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Mediaevalism   Listen
noun
Mediaevalism  n.  (Written also medievalism)  The method or spirit of the Middle Ages; devotion to the institutions and practices of the Middle Ages; a survival from the Middle Ages.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Mediaevalism" Quotes from Famous Books



... and dressing-room were like Miss Granger's morning-room. No frivolous mediaevalism here, no dainty upholsterer's work in many-coloured woods, but solid mahogany, relieved by solemn draperies of drab damask, in a style which the wise Sophia called unpretentious. The chief feature in one ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon

... Spanish spirit, which there can be little doubt about, may not threaten the existence of Spain, but it threatens the existence of the last great fortress of mediaeval splendour and beauty and romance. France, the chosen land of Saintliness and Catholicism, has been swept clear of mediaevalism. England, even though it is the chosen land of Compromise, has in the sphere of religion witnessed destructive revolutions and counter-revolutions. What can save the Church in Spain from perishing by that sword of Intolerance which ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis

... crossed in the embarrassing and unrestful company of Professor Anastasius Papadopoulos. It is not that I dislike the little man, or have the Briton's nervous shrinking from being seen in eccentric society; but I wish to eliminate mediaevalism as far as possible from my quest. In conjunction with this crazy-headed little trainer of cats it would become too preposterous even for my light sardonic humour. I resolved to dismiss him from my ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke

... philosophy or mediaevalism; it becomes a concrete personal fact. Daily each one comes under its rule and sway. The mind loves truth, and the body tempts man to break truth. The soul loves honor, and passion tempts it to deflect its pathway. ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis

... appeared very incongruous, but in Mackenzie it seemed ludicrously out of keeping with his professions. It aroused the popular indignation against him to a higher pitch than ever; but it had one good effect: it led to the removal and destruction of the barbarous relics of mediaevalism. To Mackenzie belongs the questionable credit of reviving their use when Tory magistrates had become ashamed to employ them any longer. He is entitled to the further distinction of being the last magistrate in Upper ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent

... or Esquimaux. But the woman is totally different. She is infinitely more precocious as a girl. At an age when her slow brother is still stubbing along somewhere in the neolithic period, she has flown way ahead to a kind of mediaeval stage, or dawn of mediaevalism, which is peculiarly her own. Having got there, she stays there; she dies there. The boy passes her, as the tortoise did the hare. He goes on, if he is a philosopher, and lets her remain in the dark ages, where she belongs. If he happens to be a fool, which is customary, he ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic

... apart from each other. They are as inseparable as the red and green lights of a ship: the one illumines this side and the other that, but they are both equally concerned with announcing the path of the good ship "Mediaevalism" through the dangerous currents of our times. Fifty years ago, when philology was one of the imaginative arts, it would have been easy enough to gain credit for the theory that they are veritable reincarnations of the Heavenly ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd

... play two great human ideas which the mediaeval mind never lost its grip on, through the heaviest nightmares of its dissolution. They were the two great jokes of mediaevalism, as they are the two eternal jokes of mankind. Wherever those two jokes exist there is a little health and hope; wherever they are absent, pride and insanity are present. The first is the idea that the poor man ought to get the better of the rich man. ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton

... dramatic studies often intensely subjective, lit with the moods of Ben himself, not of the things dramatized. There were self-revelations characteristically frank and provokingly debonaire. There was comment upon everything under the sun; assaults upon all the idols of antiquity, of mediaevalism, of neo-boobism. There were raw chunks of philosophy, delivered with gusto and sometimes with inaccuracy. There were subtle jabs at well-established Babbitry. And besides, of the thousand and one Hechts visible in the sketches, there were several that ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht

... eloquence, the love of humanity, the effort to raise to manly dignity the poor, the unfortunate, the workers. Above all, I mean—Will. These noble weapons, these truly golden weapons, I count higher and more useful than the rusted swords of Mediaevalism." ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... mediaeval feeling the movement in art assuredly involved, but the essential part of it was another thing, of which mediaevalism was palpably independent. How it came to be considered the fundamental element is not difficult to show. In an eminent degree the originators of the new school in painting were colourists, having, perhaps, in their ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine

... admit that London had affected my feeling for Sylvia. Whatever one's view, her big violet eyes were abrim with gentle sympathy. I watched her as I sat by her side in church, and thought of our irreverent talk at the office. Here was sincere piety, at all events, I thought. Mediaevalism never produced a sweeter devotee, a worshipper more rapt. I could not follow her into the place of ecstasy she reached. But, I told myself, I could admire from without, and even reverence. Could I? Well, I was ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson

... prelates, feudal from the Norman lords—has sunk deeply into the land, and has affected the general plan of the numerous buildings, as it has moulded the slowly succeeding phases of the civic and the religious life. It is no mere dream of the early ages, no sentimental reverie of mediaevalism. It is enough to go through the streets, noting the remnants of the ancient walls, the brutal strength of the surviving fragment of the castle, the sheltered position of the tidal basin, the many churches dedicated to the honour of Saxon saints, the proud beauty and massiveness ...
— Exeter • Sidney Heath

... Stancy, was evident from her avowed predilections. His original assumption, that she was a personification of the modern spirit, who had been dropped, like a seed from the bill of a bird, into a chink of mediaevalism, required some qualification. Romanticism, which will exist in every human breast as long as human nature itself exists, had asserted itself in her. Veneration for things old, not because of any merit in them, but because of their ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy

... paint nature as it is around them, with the help of modern science, with the earnestness of the men of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they will, as I said, found a new and noble school in England. If their sympathies with the early artists lead them into mediaevalism or Romanism, they will of course come to nothing. But I believe there is no danger of this, at least for the strongest among them. There may be some weak ones, whom the Tractarian heresies may touch; but if so, they will drop off like decayed branches from a strong ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... volition follows thinking in the case of the individual. One hundred years ago college education was classical. In the time of the Renaissance and the Reformation a revival of interest in the classics produced a reaction against mediaevalism, and in time fastened a curriculum upon the universities that was composed mainly of the ancient languages, mathematics, and a deductive philosophy and theology. In the nineteenth century there ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe

... in Russia may alter a few things, but it can scarcely effect much change in the character of its people. This iron mountain is an illustration of the mixture of mediaevalism and modernism to be found in Russia's industrial development. The summit of the mountain is capped with an Orthodox Greek church, and desperate efforts have been made to secure its removal to a less exalted and less valuable site. I was informed ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward

... monarch held out against the general acquiescence in the new rule, and that was that strange survival of mediaevalism, the 'Slavic Fox,' the King of the Balkans. He debated and delayed his submissions. He showed an extraordinary combination of cunning and temerity in his evasion of the repeated summonses from Brissago. ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells

... extreme examples of the mediaevalism that to a considerable degree prevails in New York City, probably in Chicago and Boston, and wherever there is ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train

... spiritual and semi-mystical piety of Fenelon detached him from the trenchant dogmatism which, since the Council of Trent, had been stamped so much more decisively than heretofore upon Roman tenets. Pascal, notwithstanding his mediaevalism, and the humble submissiveness which he acknowledged to be due to the Papal see, not only fascinated cultivated readers by the brilliancy of his style, not only won their hearts by the simple truthfulness and integrity of his character, but delighted ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton

... the contrary, worked according to plan, and was bent on destroying whatever seemed to him absurd in the customs and institutions of the country. Practically everything seemed so to him: the anachronism of the Joyous Entry, the mediaevalism of the Grand Privilege of Mary of Burgundy, the regionalism of provincial States, the prestige of the Church, the pilgrimages, the intolerance, down to the popular festivities, the drinking bouts of the "kermesses" and the mad craving of the people for good cheer. ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts

... his ravaging at the end of two miles and a half. In brief, the business was overcrowded in all its branches, and badly managed beside. The more that I look into the history of that time the more am I convinced that mediaevalism, either as an institution or as an investment, was not ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier

... epoch. The land is full of monuments pertaining to those two brilliant periods; and whenever the voice of poet has spoken or the hand of artist has been at work, that spirit, as distinguished from the spirit of mediaevalism, has found expression. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... a castle at a distance on the flats. But the flavour of the past is stronger in the scattered memories of bygone sea-battles not a century ago, and the names of streets that do not antedate the Georges, than in these mere scraps that are always open to the reproach of mediaevalism, and are separated from us by a great gulf. And it doesn't much matter to us whether the memories are of victory or defeat, or the names those of sweeps or heroes. All's one to us—we glow; perhaps rashly, for, you see, we really know very little about them. And he who has read no history ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan

... ancient abbey as ridiculous as admiration of Dante. So far from which, Walpole is almost the first modern Englishman who found out that our old cathedrals were really beautiful. He discovered that a most charming toy might be made of mediaevalism. Strawberry Hill, with all its gimcracks, its pasteboard battlements, and stained-paper carvings, was the lineal ancestor of the new law-courts. The restorers of churches, the manufacturers of stained glass, the modern decorators and architects of all ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen

... the enthusiasm for such lore in France, it is far less in England, where the people have for three centuries been out of all touch with the Catholic Church, and therefore with whatever modicum of mediaevalism she still preserves as part of her heritage from the past. Architecturally we appreciate our dismantled cathedrals to some extent, but their symbolism is far less understood than even the language and theology of the schools, while the study of it meets as much sympathy as would the study of ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell

... to the undoubted fact that the distinction between the actual and the potential was recognised by the schoolmen as of a very deep significance. We believe further that the real secret of the failure of mediaevalism to extend its Knowledge of Nature was not so much a preference for deductive over inductive methods as the failure to realise that Nature was ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip

... ancestor. As it is extremely old, and consequently a good deal out of repair, you may perhaps think fit to comply with her request. For my own part, I confess I am a good deal surprised to find a child of mine expressing sympathy with mediaevalism in any form, and can only account for it by the fact that Virginia was born in one of your London suburbs shortly after Mrs. Otis had returned from a ...
— The Canterville Ghost • Oscar Wilde

... toward Louie, leaving me with Laura, talking mediaevalism. Louie was evidently taking Jack to task, and very energetically too. Fragments of their conversation reached my ears from time to time. She had heard something about Mrs. Finnimore, but what it was, ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille

... of the great painters, who proclaimed the glad tidings of Liberty when the Spirit of Man awoke from Mediaevalism, may we not add yet a fifth voice to the four-part harmony of Raphael, Correggio, Leonardo, and Michel Angelo, the voice of Giorgione, the wondrous youth, "the George of Georges," who heralded the Renaissance of which we ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook

... myths are placed side by side with Christian imagery and legends. Like Dante, the poet did not consider the Hellenic doctrine of sensuous beauty to be antagonistic to the truths of religion. There is sometimes an incongruous confusion of classicism and mediaevalism, as when a magician is seen in the house of Morpheus, and a sorcerer goes to the realm of Pluto. Spenser was guided by a higher and truer sense of beauty than the ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser

... it out as it had stamped out Provencal civilization, viewed it at first with approval. The new learning, as our ancestors were wont to call it, involved, in Michelet's pregnant formula, the discovery of the world and man, and developed a spirit of revolt against mediaevalism in all its manifestations. Its fruits were speedily discerned in bold exploratory studies, sound methods of criticism, audacious speculation, and the free play of the intellect over every field of knowledge. This new ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds

... complement of my mediaevalism. The elasticity, the concreteness, of your temperament fertilised the too-brooding introspectiveness of my own. It lightened the reverence which I experience in the contemplation of my own nature. It induced in me the hint of frivolity which is necessary to procure action. Our union was as that ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... gained instead ease, wealth, magnificence, and that repose which springs from long prosperity, that the new age at last began. Europe was, as it were, a fallow field, beneath which lay buried the civilization of the old world. Behind stretched the centuries of mediaevalism, intellectually barren and inert. Of the future there were as yet but faint foreshadowings. Meanwhile, the force of the nations who were destined to achieve the coming transformation was unexhausted; their physical and mental faculties were unimpaired. No ages ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds



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