"Medieval" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... never realized from the glowing pages of written romance, that the Crusaders must have mixed with people nearly identical in manner and speech with the strange human miscellany of Massowah. During those medieval campaigns in an arid and poverty- stricken land, feudal pomp and regal glitter would yield perforce to the demands of existence. Richard of England and Philip of France, with many another noble warrior of high repute, ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... statesman. Little pettifogging personal equations and jobs occupy the whole of their time, except when they are engaged upon the congenial task of trying to thwart the Supreme Governor. The patriotism of the front officers and soldiers, and the medieval chivalry of the Cossack are the only things left upon which to rebuild Russia. This naturally limits the architectural features of the new edifice, but the pioneer is always limited to the ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... word of bitterness led me into an act of disrespect towards that enlightened and excellent class of men who make it their calling to teach goodness and their duty to practise it, I should feel that I had done myself an injury rather than them. Go and talk with any professional man holding any of the medieval creeds, choosing one who wears upon his features the mark of inward and outward health, who looks cheerful, intelligent, and kindly, and see how all your prejudices melt away in his presence! It is impossible to come into intimate relations with a large, sweet ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... less offended when we find a composition which we consider to be unreal even within its own covenanted limitations. The fault, however, rests greatly with ourselves, in forgetting that it must be the ideal of medieval Italians and not our own that we should look for, and that their ideas concerning the chief actors in the sacred dramas were not as ours are. For us, the [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] view of history has been gathered to its ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... baron, in very good French, and in a tone of the most familiar equality with the descendant of the princes and heroes of grand medieval Italy,—"mon cher, give me one of your excellent cigars. I think I have put all ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... which Greek MSS. were produced in the medieval period was (with negligible exceptions) confined to Greece proper, "Turkey in Europe," the Levant, and South Italy. In the monastic centres, particularly Mount Athos, there were and are large stores of Greek books, the vast majority ...
— The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts - Helps for Students of History, No. 17. • M. R. James
... under the rod. Common folk were punished by cruel whippings for the most trifling offences. For serious offences, death by torture was an ordinary penalty; and there were extraordinary penalties as savage, or almost as savage, as those established during our own medieval period,—[177] burnings and crucifixions and quarterings and boiling alive in oil. The documents regulating the life of village-folk do not contain any indication of the severity of legal discipline: the Kumi-cho declarations that such and ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... the most painted of all Dutch towns, and with reason; for certainly no other town sits with more calm dignity among the waters, nor has any other town so quaintly medieval a canal as that which extends from end to end, far below the level of the streets, crossed by a series of little bridges. Seen from these bridges it is the nearest thing to Venice in all Holland—nearer than anything in Amsterdam. One may see it not only from ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... species of marjoram (Origanum maru); by others, the caper-bush (Capparis spinosa); and by the author of the 'History of Bible Plants,' to have been the name of any common article in the form of a brush or a broom." In ancient and medieval times hyssop was grown for its fancied medicinal qualities, for ornament and for cookery. Except for ornament, it is now very little cultivated. Occasionally it is found growing wild in other than ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains
... fair religious enthusiasts sold themselves to the first stranger who offered them a piece of silver, and laid their gains upon the altar of the gods. The robber barons of old-time Germany, the diplomatic liars of medieval Italy, the thieves of ancient Lacedaemon and the polygamists of biblical Palestine considered themselves as respectable people, and as they were so regarded by their compatriots, they were not morally degraded by their deeds. But the robber and the liar, the thief ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... misery. That great blot upon the page of history, woman's fate, has partly been erased, and we are drawing near to the time when in the world as in Christ there shall be made no distinction between slave and freeman, between man and woman. If we compare modern with ancient and medieval epochs, wars have become less frequent, and in war men have ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... circumstance is that this medieval age produced two poets, Langland and Chaucer, who were more realistic even than present-day writers in their portrayal of life, and who together gave us such a picture of English society as no other poets have ever equaled. Langland ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... establish a claim to superior knowledge, and Templarism seemed to provide a fruitful source of inspiration. For this purpose new light must be thrown on the Order. Now, there was probably no one better qualified than Voltaire, with his knowledge of the ancient and medieval world and hatred of the Catholic Church, to undertake the construction of a historical romance subversive of the Catholic faith—hence the urgent summons to the philosopher to visit Frederick. We can imagine Voltaire delving ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... that soil-exhaustion is essentially a modern phenomenon, however, and gives the following reasons for supposing that the medieval system conserved the fertility of the soil. First, the cattle grazed over a wide area and the arable land all received some dung. Thus elements of fertility were transferred from the pasture land to the smaller area of tilled land. This process, he admits, involved ...
— The Enclosures in England - An Economic Reconstruction • Harriett Bradley
... and the opening of the modern age, the faith of Christians had attached itself to symbols and material objects little better than fetishes. The host, the relic, the wonder-working shrine, things endowed with a mysterious potency, evoked the yearning and the awe of medieval multitudes. To such concrete actualities the worshippers referred their sense of the invisible divinity. The earth of Jerusalem, the Holy Sepulchre, the House of Loreto, the Sudarium of Saint Veronica, aroused their deepest sentiments of aweful ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... history. Thus, it is a remarkable fact that the weather is generally rather warm in Egypt; and this cannot but throw a light on the sudden and mysterious impulse of the Israelites to escape from captivity. The English strikers used some barren republican formula (arid as the definitions of the medieval schoolmen), some academic shibboleth about being free men and not being forced to work except for a wage accepted by them. Just in the same way the Israelites in Egypt employed some dry scholastic quibble about the extreme difficulty of making ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... of that other medieval and papistical pilgrim hobbling along rather than 'take advantage of any wheeled thing', and I laughed at him. Now if Moroso-Malodoroso or any other Non-Aryan, Antichristian, over-inductive, statistical, ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... representative of the uji, and (3) to establish or abolish uji, to nominate uji no Kami, and to adjudicate disputes between them. The first of these prerogatives remains unaltered to the present day. The second was partly delegated in medieval times to the military class, but has now been restored to the Throne. As for the third, its exercise is to-day limited to the office of the hereditary nobility, the Constitution having replaced the Crown ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... hell of Dante and the medieval theologians contained nine separate circles. On Menga's lips, however, from the fifth hell means no more than 'from a very remote region,' 'from the North Pole.' Cf. la ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... moralists on the one side, satirists on the other. Neither of them, we venture to say, knew the subject professionally. They were not specialists in the sense of modern writers like Reyniere, Rumohr, Vaerst; nor did they approach in technical knowledge medieval writers ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... dissolution of his former engagement with Joe, but because it seemed a terribly difficult thing to speak to any one about Sybil. Ronald was very far from being poetical, or in any way given to lofty and medieval reflections of the chivalric sort, but he was a very honest fellow, loving for the first time, and he understood that his love was something more to be guarded and respected than anything that had yet come into his life; wherefore ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... then carried further and further down the slope, to be replaced by fresh ones from the same source. Here the likeness of an old Gothic cathedral, with lofty arch, and shapely pinnacle; there the similitude of a mass of medieval fortifications, with ...
— The Story of the Herschels • Anonymous
... epidemic "suggestions" to which men constantly have been and are subject. Such "suggestion" always has existed and does exist in the most varied spheres of life. As glaring instances, considerable in scope and in deceitful influence, one may cite the medieval Crusades which afflicted, not only adults, but even children, and the individual "suggestions," startling in their senselessness, such as faith in witches, in the utility of torture for the discovery of the truth, the search for the elixir of life, the philosopher's stone, or the passion for ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... to the vision of America, the Old World was the scene of many stupendous migrations. One after another, the Goths, the Huns, the Saracens, the Turks, and the Tatars, by the sheer tidal force of their numbers threatened to engulf the ancient and medieval civilization of Europe. But neither in the motives prompting them nor in the effect they produced, nor yet in the magnitude of their numbers, will such migrations bear comparison with the great exodus of European peoples which in the course of three centuries ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... show an observant consciousness of the changing world; but her imagination long ago sank its deepest roots into the traditions of the Old Dominion. She brings to them, however, no fresh interpretations, as satisfied as any medieval romancer to ring harmonious changes on ancient themes, enlarging them, perhaps, with something spacious in her language and liberal in her sentiments, yet transmitting her material rather as a singer than as a ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... 4th century was used for the heavy transport vehicles of the cursus publicus, and also for the animals by which they were drawn, came to mean generally "compulsory service." So angaria, angariare, in medieval Latin, and the rare English derivatives "angariate," "angariation," came to mean any service which was forcibly or unjustly demanded, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... By T.F. Tout, M.A., Professor of Medieval and Modern History in the Victoria University of Manchester; formerly Fellow ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... must be remembered that in medieval days not only adultery but the smallest infraction of what the Church regarded as morality could be punished in the Archdeacon's court; this continued to be the case in England even after the Reformation. See Archdeacon W.W. Hales' ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... in Japan, as in all countries at every period; but Bushido, as an institution or a code of rules, has never existed. The accounts given of it have been fabricated out of whole cloth, chiefly for foreign consumption. An analysis of medieval Japanese history shows that the great feudal houses, so far from displaying an excessive idealism in the matter of fealty to one emperor, one lord, or one party, had evolved the eminently practical plan of letting their different members take different sides, so that the family as a whole ...
— The Invention of a New Religion • Basil Hall Chamberlain
... some persons that the Church of England began to exist at the Reformation would have astonished the medieval reckoners "according to the computation of the Church of England," who were accustomed to hear Parliaments summoned to debate "concerning the welfare of the kingdom and Church of England." The former notion is ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... this period of blissful inaction was sharply terminated. Her still watching eyes brought her a message so incongruous with her immediate surroundings as to shake her out of her waking dream. She became suddenly conscious of a nineteenth-century intruder amid her almost medieval surroundings. ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... marriage resembled the other in all respects, and I leave you to decide, and no man is more competent, from your extensive knowledge of the mythology of Medieval Europe, whether Morgana, beyond the mere accident of her name, was more likely than Lurline to have added a word with a puzzling etymology to the languages of Europe. The word will, I think, be found of Eastern origin, clothed ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 47, Saturday, September 21, 1850 • Various
... misunderstandings, the original distinction is clear enough and useful to make: the modern Novel in its beginning did introduce a more truthful representation of human life than had obtained in the romantic fiction deriving from the medieval stories. The term "realism" as first applied was suitably descriptive; it is only with the subsequent evolution that so simple a word has taken on ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... of taste are mostly also matters of fashion. We are conscious of a difference between medieval fashions in belief and modern fashions. For instance, though we are more credulous than men were in the Middle Ages, and entertain such crowds of fortunetellers, magicians, miracle workers, agents of communication with the ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... the most pathetic spectacles which the student of medieval history has to contemplate is the treatment of the Jews at the hands of the Christians. "Few were the monarchs of Christendom," says Prof. Worman, "who rose above the barbarism of the Middle Ages. By considerable pecuniary ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... the same exercises occur in thousands of pieces but in such connection that the mind is interested? Is it necessary for the advanced pianist to punish himself with a kind of mental and physical penance more trying, perhaps, than the devices of the medieval ascetics or the oriental priests of to-day? No, technic is the Juggernaut which has ground to pieces more musicians than one can imagine. It produces a stiff, wooden touch and has a tendency to induce ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... Athens. Such a one as he had hardly entered the city, when he was caught hold of by a party of the academic youth, who proceeded to practise on his awkwardness and his ignorance. At first sight one wonders at their childishness; but the like conduct obtained in the medieval Universities; and not many months have passed away since the journals have told us of sober Englishmen, given to matter-of-fact calculations, and to the anxieties of money-making, pelting each other with snowballs ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... The medieval writer who declared women to be "capable of disturbing the air and exciting tempests" was not indulging a mere quip at the expense of that limited storm area, his own domestic circle. He expressed what in his day, ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... Nan, quickly. "Do you know, I think your mother, Walter, would have made a good chatelaine of a castle in medieval times. Then charitably inclined ladies were besieged by the poor and miserable at their castle gates. The good lady gave them largess as she stepped into her chariot. Their servants threw silver pennies at a distance so that the unfortunates would scramble for the coins and ...
— Nan Sherwood's Winter Holidays • Annie Roe Carr
... shapes, have in most cases been so arranged as to show also how the letters compose into words, except in those instances where they are intended to be used only as initials. The application of classic and medieval letters to modern usages has been, as far as possible, suggested by showing modern designs in which similar ...
— Letters and Lettering - A Treatise With 200 Examples • Frank Chouteau Brown
... he sat on, listening to the still soft downpour on the fading leaves. 'They don't come to me,' he said softly again; with a tiny smile on his old face. 'It's that old medieval Craik: with a face like a last year's rookery!' And again he sat, with head a little sidelong, listening now to the infinitesimal sounds of life without, now to the thoughts within, and ever and again he gazed ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... associations of old families—the Dorias, the Pallavicinis, the Durazzos," remarked Miss Cora. "Do you gloat on the medieval?" ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... transito di Maria) figured below, is, in fact, only the transition to the blessedness and exaltation figured above. But whether separate or combined, the two scenes, in themselves most beautiful and touching,—the extremes of the mournful and the majestic, the dramatic and the ideal,—offered to the medieval artists such a breadth of space for the exhibition of feeling and fancy as no other subject afforded. Consequently, among the examples handed down to us, are to be found some of the most curious and important relics of the early schools, ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... medieval tapestry of the Pumpelly marble hall glanced at the dirty sheet in James' hand and, though unfamiliar with the form of the document, perceived it to be a summons issued on the application of one Henry J. ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... the leading motive as handled by Wagner and Wagner's forerunners, he had an unwritten treatise ripe in his brain. But he had only just compared the individual motives to the lettered ribbons that issue from the mouths of the figures in medieval pictures, and began to hint at the IDEE FIXE of Berlioz, when he was interrupted by a knock at ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... zoologies, we find a separate chapter or a supplement dedicated to what is denominated heraldic zoology. And why not? For these hideous creatures, however visionary[8], have a real traditionary ground in medieval belief—sincere and partly reasonable, though adulterating with mendacity, blundering, credulity, and intense superstition. But the dream-horror which I speak of is far more frightful. The dreamer finds housed within himself—occupying, as it were, some ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... called Everyman, which Mr William Poel has lately resuscitated so triumphantly. I trust he will work that vein further, and recognize that Elizabethan Renascence fustian is no more bearable after medieval poesy than Scribe after Ibsen. As I sat watching Everyman at the Charterhouse, I said to myself Why not Everywoman? Ann was the result: every woman is not ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... of Guernsey and the other Channel Islands represent the last remnants of the medieval Dukedom of Normandy, which held sway in both France and England. The islands were the only British soil occupied by German troops ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... received, by way of bequest, the vast Jewish population of disintegrated Poland. At the end of the eighteenth century, when Western Europe had just begun the emancipation of the Jews, the latter were subjected in the East of Europe to every possible medieval experiment.... The reign of Alexander II., who slightly relieved the civil disfranchisement of the Jews by permitting certain categories among them to live outside the Pale and by a few other measures, forms a brief interlude in the Russian policy ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... heavily embroidered with jewels. Most of the dancers wore towering, pointed head-dresses, similar to the historic crowns of the Cambodian kings, though a few of them wore masks, one representing the head of a fox, another a fish, a third a lion, which could be raised or lowered, like the visors of medieval helmets. The faces of all of the dancers were so heavily coated with powder and enamel that they would have been cracked by a smile. It was a performance which would have astonished and delighted the most blase audience on Broadway, ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... overwhelming majority would have gladly obeyed the call to arms, would have been equally ready to bear permanent and heavy burdens of taxation. Haggling about war contributions is as pronounced a characteristic of the German Reichstag in modern Berlin as it was in medieval Regensburg. These conditions have induced me to publish now the following pages, which were partly written some ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... medieval Holland nor old Japan—had a garden been more formal, been better tended. Every plant had all the loam, light, water, air and nourishment ...
— 2 B R 0 2 B • Kurt Vonnegut
... as he passed through Chuisson, and a clock upon a romantic, medieval-looking little tower told him that it lacked but ten minutes ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... of Dutch history—with its strangely grouped towers and palaces, and its huge squares, made me feel an insignificant insect with no right to opinions of any kind; and as I gazed up at the dark, medieval buildings, vague visions of Cornelis and John de Witt in their torture, of van Oldenbarneveld, and fair Adelaide de Poelgust stabbed and bleeding, flitted fearfully through my brain. I wanted to get out and look for the stone where Adelaide had fallen to die (how well I remembered that story, ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... destroy, with small parties, the railroad from that point toward Lynchburg. Custer reached Charlottesville the 3d, in the afternoon, and was met at the outskirts by a deputation of its citizens, headed by the mayor, who surrendered the town with medieval ceremony, formally handing over the keys of the public buildings and of the University of Virginia. But this little scene did not delay Custer long enough to prevent his capturing, just beyond the village, a small body of cavalry and three ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... out of the west rode the swift-moving zephyrs, and, vanquished, the wavering vapor stole off into thin air, or hung in isolated wreaths above the foliage on the hillside. Soon the conquering light brightly illumined a medieval castle commanding the surrounding country; the victorious breeze whispered loudly at its gloomy casements. A great Norman structure, somber, austere, it was, however brightened with many modern features that threatened gradually to sap much of ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... Irish text and an English translation of "The Battle of Gabra," and since that date the volume of printed texts and English versions has steadily increased, until now there lies open to the ordinary reader a very considerable mass of material illustrating the imaginative life of medieval Ireland. ...
— The Harvard Classics, Volume 49, Epic and Saga - With Introductions And Notes • Various
... year 1869 the Corso Vittorio Emmanuele, that skirts the sea on the south side of the old town, was their sole promenade. And even this street was built only a short time ago. Vainly one conjectures where the medieval Tarentines took the air. It must have been like Manfredonia ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... growth of the great fortunes, this vital fact is constantly forced upon the investigator: that Law has been the most valuable asset possessed by the capitalist class. Without it, this class would have been as helpless as a babe. What would the medieval baron have been without armed force? But note how sinuously conditions have changed. The capitalist class, far shrewder than the feudalistic rulers, dispenses with personally equipped armed force. It becomes superfluous. All that is necessary to do is to make the laws, and so guide things that ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... civilized world in the struggle against the surviving systems of medieval barbarism in Europe that have been permitted to exist under the veneer of civilization. She sees clearly what she has to destroy. So do we. No American and Englishman can meet but that they grip hands and thank God together that they are comrades in this Holy War. They are out, like ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... They were coming toward the camp at a slow dogtrot; and as they approached it could be seen that save for a turban apiece they were stark naked; and save for a spear and a water gourd apiece they were without equipment. One held something straight upright before him, as medieval priests carried a cross. The turbans were formed from their blankets; mid-blade of each spear was wound with a strip of red cloth; the object one carried was a letter held in ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... scale, and with added qualities. We shall need a new Renaissance, ushered in by a new "humanistic" movement, in which we shall add our present minute, introspective study of ourselves, our jails, our slums, our nervecenters, our shifts to live, almost as morbid as medieval religion, a rediscovery of the round world, and of man's place in it, now that its face has changed. We study the world, but not yet with intent to school our hearts and tastes, broaden our natures, and know our fellow-men as comrades rather than as phenomena; with purpose, ...
— On Being Human • Woodrow Wilson
... asino; or in superlative piled on superlative, as in the 'minimissimus' and 'pessimissimus' of Seneca, the 'ottimissimo' of the modern Italian; so too in the 'dosones,' 'dabones,' which in Greek and in medieval Latin were names given to those who were ever promising, ever saying 'I will give,' but never crowning promise with performance. Plautus, with his exuberant wit, and exulting in his mastery of the Latin language, is rich in these, 'fustitudinus,' ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... but they did not dream at that time of controlling the counsels of kings and dictating affairs of State. Even the story of Pope Leo the Great overawing the King of the Huns, Attila, and turning his army away from Italy, is a mere legend of medieval writers, and is at variance with the nearer authorities. The northern tribes themselves were to a great extent, and for some centuries, of the Arian faith, and took no advice from Rome. In a word, it would be stupid to expect ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... within a month after our wedding ceremony, on the plea that none of the drawers would work. They don't still, for that matter. A cumbersome, stately Dutch clock and a toast-rack of what Josephine styled medieval pattern, were among the other discoveries. The latter was reposing in a soap-box in company with a battered, vulgar nutmeg-grater. But the pieces of resistance, as I called them, on account of the difficulty we had in moving them from behind a pile of old window-blinds, ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... Realism is simply Romanticism that has lost its reason. This is so not merely in the sense of insanity but of suicide. It has lost its reason; that is its reason for existing. The old Greeks summoned godlike things to worship their god. The medieval Christians summoned all things to worship theirs, dwarfs and pelicans, monkeys and madmen. The modern realists summon all these million creatures to worship their god; and then have no god for them to worship. ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... has been preserved at Bainbridge. It takes place at ten o'clock every night between Holy Rood (September 27) and Shrovetide, but somehow the reason for the observance has been forgotten. The medieval regulations as to the carrying of horns by foresters and those who passed through forests would undoubtedly associate the custom with early times, and this happy old village certainly gains our respect for having ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... in an old Venetian edition of The Decameron, found himself suddenly recalled from medieval Italy to modern England, by no less ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... and educational reforms of Maria Theresa also mark her reign as the true epoch of transition from medieval to modern conditions in Austria. In religious matters the empress, though a devout Catholic and herself devoted to the Holy See, was carried away by the prevailing reaction, in which her ministers shared, against the pretensions of the papacy. The anti-papal ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... Dentistry at Fortieth and Spruce is a surprising place. Its grotesque gargoyles, showing (with true medieval humour) the sufferings of tooth patients, are the first thing one notices. Then one finds the museum, in which is housed Doctor Thomas W. Evans's collection of paintings and curios brought back from France. Unfortunately there seems to be no catalogue of the items, so that there is no way ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... not without its picturesqueness. The low crockery shelves of polished mahogany running the length of the room and filled with rare porcelain, costly Italian glass, medieval silver, antique flagons, loving-cups of gold inlaid with amber and garnets; a dazzling array of candlesticks; a fireplace of shining mosaics; the mahogany table littered with broken glass, full and empty bottles, ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... handsome, learned, exceedingly accomplished, gloriously strong in body and in mind, Henry mounted the throne in 1509 with the hearty good will of nearly all his subjects. Before England could become the mother country of an empire overseas, she had to shake off her medieval weaknesses, become a strongly unified modern state, and arm herself against any probable combination of hostile foreign states. Happily for herself and for her future colonists, Henry was richly endowed with strength and skill for his task. With one hand ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... cases as the foregoing, we find the medieval writers report likely instances of terata, as, for instance, Rhodiginus, who speaks of a monster in Italy with two heads and two bodies; Lycosthenes saw a double monster, both components of which slept ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... served; and at one of those tables a man was seated. Jimmie took a glance at him, and started so that he almost spilled his coffee. Impossible; and yet— surely—who could mistake that face? The face of a medieval churchman, lean, ascetic, but with a modern touch of kindliness, and a bald dome on top like a moon rising over the prairie. Jimmie started, then stared at the picture of the Candidate which crowned the shelf of pies. He turned to the man again; and the man glanced up, and ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... pass right through the house on their way. A flash of his torch had shown him that the walls of the hall were decorated with all manner of armour, ancient swords of Eastern handiwork, barbaric weapons from central Africa, savage implements of medieval warfare; and an idea came to him. He took down a huge battle-axe and swung it ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... Lands of Nebraska—a chaos of ochre-colored hills, of mountainous fragments fallen on the soil and broken in their fall. At a distance these blocks take the most fantastic shapes. Here and there amid this enormous game of knucklebones there could be traced the imaginary ruins of medieval cities with forts and dungeons, pepper-box turrets, and machicolated towers. And in truth these Bad Lands are an immense ossuary where lie bleaching in the sun myriads of fragments of pachyderms, chelonians, and even, ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... up, Bannal. This crude medieval psychology of heart and brain—Shakespear would have called it liver and wits—is really schoolboyish. Surely weve had enough of second-hand Schopenhauer. Even such a played-out old back number as Ibsen would have been ashamed of ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw
... edifices they saw pictures that time had not dimmed nor injured in the least, though they perhaps belonged to as old a school of Art as any that were perishing around them. These were the painted windows; and as often as he gazed at them the sculptor blessed the medieval time, and its gorgeous contrivances of splendor; for surely the skill of man has never accomplished, nor his mind imagined, any other beauty or glory worthy to ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... prison quarters like so many cattle. It has been a foul blot upon the escutcheon of the South, second only to the murderous stains made thereon by the lynchers. It is a disgrace even to the civilization of medieval times. For cruelty and outrage it is unparalleled in the annals of civilized society. Siberia itself is preferable to the convict camp. Given the worst form of human slavery plus the barbarities ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... contents with the fifth and last volume of the Corpus juris as it is found arranged in the medieval MSS., except for the omission of the Institutiones, already sufficiently accessible in separate editions, of which no less than fifty were printed in the 15th century, the first of them by Schoeffer himself in ...
— Catalogue of the William Loring Andrews Collection of Early Books in the Library of Yale University • Anonymous
... The medieval account of physical nature had been dominated by what we may call common-sense biology. Biology, indeed, is the science of the living, and the medievals were no more inclined than we are to endow all physical bodies with life. What they did do was to ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... way of securing the door. But somehow I felt that, if I were destined to be robbed or murdered, it would not be by tramps and beggars. So I blew out the candle and lay under the big feather bed, listening to the running and whispering of the medieval Rhine. ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... know—it's a very fine medieval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn't theirs. Since it may be laid as a general principle that women always get what they want we must suppose they didn't want it. In addition they are devoid of decency. I mean masculine decency. ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... which never could be forgotten—a long sierra of broken pinnacles and crags which had all the semblance of a weathered and dismantled castle. It stood out against the tender blue of the morning sky like the ancient stronghold of some grisly robber-baron of medieval days; towers of dark sublimity, battlements whence invaders might have been hurled a thousand feet to death, slender minarets, escarpments and rugged casements through which fleecy clouds peeped from the high horizon. I once saw ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... woodlands, an appearance of a hilly country is presented where the pit mounds have been planted with fir trees. Apart from its mining aspect, Mons is a city of historic importance. It contains a Gothic cathedral and town hall of medieval architectural note. It also, cherishes a special yearly fete of its own on Trinity Sunday, when in the parade of the Limacon, or snail, the spectacle of St. George and the Dragon is presented. With great pride the citizens of Mons showed the British soldiers of occupation ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... pleasant to perceive that American enterprise and administration have transformed Manila, the capital of the Philippine Islands, from a medieval into a modern city. Its newly constructed streets and pavements, water-works and drainage, electricity and the trolley, have turned this old and dilapidated Spanish town into a place of order and beauty. Its parks and gardens, its municipal buildings ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... sufferings compared to yours? Incredible as it may seem to anybody who has heard these talks, they had originally a certain consistent plan. I dealt first with heroic and half-legendary stories, touched upon medieval chivalry, then on the party-heroes of Elizabethan or Puritan times; then on the eighteenth century and then the nineteenth. In this address I had meant to face the twentieth century; but I find it almost faceless, largely featureless; and, anyhow, very bewildering. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... vulgar crowd. Gazing through the open windows they could see the tall trees waving their heads in a sorrowful sort of way in the summer breeze, throwing their shifty shadows over the neglected grass-grown paths, once the haunt of the stately peacocks, whose medieval beauty had such a strange fascination for Rossetti, and whose feathers are now the accepted favors of his apostles and admirers. And so their gaze would wander back again to that mysterious face upon the wall, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... city in medieval days, when it was the residence of the Mikado. From 793 until 1868, when the court removed to Tokio, Kyoto remained the capital. Its importance, however, began to decline with the founding of Yedo, or Tokio, in 1590, and to-day many miles of its former streets are ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... Great Britain. On the Continent he pursued much the same course, and published his first "novels with a purpose," The Bravo, The Heidenmauer, and The Headsman, the object of which was to demonstrate the superiority of democratic institutions over the medieval inheritances of Europe. In his introduction to The Heidenmauer he wrote a sentence that stirred the wrath of the newspaper press of his own country: "Each hour, as life advances," he asserted, "am I made to see how capricious and ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... officers, which makes of them a species of privateers, and pays them for capturing a helpless merchant ship, while an army officer gets nothing for taking the most powerful fort, may likewise be set aside as a relic of medieval warfare. ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... to, in comparison with other contemporary sociologists, as a realist. This is a reference to the controversy of the medieval philosophers in regard to the nature of concepts. Those who thought a concept a mere class-name applied to a group of objects because of some common characteristics were called nominalists. Those who thought the concept was real, and not the name of a mere collection of individuals, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... of the sun-scorched deserts of Arabia, with the Koran in the one hand and the sword in the other, the followers of Mahomed swept eastward to the confines of China, northward through Asia Minor into Eastern Europe, and westward through Africa into Spain, and even into the heart of medieval France. But it was not till the beginning of the eleventh century that the Mahomedan flood began to roll down into India from the north with the overwhelming momentum of fierce fanaticism and primitive cupidity ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... occurred to me that I may be so fortunate as to interest a Cambridge audience while I set before them some of the results at which I have arrived in investigating the position, the arrangement, and the fittings of libraries in the medieval and renaissance periods. It will, of course, be impossible to attempt more than a sketch of so extensive a subject, and I fear that I must omit the contents of the bookcases altogether; but I shall hope, by a selection of typical illustrations, to make you realise what some of the libraries, ...
— Libraries in the Medieval and Renaissance Periods - The Rede Lecture Delivered June 13, 1894 • J. W. Clark
... George would have his way to the bitter end; the blind lust to thrash the colonies into abject submission had the upper hand in England; reason could not get a hearing; and such criticisms as the opposition could offer served only to make still more rigid and medieval the ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... times and left no sign—a fact that brings me to that part of my recital I most deplore. But a measure of delay was necessary that we might learn the market value of his books—otherwise Virgilio Poggi would doubtless have robbed us after the old man's death. There was a medieval history of the Borgia family I should myself have ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... of ancient and medieval China has also been entirely changed since it has been realized that the sources on which reliance has always been placed were not objective, but deliberately and emphatically represented a particular philosophy. The reports on the emperors and ministers ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... pagan cults it was always the salvation of the CLAN, the TRIBE, the people that was the main consideration; the advantage of the individual took only a very secondary part. But in Christendom—after the communal enthusiasms of apostolic days and of the medieval and monastic brotherhoods and sisterhoods had died down—religion occupied itself more and more with each man or woman's INDIVIDUAL salvation, regardless of what might happen to the community; till, with the rise of Protestantism and Puritanism, this tendency reached ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... of India have degenerated is equally clear. The fact that all the medieval and modern reforms look back for their ideals to the earlier and purer Aryan faith, might of itself afford sufficient proof of this, but we have also abundant evidence which is direct. In the Rig Veda there is little polytheism, and no idolatry. There is no doctrine ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... was a lady leaning from an oriel window in a medieval tower, listening in the moonlight, with love in her eyes and attitude, to the music of a guitar, touched by a gallant knight below, who looked as Arthur Merlin would have looked had Arthur Merlin been a gallant ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... believes, the immediate result would be a revolution of incalculable beneficence. To be wealthy, says Undershaft, is with me a point of honor for which I am prepared to kill at the risk of my own life. This preparedness is, as he says, the final test of sincerity. Like Froissart's medieval hero, who saw that "to rob and pill was a good life," he is not the dupe of that public sentiment against killing which is propagated and endowed by people who would otherwise be killed themselves, or of the ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... traditions there survives in Kentucky the medieval rite of blessing the hounds which takes place usually on the first Saturday in November. In his clerical robes the Bishop of Lexington, in the heart of the Blue Ridge, performs the ceremony much in the manner of the prelates of ages past. With proper solemnity the bishop bestows upon each huntsman ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... moral background of Bismarck's internal policy. His monarchism rested not only on his personal allegiance to the hereditary dynasty, although no medieval knight could have been more steadfast in his loyalty to his liege lord than Bismarck was in his unswerving devotion to the Hohenzollern house. His monarchism rested above all on the conviction that, under the present ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... the aid of a pocketlite, and made a notation. The scene and the martial music faded out, to be replaced by stock footage from medieval epics: Peter the Hermit exhorting knights to smite the Saracen, the clash of Mediterranean men o' war, chivalric ...
— Telempathy • Vance Simonds
... was composing this polonaise, he was so affected when playing over the nearly completed work, that, seized by a peculiar hallucination, he saw the walls of the room open and, approaching from the outer night, a band of medieval Polish knights mounted and in armor, as if they had risen from their ancient graves and ridden on the clouds to appear in response to the summons of his music. The somewhat vague passage which follows the climax of the cavalry charge and leads ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... type of building is not entirely clear. It is difficult to imagine it growing naturally in the political and social climate of the villages which grew up clustered around England's medieval castles and monasteries. At the time when town-and-market halls were common in the central squares of free towns in Italy, Germany and the Low Countries, they were absent in England. Their appearance in ...
— The Fairfax County Courthouse • Ross D. Netherton
... hasten the troops; I ran forward with Captain Carbury and the Sagamore, passing several outlying huts, then some barns and houses which loomed huge as medieval castles in the fog, ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... something he had not thought of, before. It gave him an ugly start. He was still thinking about it as he turned into the side hall to the History Department offices and entered the cubicle he shared with a colleague. The colleague, old Pottgeiter, Medieval History, was emerging in a rush; short, rotund, gray-bearded, his arms full of books and papers, oblivious, as usual, to anything that had happened since the Battle of Bosworth or the Fall of Constantinople. Chalmers stepped quickly ...
— The Edge of the Knife • Henry Beam Piper
... had the whole national debt to do it with. I remember once how an extensive publisher, speaking of the rapid strides which literature had made of late years, and referring to a certain old public library, celebrated for its affluence in the fathers, the civilians, and the medieval chroniclers, stated how he had himself freighted for exportation, within the past month, as many books as that whole library consisted of. This was likely enough to be true, but the two collections were very different from each other. The cargoes ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... ancestors as Goethe had thrown upon that of the Rhine barons. This led him to subordinate the part played by the goblin page in the proposed story, which was now widened to include elaborate pictures of medieval life and manners, and to lay the scene in the castle of Branksome, formerly the stronghold of Scott's and the Duke of Buccleugh's ancestors. The verse form into which the story was thrown was due to a still ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... cut beauty, but an ugly headed monster with a savagely hooked Roman nose and small, keen eyes, always red at the corners. A medieval baron in full panoply of plate armor would have chosen such a charger among ten thousand steeds, yet the black stallion needed all his strength to uphold the unarmored giant who bestrode him, ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... look at her. What she wanted of this holiday was complete escape from all she had had before, she wanted the rest of complete contrast. Being admired, being dogged, wasn't contrast, it was repetition; and as for originals, to find herself shut up with two on the top of a precipitous hill in a medieval castle built for the express purpose of preventing easy goings out and in, would not, she was afraid, be especially restful. Perhaps she had better be a little less encouraging. They had seemed such timid creatures, even the dark one—she couldn't remember their names—that day ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... considered either as a street of palaces—and in this respect not to be surpassed by any street in medieval Europe, not even Venice—or a street full of associations, connected chiefly with retail trade, taverns, shops, sedan-chairs, ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... hair. Their manners were of the courts of Europe, polished in the extreme, and they had all been trained to make an art of conversation. Negro servants waited on the table, and the noble lord presided at its head with something of the majesty of a medieval baron in his castle. There were young people present, and George sat with them, paying gallant speeches to the girls and telling stories of sport to the boys. He was a popular youth, having a singularly gentle manner which ...
— Historic Boyhoods • Rupert Sargent Holland
... covenant with them in Hebron before the Lord; and they anointed David King over Israel." As a philosophical speculation to explain why people were governed or consented to be governed, this theory went back at least to the Greeks, and doubtless much earlier; and, though of some significance in medieval thought, it became of greater importance in British political philosophy, especially through the works of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. A very practical application of the compact theory was made in the English Revolution of 1688, when in order to avoid the ...
— The Fathers of the Constitution - Volume 13 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Max Farrand
... artists loved form and colour for themselves rather than for the spiritual meaning. Miss Owen [Footnote: Art Schools of Medieval Christendom, edited by Ruskin.] accuses Raphael of having rendered Art pagan, but this seems blaming him for the weakness of his followers, who took for their type his works rather than his ideal. The ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)
... Herrick's poems cannot be dated, and it is idle to enquire which were written before his ordination and which afterwards. His conception of religion was medieval in its sensuousness, and he probably repeated the stages of sin, repentance and renewed assurance with some facility. He lived with an old servant, Prudence Baldwin, the "Prew" of many of his poems; kept a spaniel named Tracy, and, so says tradition, a tame ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... with the remote places of the world, centers of commerce, and the names of men high in affairs, made me wonder and wonder again what had led him to choose for advance in fortune this Buddhist stronghold of moats and medieval castles, so limited in possibilities, so far from contact with foreign things. The teaching of English, as I had good reason to know, yielded many a hearty laugh, but a scant living. There was no other ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... indicate as to what he represents himself? What is the "broken sword"? Who fight in tournaments? What is there appropriate in the word "tilt"? How can the one who is vanquished be victor still? Is the figure of medieval knighthood well sustained? ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... signalizes that century for its greatness. To confine the quotations to two writers well known in our day, I find that Fiske in his Beginnings of New England says of the thirteenth century: "It was a wonderful time but after all less memorable as the culmination of medieval empire and medieval church than as the dawning of the new era in which we live today." Frederic Harrison, in his Survey of the Thirteenth Century says, "Of all the epochs of effort after a new life that ... is the most spiritual, the most really constructive ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... by Gray, Collins, Chatterton, Macpherson, and others, culminated in Walter Scott (1771-1832). His passion for the medieval was first excited by reading Percy's Reliques, when he was a boy; and in one of his school themes he maintained that Ariosto was a greater poet than Homer. He began early to collect manuscript ballads, suits of armor, pieces of old plate, border-horns, and ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... and medieval times believed, firmly believed, that men are not equal, that the only true men are Persians, or Greeks, or Romans, or Franks. But we cannot believe that now. And people who sacrifice themselves for the principles of aristocracy and of patriotism to-duty, ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... its wood formed the torch which lighted the Roman bridal couple to their nuptial chamber on the wedding day. It is evident, therefore, that the white-thorn was considered a sacred tree long before Christian tradition identified it as forming the Crown of Thorns; a medieval belief which further enhanced the sanctity attached to it. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Irish consider it unlucky to cut down this holy tree, especially as it is said to be under the protection of the fairies, who resent any injury done to it. A legend current in county ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... Pliny and Seneca represent the more advanced study of physical and of moral science respectively, and the edifice is crowned by Theology, the long and arduous course for which followed that of the Arts. Its representative in a medieval treatise is naturally ...
— Life in the Medieval University • Robert S. Rait
... noblest proof of his love of England lies in the work which immortalizes his name. In his 'Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation,' Baeda was at once the founder of medieval history and the first English historian. All that we really know of the century and a half that follows the landing of Augustine, we know from him. Wherever his own personal observation extended, the story is told with admirable detail and force. He is hardly less ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous |
