red Sea, which collected the produce of Arabia and the exports of India and of West Africa, the traditional site could hardly have escaped the notice of the inquiring Arabian geographers of our Middle Ages. The ruins of a port would have been found, and we should not be compelled theoretically to ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... pleasure in his rather delicate face, and that this glow lent an expression of ecstasy to his dark-gray eyes—the eyes of a mystic and a dreamer. "I wonder how he ever became a physician," she thought. "He is more like a priest—like a priest of the Middle Ages." But aloud she only said: "You have done them a world of good. Fanny has got some of her colour back already, and that means an appetite ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... down) by the doctors. Whether the irritation of mind I had to endure pending the discussions of a preposterous clerical body called a Convocation, and whether the weakened hopefulness of mankind which such a dash of the middle ages in the colour and pattern of 1866 engenders, may have anything to do with it, I ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... they would probably have pointed to the 'Signor', as Watts came to be called among his intimate friends—to the slight figure with the small delicately-shaped head, who seemed to recall the atmosphere of Florence in the Middle Ages, when art was at once a craft and a religion. But few who saw the grace and old-fashioned courtesy with which he moved among young and old would have guessed what fire and persistency were in him, that he would ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... way, a resemblance in our situation and in our work to that of feudal chiefs in the middle ages. We held a lofty and almost impregnable position, overlooking the country in every direction. The distant ridges of the Alleghanies rose before us, the higher peaks standing out in the blue distance, so that we seemed ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... we would? A little thought ought to convince us that the liberation of the individual could not be revoked, that it had forever destroyed the power of authority to carry conviction. To go back to the Middle Ages would be to deteriorate and degenerate. No, we must go on. . ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... monuments to which the religious art of the middle ages has given rise and which will for ever excite the admiration of men, the church of Notre-Dame or Cathedral of Strasburg occupies one of the first ranks. By its dimensions, the richness of the ornaments and figures that adorn its exterior, by the majesty of its nave, and by its light ...
— Historical Sketch of the Cathedral of Strasburg • Anonymous
... animals is a very general practice, though the reason for the selection of the particular name is not always clear. The most famous of such names is Renard the Fox. The Old French for fox is goupil, a derivative of Lat. vulpes, fox. The hero of the great beast epic of the Middle Ages is Renard le goupil, and the fact that renard now completely supplanted goupil shows how popular the Renard legends must have been. Renard is from Old High Ger. regin-hart, strong in counsel; cf. our names Reginald and Reynold, and Scot. Ronald, of ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... classes throughout the country during this autumn was terrible. It was to meet this distress, unparalleled since the Middle Ages, that Lord John wrote from Edinburgh his famous Free Trade letter to his London constituents, urging them to clamour for the only remedy, "to unite to put an end to a system which has proved to be the blight of commerce, the bane of agriculture, the source of bitter divisions among ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... Outwardly, Europe of the Middle Ages presented a sad contrast to the magnificence of an Empire which was fading to remoteness year by year. The ugly towns did not attempt to hide their squalor, when dirt was such a natural condition of life that a knight would dwell ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... of surnames and the fact that Browning used a seal with a coat-of-arms. Thousands of middle-class men use such a seal, merely because it is a curiosity or a legacy, without knowing or caring anything about the condition of their ancestors in the Middle Ages. Then, again, there is a theory that he was of Jewish blood; a view which is perfectly conceivable, and which Browning would have been the last to have thought derogatory, but for which, as a matter of fact, there is exceedingly ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... another. When a man fails to understand something he is conscious of a discord, and seeks for the cause of it not in himself, as he should, but outside himself—hence the war with what he does not understand. In the middle ages alchemy was gradually in a natural, peaceful way changing into chemistry, and astrology into astronomy; the monks did not understand, saw a conflict and fought against it. Just such a belligerent Spanish monk was ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... the narrow and deductive manner of the Middle Ages," replied the Professor, calmly, "but even upon your own basis I will illustrate my point. We are up in the sky. In your religion and all the religions, as far as I know (and I know everything), the sky is made the symbol of everything ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... neither wine nor spirits. Climate has a good deal to say to the craving for a 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; neither is a temperance man. In effect, I am inclined to think that tobacco ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... entertain children and give them pleasure. Within the last century and a half, too, many authors have collected and retold for children innumerable traditional stories from all parts of the earth—traditional fairy stories, romantic stories of the Middle Ages, ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... you a ghastly pleasure in doing things that hurt you. Oh, if you'd only been born in the Middle Ages, what a fiendish joy you would have taken in mortifying your flesh, and in denying yourself everything that makes life so good to live! You're never thoroughly happy unless you're ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... results of their various labors during the year. The King presented a paper on excavations made under his personal direction in the ruins of the castles of Saborg and Adserbo, in the North of Seland. These castles date from the middle ages; the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... least two generations. Through the reminiscences of college mates, of soldiers and of frequenters of the Peabody concerts, the memory of this genius with the flute would have remained like that of some troubadour of the Middle Ages. It is unfortunate that he left no compositions to indicate a musical power sufficient to give him a place in the history of American music. It cannot be controverted, however, that he is the one man of letters in America who has had an adequate appreciation of the value of music ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... behind me, flung myself wildly on my bed, and, burying my face in my hands, had a good, long, hard-hearted, cruel, obdurate cry—exactly like any other mediaeval woman. It's all very well being modern; but my experience is that, when it comes to a man one loves—well, the Middle Ages are still horribly strong ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... compact with England, and it shall be kept, if thou art an honest man. Thou mayst find thousands in Egypt who will serve thee at any price, and bear thee in any mood. I have but one price. It is well known to thee. I will not be the target for thy black temper. This is not the middle ages; I am an Englishman, not a helot. The bond must be kept; thou shalt not play fast and loose. Money must be found; the expedition must go. But if thy purpose is now Harrik's purpose, then Europe should know, and Egypt also should know. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... brought him up surprisingly well; I have always admired you for it; but let us admit - as women of the world, my dear - it was no upbringing for a man. You and that fine solemn fellow, John Fenwick, led a life that was positively no better than the Middle Ages; and between the two of you, poor Anthony (who, I am sure, was a most passive creature!) was so packed with principle and admonition that I vow and declare he reminded me of Issachar stooping between his two burdens. It ...
— The Plays of W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson
... Giotto, but rather the types of the Germanic style gradually assuming a new character, possibly owing to the social condition of Venice itself. There was something perhaps in the nature of a rich commercial aristocracy of the middle ages calculated to encourage that species of art which offered the greatest splendour and elegance to the eye; and this also, if possible, in a portable form; thus preferring the domestic altar or the dedication picture to wall decorations ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... 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 the pistol out of ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... to check the present war but rather to provide, at its close, an adequate supply of leaders. That seemed to them the only way to prevent a permanent impoverishment and a dropping back into a state of, at least, temporary semi-barbarism as was so common during the early Middle Ages under analogous circumstances. And the step taken by those shrewd, coldly-calculating war lords was the strengthening of the forces of higher education. One reason why, during the Middle Ages, there was this frequent dropping back is the fact that this relationship ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... for introducing such a story into my sketches of travel, and showing how the little narrative brought into view some of the characteristics of the people of Sicily. After that I discoursed of the present commerce of Italy as compared with that of the Middle Ages. ...
— The House of Martha • Frank R. Stockton
... massive cornice of carved wood with curious horizontal caryatides in the place of brackets. The rich burnt-sienna tint of the carvings contrasts finely with the golden-brown of the massive marble walls,—a combination which is shown in no other building of the Middle Ages. The sunken rosettes, surrounded by raised arabesque borders, between the caryatides, are sculptured with such a careful reference to the distance at which they must be seen, that they appear as firm and delicate as if near the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... him ready written. The whole of his conversation, which steadily he maintained for nearly four hours, was a continued stream of light. Well contented was I to be a listener. His subjects were the architecture of the middle ages; the stained glass of that period; sculpture, embracing monuments particularly. On this subject his opinion of Mrs. Nightingale's monument in Westminster Abbey, differs from all others that I have seen or heard. He places it above every other in ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... that which is the mere barter of the lower conditions of savagery and barbarism. In all these respects we see that civilization means a type about such as we enjoy at present. It is such as has existed in Europe since the Renaissance; because during the middle ages we could only say that Europe was in a semi-civilized condition. They knew something about writing; but at a time when Dean, the writer of the early history of England, said that throughout the whole ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... evil property of werwolfery upon those against whom they—or some other—bore a grudge was, in the Middle Ages, a method of revenge frequently resorted to by witches; and countless knights and ladies were thus victimized. Nor were such practices confined to ancient times; for as late as the eighteenth century a case of this kind ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... hanging, from the amiable Bois-Guilbert and the pleasant Front-de-Boeuf clear down to the nameless ruffians that entered the riot with unpictured shields and did their first murder and acquired their first claim to respect that day. The doings of the so-called "chivalry" of the Middle Ages were absurd enough, even when they were brutally and bloodily in earnest, and when their surroundings of castles and donjons, savage landscapes and half-savage peoples, were in keeping; but those doings gravely reproduced with tinsel decorations and mock pageantry, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... "City Beautiful," castigating the Philistine the while, and looking forward to a time when "the pomp, and chronicle of our time should be splendidly committed to illumined window and pictured wall," with some slight allusion to "those ancient webs through which the Middle Ages still ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... systems of philosophy, its wealth, and its commerce have been more or less important factors in universal history. Greece carried on an intellectual commerce with this country; Rome, and the Italian republics of the Middle Ages, a more material but not less important trade. Columbus was seeking a short all-sea route to this country when he found the New World. And in the upbuilding of the imperial greatness of the England of to-day, the wealth and trade of India have played ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... hundred small objects of gold. Ornaments of gold are very abundant in the tombs of Mycenae. In remote antiquity the bulk of gold was brought by the Phenicians from Arabia, which had twenty-two gold mines. It was the ancient El Dorado, and proverbial for its wealth of gold in all antiquity, down to the Middle Ages. "Arabia sends us gold," said Thomas A. Becket. Sacred ornaments of gold abound in churches, temples, pagodas, and tombs, throughout the Eastern hemisphere. The Homeric poems call Mycenae a city rich in gold. Gold abounded ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... minerals were known to the Egyptians "not only by their external characters, but also by what we at the present day call their chemical characters." He also adds, that what was afterwards called the Egyptian science, the Hermetic art, the art of transmuting metals, was a mere reverie of the middle ages, utterly unknown to antiquity. "The pretended books of Hermes are evidently supposititious, and were written by the Greeks of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 479, March 5, 1831 • Various
... advertisement, which carried a suggestion of the Middle Ages, A was no quack. He was, I think, a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, and had undergone a certain amount of medical training. He saved many a life, perhaps mine included, for he pulled me through my bout of fever. But several of his serious operations ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... no mere recent phase in human history. It is human history. It permeated the ancient life of early peoples. It blazed anew in the middle ages. It ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... historians are not without excuse for the course they are condemned for taking: "They have wholly neglected the great topic of the ruin of the Eastern Church." And as for the Western Church, even the debased popes of the middle ages—the ages of the Crusades—could not see without indignation that they were compelled to rest the claims of Rome as the metropolis of Christendom on a false legendary story of a visit of St. Peter to that city; ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... which seemed to me, when I first conceived of it, a dream too chimerical to be cherished save in secret—the restoring woman to her natural share in that sacred office of healer, which she held in the Middle Ages, and from which she was thrust ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... careless and prejudiced nature of accepted racial generalisations is particularly marked. A great and increasing number of people are persuaded that "half-breeds" are peculiarly evil creatures—as hunchbacks and bastards were supposed to be in the middle ages. The full legend of the wickedness of the half-breed is best to be learnt from a drunken mean white from Virginia or the Cape. The half-breed, one hears, combines all the vices of either parent, he is wretchedly poor in health and spirit, but vindictive, powerful, ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... often asserted) the best king that ever reigned in England. Still, there were allowances to be made for him; I mean King John, not Belloc. "He had been Regent," said Belloc with forbearance, "and in all the Middle Ages there is no example of a successful Regent." I, for one, had not come provided with any successful Regents with whom to counter this generalization; and when I came to think of it, it was quite true. I have noticed the same thing about many other sweeping remarks coming ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... Dupont-Delporte, prefect, by the general council of the departement, 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 ...
— Rouen, It's History and Monuments - A Guide to Strangers • Theodore Licquet
... time was also, of course, largely empirical, but assuredly hardly more so than it was a century or so ago, and distinctly more rational than it became in the Middle Ages. We cannot conceive of a reputable doctor at Rome prescribing the nauseous mediaeval absurdities. Practical surgery must have been surprisingly advanced, and there is scarcely a modern surgeon who does not exclaim in admiration of the instruments discovered at Pompeii and now preserved ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... the present volume is to deal with Old English Customs, not so much in their picturesque aspect—though that element is not wholly wanting—as in their fundamental relations to the organized life of the Middle Ages. Partly for that reason and partly because the work is comparatively small, it embraces only such usages as are of national (and, in some cases, international) significance. The writer is much too modest to put it forth as ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... son, was twenty-two years of age at the time of his father's death. Frederic II., one of the most renowned monarchs of the middle ages, was then Emperor of that conglomeration of heterogeneous States called Germany. Each of these States had its own independent ruler and laws, but they were all held together by a common bond for mutual protection, and some one illustrious sovereign was chosen as Emperor of Germany, ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... complete works (Lippincott) we have remarked that the introduction to Charles V., so admirable for the time when it was written, is left untouched by the editor, not even the notes giving any intimation of the great progress made in the knowledge of the Middle Ages within the last hundred years. The editor may have chosen to regard the work as a literary monument to be preserved as it stands, and certainly it would require very extensive ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... throw off its ordinary trammels and recompense itself for its long restraint, it prepared to realize those visions of enchanted bowers and ancient pageantry on which it had fed so long in the fictions and romances of the Middle Ages. I have thought it worth while to notice so much of the details as will enable the reader to form some slight conception for himself of this scene of enchantment which the genius of the age had contrived for ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... of this little book is to give general readers some idea of the subject and spirit of European Continental literature in the later and culminating period of the Middle Ages—the eleventh, ...
— Song and Legend From the Middle Ages • William D. McClintock and Porter Lander McClintock
... of the Ignatian Epistles,' says the Bishop, 'in Western Europe before and after the revival of letters, is full of interest. In the Middle Ages the spurious and interpolated letters alone have any wide circulation. Gradually, as the light advances, the forgeries recede into the background. Each successive stage diminishes the bulk of the Ignatian literature, which the educated mind accepts as genuine; till at ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... of Les Aigues was a younger son of the Soulanges family, enriched by marriage, whose chief ambition was to make his elder brother jealous,—a sentiment, by the bye, to which we owe the fairy-land of Isola Bella in the Lago Maggiore. In the middle ages the castle of Les Aigues stood on the banks of the Avonne. Of this old building nothing remains but the gateway, which has a porch like the entrance to a fortified town, flanked by two round towers with conical roofs. Above the arch of the porch are heavy stone courses, now draped with vegetation, ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... youth and maid. In the dimmest distance we can see traces of the earlier kindred group marriage, and in the near foreground the beginnings of that fight with patriarchal institutions which led the priestess to be branded by the new Christian civilization as the evil-working witch of the Middle Ages."[53] ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... disbanded soldiers. Plague and war, war and plague, and confusion, alternate in the annals. Sickly as Oxford is to-day by climate and situation, she is a city of health compared to what she was in the middle ages. In 1448 "a pestilence broke out, occasioned by the overflowing of waters, . . . also by the lying of many scholars in one room or dormitory in almost every Hall, which occasioned nasty air and smells, and consequently diseases." In the general dulness and squalor two ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... mile farther on our way (both Bramber and Steyning are stations on the Brighton Railway). This was another borough until 1832 but, unlike its neighbour, it was of considerable importance in the early middle ages and at the Domesday survey there were two churches here. The one remaining is of great interest; built by the Abbey of Fecamp to whom Edward the Confessor gave Steyning, it was evidently never completed; ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... tropic nature, the grace of palms, the many-colored fire of liana blossoms—jar on the aesthetic sense with an almost brutal violence. Yet there is a veiled poetry in these silent populations of plaster and wood and stone. They represent something older than the Middle Ages, older than Christianity,— something strangely distorted and transformed, it is true, but recognizably conserved by the Latin race from those antique years when every home had its beloved ghosts, when every wood or hill or spring had its gracious divinity, and the boundaries ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... Middle Ages the conscientious German was doing more for this helpless element of his population than England and America are doing to-day. He saw that some of his daughters would remain unmarried, and that if they were gently bred he must provide for their future, and ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... found themselves alone. None called at their house, none spoke to them on the roads. If they went to church, the other women drew their mats away and left them in a clear place by themselves. It was a regular excommunication, like what you read of in the Middle Ages; and the cause or sense of it beyond guessing. It was some tala pepelo, Uma said, some lie, some calumny; and all she knew of it was that the girls who had been jealous of her luck with Ioane used to twit her with his desertion, and cry out, ...
— Island Nights' Entertainments • Robert Louis Stevenson
... time of creation Regarding the date of creation Regarding the Creator Regarding light and darkness Rise of the conception of an evolution: among the Chaldeans, the Hebrews, the Greeks, the Romans Its survival through the Middle Ages, despite the disfavour of the Church Its development in modern times.—The nebular hypothesis and its struggle with theology The idea of evolution at last victorious Our sacred books themselves an illustration of its truth The true reconciliation ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... race in the SW. of France of uncertain origin; treated as outcasts in the Middle Ages, owing, it has been supposed, to some taint of leprosy, from which, it is argued, they were by their manner of life in course ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... pirates. I propose, therefore, to touch lightly upon these points, and especially to use our records of plague in different Italian districts as tests for contrasting the condition of the people at this epoch with that of the same people in the Middle Ages. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... as fine a specimen of the plant as it would be easy to discover either in Bohemia or elsewhere. Its bold and isolated character seems to have pointed it out as a fit situation for one of those keeps or strong-holds in which even monarchs were, during the middle ages, glad at times to seek refuge, and which constituted the groundwork of their power to chiefs of less elevated rank. So early as the year 1250, a castle accordingly was erected on it, in which the Baron von Ronow, a nobleman of vast influence, held his ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... man, one of those dignified, astute, tall, gray-bearded, and keen-eyed men, whom we find in the picture galleries of the middle ages, dressed in a suit of stately black, with the golden chain of his order, and riband of the Fleece, "I was very anxious to see you, my son. The influence of our house is deserting us; you have not attended the council lately—there is a majority organizing against ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... lost his sapphire talisman, and she was most careful to see that the lamps which she lighted before the images of certain saints never went out. Burton himself looked upon all this with amused complacency and observed that she was a figure stayed somehow from the Middle Ages. If the mediaeval Mrs. Burton liked to illuminate the day with lamps or camphorated tapers, that, he said, was her business; adding that the light of the sun was good enough for him. He objected at first to her going to confession, but subsequently made no further ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... one goes to the city expecting to find ancient walls and towers, or a really strong flavour of the middle ages, any more than one expects to obtain such impressions in the city of London. Rouen, however, contains sufficient relics of its past to convey a powerful impression upon the minds of all who have strong imaginations. There is the cathedral which contains the work of many centuries; there is the ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home
... professionally. It was, however, prosecuted with much zeal en amateur. The Chinese bureaucratic system has been wanting. For in spite of her students, until within thirty years Japan slumbered still in the Knight-time of the Middle Ages, and so long as a man carried about with him continually two beautiful swords he felt it incumbent upon him to use them. The happy days of knight-errantry have passed. These same cavaliers of Samurai are now thankful to police the streets in spectacles ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... creatures, yet it is only their "nothingness" that keeps them separate creatures. Most of this comes from the Neoplatonists, and much of it through the pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, a Platonising Christian of the fifth century, whose writings were believed in the Middle Ages to proceed from St Paul's Athenian convert. It would, however, be easy to find parallels in St Augustine's writings to most of the phases quoted in this paragraph. The practical consequences will ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... be progress without a sincere and single eye to the truth. The fatal sterility of the middle ages, and of our first and second University periods, had to do with the mistake of gagging men's mouths, and dictating all their conclusions. Things came to be so arranged that contradictory views ran side by side, like opposing electric currents; the thick wrappage of ingenious phraseology arresting ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... defence and their weakest point. It was difficult sufficiently to guard so many miles of water; above all because, as I say, its course was so much clearer, and its depth so much greater, that a flotilla of rafts or cutters could ascend it from its mouth as far as this town in the Middle Ages; in fact, more than once, corsairs from the Levant and from Morocco did so ascend it, and though they were driven back by the culverins of the citadel, they every time carried off to slavery some of the youths ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... prerogative of determining what should or should not be built on all the lands over which the Le Flemings have borne sway; and her extraordinary determination was, that no dwelling should be built, except on the site of a former one! We could scarcely believe we had not been carried back into the Middle Ages, when we heard it; but the old poet, whom any sovereign in Europe would have been delighted to gratify, submitted with a good grace, and thenceforth robbed his sister's feet, and coaxed and humored her at home,—trusting his guests ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... Golden Age, the Silver Age, the Iron Age, and so forth, which, with all possible respect for the poets, can scarcely be said to be worth much in a grave argument; it is quite clear that the Augustan Age, the Middle Ages, the Elizabethan Age, and the Age of Queen Anne, were all of them very different, one from the other, in regard to the peculiar tone of feeling which distinguished the public mind in each of them. In ...
— The Comic Latin Grammar - A new and facetious introduction to the Latin tongue • Percival Leigh
... clumsiness in the adaptation of these means to that end. The plot and personages recall those of Indiana, with the important differences that the beau role of the piece falls to the husband, and that the scene is transported back to Florence in the Middle Ages—an undoubted error, as giving to a play essentially modern and French in its complexities of sentiment and motive a strong local coloring of a past time and another people, making the whole seem ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... Ermann and Middendorff even suppose that such finds two thousand years ago gave occasion to Herodotus' account of the Arimaspi and the gold-guarding dragons (Herodotus, Book IV. chap. 27). Certain it is that during the middle ages such "grip-claws" were preserved, as of great value, in the treasuries and art collections of that time, and that they gave rise to many a romantic story in the folk-lore both of the West and East. Even ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... the condition is suddenly reversed; the Germans are fighting for themselves, and the fact arouses the limitless rage of their opponents. Let us console ourselves with the fact that even in the Middle Ages it was said: "Teutonici nullius amici," in spite ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... In the Middle Ages stories of the martyrs and legends of the Church, along with some simple form of catechetical instruction, formed the basis of a child's mental and religious training. Later, during and after the Crusades, the stories of war and the mysteries of the East increased the stock in trade ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... weirdly garbed monk of the Middle Ages as he stretched his tall, lithe figure. His head was completely swathed in a hood of lead-cloth, broken only by twin eyeholes of green glass. The hood merged into a long-sleeved tunic of the same fabric, while lead-cloth ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... the scene. Prettilove is an inoffensive little rabbit of a man. Marigold might sit for the model of a war-scarred mercenary of the middle ages, and when he called a man a liar he did it with accentuaton and vehemence. No wonder ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... the Middle Ages it was very usual for afflicted persons to renounce secular life, the Buddhist tonsure being the outward sign of the ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... is indeed redolent of the present: but it is almost avowedly an imitation of what was current in the days of Chaucer: of what were supposed to be the words, and the social ideas and conditions, of the age of chivalry. He looked back to the fashions and ideas of the Middle Ages, as Pindar sought his materials in the legends and customs of the Homeric times, and created a revival of the spirit of the age of the Heroes in an age of tyrants and incipient democracies.[132:3] The age of chivalry, in Spenser's day far distant, had yet left two survivals, one real, the other ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... and skill displayed in the needle-work of the Middle Ages demonstrate the perfection that art had attained; while church inventories, wills, and costumes represented in the miniatures of illuminated manuscripts and elsewhere, amaze us by the quantity as well as the quality of this department of woman's work. Though ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... has of late years received a more extended significance than that which is implied in our English equivalent—the Revival of Learning. We use it to denote the whole transition from the Middle Ages to the Modern World; and though it is possible to assign certain limits to the period during which this transition took place, we cannot fix on any dates so positively as to say—between this year and that the movement was accomplished. To do so would be like trying to name ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... you," repeated Lord Valleys, "Miltoun's no good in a matter of this sort—he and his ideas throw back to the Middle Ages." ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... a motor car behind a herd of antelope fleeing like wind-blown ribbons across a desert which isn't a desert, past caravans of camels led by picturesque Mongol horsemen, the Twentieth Century suddenly and violently interjected into the Middle Ages, should be contrast and paradox enough for even the most blase sportsman. I am a naturalist who has wandered into many of the far corners of the earth. I have seen strange men and things, but ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... though the Scottish Church, like the others, ultimately fell away from that council and the pope elected by it, and under Bishop Kennedy was reconciled to the Roman See and to Pope Eugenius.[12] Scotland had had no Grosteste, no Anselm or Bradwardine among its prelates in the middle ages, no Wycliffe among its priests. Duns Scotus, the one theologian before the sixteenth century who claimed Scottish birth and European fame, never seems to have taught in his native land. Chief among its doctors in the beginning of the sixteenth century ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... but close at hand, is a cloister with beautiful 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 color, that I marvel much no one has ever cared to sing ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... of a certain bird called a shongar, according to a custom often observed among the people of that region. The shongar was a very large and fierce bird of prey, which, however, could be trained like the falcons which were so much prized in the Middle Ages by the princes and nobles of Europe. It seems it was customary for an inferior khan to present one of these birds to his superior on great occasions, as an emblem and token of his submission to his superior's authority. The bird in such a case was very ...
— Genghis Khan, Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... the fact that art has flourished more on your Earth among those races and individuals who are spiritually inclined. The products of the monastery and cloister in the Middle Ages ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... been used in the same way from time immemorial, and they are probably, like flint and nephrite, among the few kinds of stone which were used by the men of the Stone Age. So far as is known, graphite come first into use in Europe during the middle ages. A black-lead pencil is mentioned and delineated for the first time by Conrad Gessner in 1565. The rich but now exhausted graphite seam at Borrowdale, in England, is mentioned for the first time by Dr. Merret in 1667, as containing a useful ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... guild, to be again striven for. The family of him who died during the year that he was king, were bound to present the decoration to the church of the patron saint of the guild, and to furnish a similar prize to be contended for afresh. These noble cross-bow men of the middle ages formed a sort of armed guard to the powers in existence, and almost invariably took the aristocratic, in preference to the democratic side, in the numerous civil dissensions of the Flemish towns. Hence they were protected by the authorities, and easily obtained ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... 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 ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... opportunity of observing, that its defences were gone totally to ruin, and significantly remarks, that it could not possibly withstand a coup de main. Amastra, a great and wealthy city while possessed by the Genoese in the middle ages, is now a wretched village, occupied by a few Turkish families, whose whole industry consists in making a few toys and articles of wooden ware. It stands on a peninsula, which appears to have been formerly ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 392, Saturday, October 3, 1829. • Various
... the Dark Ages, that the Norman and his followers effected their successful landing and lodgement here; it was in the later years of the fifteenth century,—it was when the bell that tolled through Europe for a century and a half the closing hour of the Middle Ages, had already begun its peals, that the Tudor 'came ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... hour of English history, when the cruel sights and haunting insecurities of the Middle Ages had passed away, and while, as yet, the fanatic zeal of Puritanism had not cast its blighting shadow over all merry and pleasant things, it seemed good to one Denzil Calmady, esquire, to build himself a stately red-brick and freestone house upon the southern verge ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... you take the world as your ancestors found it! You may be all your fathers were, but however time goes at Sagan, the rest of the world has not stood still since the middle ages. And the world is on my side to-day. Besides,' he added more suavely, 'we should gain nothing. We should alienate Selpdorf, who is useful, and who knows too much. As for the Duke, after such an affair he could never be ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... to take possession of the Azores archipelago from the year 1432. These islands were probably known to the Phoenicians, and even to the Arabs of the Middle Ages; between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries they had been rediscovered by Catalans, Genoese, Flemings, and Portuguese; and after 1444 the Azores began to prove very useful to the sea adventurers of this wonderful ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... unknown, the severity of the disease is very great. Cases are on record where measles have broken out on the frontier and whole villages were wiped out; where the insignificant measles, so innocuous in civilized communities, became a plague similar to a scourge of the Middle Ages. It apparently has been modified by its passage through generations of individuals, just as any bacterial disease germ is modified by successive transmission through the bodies of different animals. When, however, the disease breaks out in a community ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... which may, perhaps, be called the renaissance of cooking in England, since Kettner, in his "Book of the Table," shows that in the Middle Ages that country was famous for its cuisine, while France was still benighted—within the last few years, then, there has grown up a fashion of introducing preparations called savories. They vary very much, from the tiny little bouchette of something very piquant, to be taken between courses ...
— Choice Cookery • Catherine Owen
... neighboring tribe. Similarly, we shall find that the Egyptian and the Babylonian of the early historical period conceived illness as being almost invariably the result of the machinations of an enemy. One need but recall the superstitious observances of the Middle Ages, and the yet more recent belief in witchcraft, to realize how generally disease has been personified as a malicious agent invoked by an unfriendly mind. Indeed, the phraseology of our present-day speech is still reminiscent ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... the man for taking a comprehensive survey, and giving to the public an intelligent and intelligible account of that other Library of Chronicles, and biographies, and letters, and cartularies, and those other memorials of the Middle Ages in England, which it is to be feared are hardly as well known as they ought to be, nor as widely studied as ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... rate they discuss. Correspondence is published with an official of the White Star Line from some one imploring them not to name the new ship "Gigantic," because it seems like "tempting fate" when the Titanic has been sunk. It would seem almost as if we were back in the Middle Ages when witches were burned because they kept black cats. There seems no more reason why a black stoker should be an ill omen for the Titanic than a black cat should be for an ...
— The Loss of the SS. Titanic • Lawrence Beesley
... Mackhai!" and, as he stood there, with scarf and kilt fluttering about his tall, lean old figure, he looked like one of the ancient fighting men of the clan come back from the Middle Ages to battle in defence of ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... astronomical research, but the intellectual demand has been keen from the first. Hipparchus and the Greek astronomers of the Alexandrian school, shaking off the vagaries of magic and divination, placed astronomy on a scientific basis, though the reaction of the Middle Ages caused even such a great astronomer as Tycho Brahe himself to revert for a time to the ...
— The New Heavens • George Ellery Hale
... Could it be that they had been purposely impregnated with disease, so that while the prince that sent them seemed to bestow a graceful gift, he was in reality taking a treacherous and terrible revenge? Such things were not infrequent in Asiatic history; and even the history of Europe, in the middle ages, tells us of poisoned masks, of gloves and ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... tower, which is built in the ancient wall of the mediaeval town, is the tower of Caterina Cornaro, and one sees from most of my windows, so high are they, the whole Marca Trevigiana, with its tragic and dramatic associations of the early Middle Ages; the Eccelini, the Azzi, the incessant wars in which towns were treated by the tyrants like shuttlecocks ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... know whether the monstrous tableau of the Black Mass—so marvellously, so revoltingly described in the central episode of the book—is still enacted in our days, but I do know that all but the most horrible practices of the sacrilegious magic of the Middle Ages are yet performed, from time to time, in a secrecy which is all but absolute. The character of Madame Chantelouve is an attempt, probably the first in literature, to diagnose a case of Sadism in a woman. To say that it is successful would be to assume that the thing is possible, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... fetish men and women who are the vendors of these drugs keep as a profound secret their origin and nature, but it is certain that many of them are in point of secrecy and celerity equal to those of the middle ages." ...
— By Sheer Pluck - A Tale of the Ashanti War • G. A. Henty
... lain, shivering and famished, beneath his scanty coverlet in the corner of the garret allotted to him, watching the stars shining through the skylight above his head, and praying, with all the earnestness of a warrior-knight of the Middle Ages, for strength to battle with the temptation of despair. If music—the music that raises and ennobles, that strengthens, and uplifts the soul of man to heights which bring him nearer and ever nearer to a true conception of God—were destined to find a voice in Haydn's soul, that music must ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... agreeable to our readers, that we should occupy a few vacant pages, by the following lively particulars respecting "Patrick, the Apostle of the Irish." They are extracted from a work lately published, under the title of, "Light in Dark Places; or Memorials of Christian Life in the Middle Ages," which is stated, in the preface, to be translated from a German work by the late Augustus Neander. Patrick flourished in the early part of the fifth century, before the Romish yoke was imposed upon the British churches, but ...
— The Annual Monitor for 1851 • Anonymous
... "leans-to," so in Australia the spirits do their rapping on the tree trunks; a native illustrated this by whacking a table with a book. The perched-up houses of the Dyaks are haunted by noisy routing agencies. We find them in monasteries, palaces, and crofters' cottages all through the Middle Ages. On an ancient Egyptian papyrus we find the husband of the Lady Onkhari protesting against her habit of haunting his house, and exclaiming: "What wrong have I done," exactly in the spirit of the "Hymn of Donald Ban," who was "sair hadden down by a bodach" ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... the origin of language; on the crossing or blending of languages; on the absence of the idea of God in certain races of men; on early marriages of the poor; on the middle ages. ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... Pomponius Mela, the two Plinies, and the Germania of Tacitus." He possessed a creditable amount of knowledge of General History and Church History. He had made a profound study of the leading philosophers and scholastic theologians of the Middle Ages: Thomas of Aquinas, Peter Lombard, Bernard of Clairvaux, Duns Scotus, Occam, Gregory of Rimini, Pierre d'Ailly, Gerson, and Biel. Two of these he knew almost by heart. He had studied the ancient ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... (c. 1215) took the subject of his Merlin (published by G. Paris and J. Ulrich, 1886, 2 vols., Societe des Anciens Textes) from Geoffrey of Monmouth. Finally, the most celebrated love-legend of the middle ages, and one of the most beautiful inventions of world-literature, the story of Tristan and Iseult, tempted two authors, Beroul and Thomas, the first of whom is probably, and the second certainly, Anglo-Norman (see ARTHURIAN LEGEND; GRAIL, THE HOLY; TRISTAN). One Folie Tristan was composed ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... that of pius. Our English word "pious" has suffered some damage from the sanctimoniousness of a certain type of Puritanism; but piety still remains sweet and wholesome, and, like its Latin original in the middle ages it seems to express one beautiful aspect of the Christian life better than any other word. In the old Roman religion pius meant the man who strictly conforms his life to the ius divinum; this we know from the ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... attitude has in some periods been very rare, it 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 ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... until we are hidden away in the earth. They were quite miracles in a small way that he showed, and yet everything flowed as naturally as water! At the time of Moses and the prophets such a man would have been received among the sages of the land; in the middle ages they would have burned him at a stake. All night long I could not go to sleep. And the next evening, when I gave another performance, and the candidate was again present, I felt fairly overflowing with humour. I once heard from a player that when he acted a lover he always thought of ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... upright and as supple as a willow rod; and her innocent, delicate face was framed in a nimbus of that fine golden hair—dry and electrical, each separate thread shining with a lustre of its own—with which the dreaming painters of the middle ages endowed and ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... middle ages, and of the time of the Renaissance, and even down to the last century, in Italy, France, and Germany showed, in the crudest examples, the principal virtues of all true decorative art. The reason is not far to seek. The difficulties in the way of working the material ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Vol. 1, No. 7, - July, 1895 • Various
... mortuum that it is now; and has therefore, like other mummies, been able to last. What was opposed to it was the Life of Puritanism,—then on the point of disappearing; and it too has left its mummy at Exeter Hall on the platform and elsewhere. One must go back to the Middle Ages to see Squirism as rampant and vivacious as Biblicism was in the Seventeenth Century: and I suppose our modern Country Gentlemen are about as near to what the old Knights and Barons were who fought the Crusades, as our modern Evangelicals to the fellows who sought the ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... charming. Clever, and intimate with every branch of literature, she might have made folks believe that, as Mascarille says, people of quality come into the world knowing everything. She could argue fluently on Italian or Flemish painting, on the Middle Ages or the Renaissance; pronounced at haphazard on books new or old, and could expose the defects of a work with a cruelly graceful wit. The simplest thing she said was accepted by an admiring crowd as a fetfah of the Sultan by the Turks. She thus dazzled shallow persons; as to deeper minds, ...
— The Ball at Sceaux • Honore de Balzac
... stoppage of its Chicago beef and Armour pork, and the world would grumble and know for once that Chicago fed it. Inside the city there was talk of a famine. The condition was like that of the beleaguered city of the Middle Ages, threatened with starvation while wheat and cattle rotted outside its grasp. But the enemy was within its walls, either rioting up and down the iron roadways, or sipping its cooling draughts and fanning itself with the garish ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... reason why I should perpetuate my own feeble qualities, bind my dull qualities up closer with the life of the world. Besides, I have a theory that the world is made now very much as it was in the Middle Ages. There was but one choice then—a soldier or a monk. Now, I have no combative blood in me; I hate a row; I am a monk to the marrow of my bones, and the monks are the failures from the point of view of race. No monk should breed ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... have endeavoured to portray the life and character of one of the most striking figures in the history of the Early Middle Ages, Theodoric the Ostrogoth. The plan of the series, for which this volume has been prepared, does not admit of minute discussion of the authorities on which the history rests. In my case the omission is of the less consequence, as I have treated the subject more fully in my larger work, ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... and explore its new domain. These are the great ages of the world. They could be counted, perhaps, on one hand. The age of Pericles in Athens; the less defined age, when Europe passed, spiritually and artistically, from what we call the Dark, to what we call the Middle Ages; the Renaissance; the period of the French Revolution. Two of them, so far as English literature is concerned, fall within the compass of this book, and it is with one of ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... Protestant place, or at any rate chiefly so, indeed all the way from Cervieres we have been among people half Protestant and half Romanist; these were the Waldenses of the Middle Ages, they are handsome, particularly the young women, and I should fancy an honest simple race enough, but ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... the Middle Ages, when the emperors, rough and bold, Had their dwelling in thy castle, time-defying, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... said with a nod. "Those would fit periods corresponding from the Roman Empire into the Middle Ages. But you're right, Ross, those ships had power of some kind to take them ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... ancient Christian Church. The 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
... practice. His fragmentary and uncritical editions of Wolfram's Parzival, the Nibelung Lay, and the Minnesingers (1753-59) are the earliest attempts to arouse interest in the forgotten poetry of the despised Middle Ages. The selection is from the Discourse der Mahlern, following Bchtold and Vetter's reprint in Bibliothek lterer Schriftwerke ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... Royal Geographical Society of London, that the Eskimos are the remnants of an ancient Siberian tribe, the Onkilon; that the last members of this tribe were driven out on the Arctic Ocean by the fierce waves of Tartar invasion in the Middle Ages, and that they found their way to the New Siberian Islands, thence eastward over lands yet undiscovered to Grinnell Land and Greenland. I am inclined to believe in the truth of this ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... absurd notions as to what the Talmud was, given credence in the Middle Ages, one was that it was a man! The mediaeval priest or peasant was perhaps wiser than he knew. Almost, might we say, the Talmud was Man, for it is a record of the doings, the beliefs, the usages, the hopes, the sufferings, the patience, the humor, ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... upon Mamie, innocent Mamie who had done nothing to anybody, scattered his embarrassment and filled him with much the same spirit which sent bantam-weight knights up against heavy-weight dragons in the Middle Ages. He felt inspired. ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... cannon. Of his cavalry, only one-fifth part were provided with lances, the rest having swords and pistols. The greater number had no defensive armor; and not a horse was furnished with the leathern barbe with which the knight continued, as in the middle ages, to cover his steed's breast and sides. The constable had wisely chosen a moment when the prince had weakened himself by detaching D'Andelot, with five hundred horse and eight hundred arquebusiers, to seize Poissy and intercept the Count of Aremberg.[457] In ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... I might produce for France in the nineteenth century the book which we must all regret that Rome, Athens, Tyre, Memphis, Persia, and India have not bequeathed to us; that history of their social life which, prompted by the Abbe Barthelemy, Monteil patiently and steadily tried to write for the Middle Ages, but in ...
— The Human Comedy - Introductions and Appendix • Honore de Balzac
... the great importance of individuality along the line of teaching, for, as soon as we begin to adopt the methods of others exactly without examining them carefully, progress stops, and we are like the teachers of the Middle Ages. ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... has to be lain at the door of opportunity, and idleness in youth, and ennui and boredom in middle ages. Rawson-Clew was in the borderland between the two, and did not consider himself open to the temptations of either. He was not idle, he had things to do; and he was not bored, he had things to think about; but not enough ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... as is well known, the so-called seven liberal arts, which, with this distinction between the three branches of discipline earlier naturalized in Italy and the four subsequently received, maintained their position throughout the middle ages. ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... perceived by Roger Bacon as early as 1280, though it was not used on the field of battle until 1346, had completely changed the art of war and had greatly contributed to undermine the feudal system. The polarity of the magnet, also discovered in the middle ages, and not practically applied to the mariner's compass until 1403, had led to the greatest event of the fifteenth century—the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, in 1492. The impulse given to commerce by this and other discoveries of unknown ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... stand upon it, the men to the left and the Jinns to the right of the throne; and when all were ordered, the Wind, at royal command, raised it and wafted it whither the Prophet would, while an army of birds flying overhead canopied the host from the sun. In the Middle Ages the legend assumed another form. "Duke Richard, surnamed 'Richard sans peur,' walking with his courtiers one evening in the forest of Moulineaux, near one of his castles on the banks of the Seine, hearing a prodigious noise ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... so much that is interesting connected with the sanctuary, the cloisters, and the chapter-house, that I shall devote my next talk specially to those buildings. The abbot's house, now the deanery, saw many notable scenes in the Middle Ages. Especially was it so with the Jerusalem Chamber, of which the low rough wall runs off from the south side of the western portal of the Abbey. There is an entrance to it from the nave. It was in this chamber that Henry IV. died. He was purposing a journey to the Holy Land, ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... only the Italian resistance to Austrian aggression and tyranny that has made this doorway into the lowlands about the Po a vast battlefield. From the Middle Ages onward France and Austria constantly fought out their quarrels here. In 1796, Napoleon, after routing Marshal Wurmser at Lonato and Castiglione, small towns to the south of the Lake of Garda, drove ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... there presented itself a monument at which my engineering friend clapped his hands. It was a crown of buildings with extinguisher roofs encircling the brow of a hill, and presenting the antique appearance of some chastel of the Middle Ages. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... shot; but what could one man do against three hundred? As for saving herself by deserting her house, Aunt Mary scorned to do it; but immediately devised a plan that reminds one of the heroism of a Dame Chatelaine of the Middle Ages. ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... of woman. The mournful feeling of compassion and the pang of conscience experienced by a modern man at the sight of suffering is, to my mind, far greater proof of culture and moral elevation than hatred and aversion. Woman is as tearful and as coarse in her feelings now as she was in the Middle Ages, and to my thinking those who advise that she should be educated like a man are ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... black with age, and quite deeply graven in the stone, with I know not what signs peculiar to Gothic caligraphy imprinted upon their forms and upon their attitudes, as though with the purpose of revealing that it had been a hand of the Middle Ages which had inscribed them there, and especially the fatal and melancholy meaning contained in them, struck the ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... ceased to exist. That species of force, which, in the eighteenth century, humbled France and Spain once more, had not yet been called into action. The government was no longer a limited monarchy after the fashion of the middle ages. It had not yet become a limited monarchy after the modern fashion. With the vices of two different systems it had the strength of neither. The elements of our polity, instead of combining in harmony, counteracted and neutralised each other All was ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay |
