"Middle Ages" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... frequently made that observation. [Rising.] I do live in the Middle Ages, in my imagination. I live in every age in which Love was not a cool, level emotion, but a fierce, all-conquering flame—a flame that grew in the heart of a woman, that of a sudden spread through her whole organism, that lit up her eyes with a light ...
— The Gay Lord Quex - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur W. Pinero
... of Finance and Legislation.*—Structurally, the English Parliament is a creation of the Middle Ages; politically, it is a product of modern times, and, in no small measure, of the past hundred years. Before the close of the Middle Ages, however, it had acquired a sum total of authority which at least gave promise of its development into a great co-ordinate, if not a preponderating, power ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... humidity; its natural condition was unfavorable for the construction and maintenance of substantial common roads, and the transportation of so heavy a material as coal, by land, from the remote counties where alone it was mined in the Middle Ages, was costly and difficult. For all these reasons, the consumption of wood was large, and apprehensions of the exhaustion of the forests were excited at an early period. Legislation there, as elsewhere, proved ineffectual ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... literature has not yet been given a name that recommends itself to universal acceptance. Some have called it "Rabbinical Literature," because during the middle ages every Jew of learning bore the title Rabbi; others, "Neo-Hebraic"; and a third party considers it purely theological. These names are all inadequate. Perhaps the only one sufficiently comprehensive is "Jewish Literature." That embraces, as it should, the aggregate of writings produced ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... for the rich fish sauce of the ancients, equivalent to a saumure, perhaps, in modern French cookery. In the Middle Ages the word is used both for a condiment ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... By the Classic age is generally meant the age of Greece and Rome; and by the Romantic is meant the middle ages.] ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... states named republics in the Middle Ages had no woman Doge, or Duke, although women rose to the semblance of political power with empires and kingdoms, in Italy and Spain as well as in Germany and France, ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... it belonged to some vintner or maltster in the Middle Ages," said I. "I have seen in England leathern drinking flagons of the seventeenth century—'black jacks' as they were called—which were of the same colour and hardness ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... very much more popularly distributed in the Middle Ages than they are now; but we will pass all that and consider recent history. The franchise has never been largely and liberally granted in England; half the males have no vote and are not likely to get one. It was never granted in reply to pressure from awakened sections ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... the operations of a band of ruffians, estimated at from fifty to one hundred in number, and such floundering incapacity for prompt action by public authority seem more like events from a chronicle of the Middle Ages than from the public records of a modern nation. Of like tenor, was a famous career which came to an end in this period. Jesse W. James, the son of a Baptist minister in Clay County, Missouri, for some years carried on ...
— The Cleveland Era - A Chronicle of the New Order in Politics, Volume 44 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Henry Jones Ford
... of the 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 ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... a corruption of Tibby, and that is from Tybalt, the name of puss in the old Beast Epic of the middle ages. Ben Johnson uses “tiberts” for cats; and Mercutio, in “Romeo and Juliet” (Act. iii., sc. 1) addresses Tybalt, when wishing to annoy him, as “Tybalt, you rat catcher . . . King of ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... and silver-smiths of the middle ages, the Roman money-lenders united both trades. See afterwards, NERO, c. 5. It is hardly necessary to remark that vases or vessels of the compound metal which went by the name of Corinthian brass, or bronze, were esteemed even more valuable ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... were nearly, though not quite, as superstitious at that time as in the Middle Ages. "Murrain on him," said Leicester. "Catch me laying a finger on him. I'm glad he is gone; and I hope he won't ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... long ago for use in case of extreme emergency. It contained prussic acid. She poured the contents into a glass and drank it off. Then she lay upon her bed and waited for the only friend she had left in the world, with hands folded on her breast, like some saint of the middle ages. ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... the necessary knowledge of preservative chemicals, the art seems to have been in the hands of chemists and astrologers, chiefly, during the middle ages, and stuffed animals such as bats, crocodiles, frogs, snakes, lizards, owls, etc., figure in literary descriptions of their abodes. Then as now also, the dining halls of the nobles and wealthy were decorated with heads and horns procured ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham
... of the tale of terror; the element of fear in myths, heroic legends, ballads and folk-tales; terror in the romances of the middle ages, in Elizabethan times and in the seventeenth century; the credulity of the age of reason; the renascence of terror and wonder in poetry; the "attempt to blend the marvellous of old story with the natural of ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... loved the Renaissance as he did the Middle Ages, but he saw it not as primarily pagan but as one more example of the immense vitality of a Catholicism which had had so many rebirths that it had buried its own past deeper than the past of paganism. He loved the fountains that threw their ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... training, and its progress is the improvement which one generation makes upon another in the observance of its precepts. One who has read the old Penitential books and observed the evidences they afford of the vitality of heathen practices and rites among the people in England in the early Middle Ages will not be too harsh in characterizing the still imperfect fruits of the Catholic missions of the last ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 • Emma Helen Blair
... intellects rendered even more obtuse by the rude nature of their customary employments; while, on the other hand, an apposite story would arouse attention and stimulate that blind and unenquiring devotion which is so remarkably characteristic of the Middle Ages."[4] ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... the only classical authors for the Romans, who strove and contrived to imitate them. After the great periods of Roman literature, after Cicero and Virgil, the Romans in their turn had their classics, who became almost exclusively the classical authors of the centuries which followed. The middle ages, which were less ignorant of Latin antiquity than is believed, but which lacked proportion and taste, confused the ranks and orders. Ovid was placed above Homer, and Boetius seemed a classic equal to Plato. The revival of learning in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... the Garden of Eden was to be found in the Orient was a common belief in the Middle Ages and later. Cf. the Book of ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... The banners of the Romans, used in their warfares, were essentially different from modern flags, colors and ensigns; they were carvings of wood or metal, some of them representing eagles, like the Persian standard described by Xenophon. In the Middle Ages it was a connecting link between the military and the clergy. The crescent and the cross symbols typified the two great contending forces of the ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Exploring the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... with deep pleasure at first, and with much relief, upon these healthy objective modern men of ours. The only way out, for spiritual hardihood, after the world-sick Middle Ages, was a Columbus, a vast splendid train of Things after him, of men who emphasised Things,—who could emphasise Things. It is a great spectacle and a memorable one—the one we are in to-day, the spectacle of the wonder that men are doing ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... apparition changed again, showing a crossbow on the shoulder, and the visored cap of an archer of the middle ages, with the visor lowered, an object even more unlikely to meet with on these heights than a strayed cow or ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... There is a Mr. Sumner here,—lately arrived,—who is teaching. The place is quite at the other end of the island from Coffin's Point. At present I am by no means settled; it seems like jumping from the 19th century into the Middle Ages to return from the civilization and refinement which the ladies instituted at Coffin's to ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... name of Ruskin is English, dating from the middle ages. Soon after the dissolution of Furness Abbey, Richerde Ruskyn and his family were land-owners at Dalton-in-Furness. One branch, and that with which we are ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... During the middle ages, as religion became ever more formal and less spiritual, as the priesthood deteriorated intellectually and spiritually, liturgies flourished; and it is not too much to assert that just in proportion to the growth ...
— Presbyterian Worship - Its Spirit, Method and History • Robert Johnston
... during the three years of this awful visitation one-third of the people of Europe perished. Whole cities were wiped out. In the despair and desolation of the period of scarcity that followed, humanity became hysterical, and within a generation that oddest of all the extravagances of the Middle Ages, the "dancing mania," rose to its height. Men and women wandered from town to town, especially in Germany, dancing frantically, until in their exhaustion they would beg the bystanders to beat them or even jump on them to enable ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... now I will tell you why I wished to have the picture. I read that no one knew the artist, nor whom the picture represents. But it is very clearly a philosopher of the Middle Ages. Just such a picture I wanted for my gallery, for you are aware that no one knows the author of the 'German Theology,' and moreover, that we have no picture of him. I wished to try whether the picture of an Unknown by an Unknown ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... demonstrated harmony between theory and fact, the highest pleasure of the religious man has been already tasted in the very act of praying, prior to verification, any further effort in this direction being a mere disturbance of his peace? Or is it that we have before us a residue of that mysticism of the middle ages, so admirably described by Whewell—that 'practice of referring things and events not to clear and distinct notions, not to general rules capable of direct verification, but to notions vague, distant, and vast, which we cannot bring ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... and spirit of this volume are alike admirable. Miss Kavanagh divides her work into four periods; the first relates the deeds of holy women under the Roman empire; the second tells us of the fruits of faith in the middle ages; the third is devoted to the women of the seventeenth century; and the fourth to those of the eighteenth and present centuries. We have read many of these records of other days, as told by Miss Kavanagh, and we are sure that ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... consider the Decameron of Boccacio as a probable period where the temporary queen of the day would impose the arret of pique-nique upon her subjects; and when I look over the engravings of the manners and customs of the Italians of the Middle Ages, all indicating the frequency of the al fresco banquets, and find that subsequently Watteau and Lancret revel in similar amusements in France, where the personages of the fete manifestly wear Italian-fashioned ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... as the great booms of the wing-shaped sails are hoisted to the tops of the stumpy masts of the fishermen's boats. Barcelona with its fine harbor nestling under the towering slopes of Montjuic has been a trading city since most ancient times. In the middle ages the fleets of its stocky merchants were the economic scaffolding which underlay the pomp and heraldry of the great sea kingdom of the Aragonese. To this day you can find on old buildings the arms of the kings of Aragon and the counts of Barcelona in Mallorca ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... Berry. "What with the cocoa-nut shies and the steam roundabouts, you'd think you were back in the Middle Ages. ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... Constantinople, though cats were generally deemed to have souls and to possess psychic properties, they were thought to derive them from evil sources, and so strong was the prejudice against these unfortunate animals on this account, that all through the Middle Ages we find them suffering such barbaric torture as only the perverted minds of a fanatical, priest-ridden people could devise (which treatment, no doubt, partly, at all events, accounts for the many palaces, houses, etc., in those particular countries, stated to have ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... 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 ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... crumbling segment of the ancient world, over the yellow Tiber: as familiar on the Chinese tea-caddy as on Canaletto's canvas; as traditional a local feature of London as of Florence; as significant of the onward march of civilization in Wales to-day as in Liguria during the Middle Ages. Where men dwell and wander, and water flows, these beautiful and enduring, or curious and casual expedients are found, as memorable triumphs of architecture, crowned with historical associations, or as primitive inventions that unconsciously ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... Malati Madhava, the hero of which rescues his mistress from being offered as a sacrifice by one named Aghori Ghanta. [8] According to Lassen, quoted by Sir H. Risley, the Aghoris of the present day are closely connected with the Kapalika sect of the Middle Ages, who wore crowns and necklaces of skulls and offered human sacrifices to Chamunda, a form of Devi. The Aghoris now represent their filthy habits as merely giving practical expression to the abstract doctrine that the whole ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... lived like brothers amongst themselves, dividing all goods alike, so that they were called Like-dealers; and no beggar was found amongst them, for they had all things in common. [Footnote: These Like-dealers were the communists of the Middle Ages, and were for a number of years the plague of the northern seas; until at the beginning of the fifteenth century they were subdued, and many of them captured by the Dutch, who nailed them up in barrels, ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... for many centuries, Staple Inn was at first associated in the middle ages with the dealing in the "staple commodity" of wool, to use Lord Chief Justice Coke's words, but about the fifteenth century the wool merchants gave way to the wearers of woollen "stuff," and their old haunt became one of the Inns of Chancery—the Staple Inn of the lawyers—perpetuating ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... first night was clear, and we lay down in the darkening aisles of the great Sequoia grove. The majestic trunks, beautiful in color and in symmetry, rose round us like the pillars of a mightier cathedral than ever was conceived even by the fervor of the Middle Ages. Hermit thrushes sang beautifully in the evening, and again, with a burst of wonderful music, at dawn. I was interested and a little surprised to find that, unlike John Burroughs, John Muir cared little for birds or bird songs, and knew little about them. The hermit-thrushes meant nothing to him, ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... secret from my stepfather was impossible. I had vainly endeavored for months to find the flaw in his armor of dissimulation; I had but broken not one dagger, but twenty against the plates of that cuirass. If I had had all the tormentors of the Middle Ages at my service, I could not have forced his fast-shut lips to open, or extorted an admission from his ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... during the time that Paul, newly returned from Florence, was passing the proofs of his great tragedy, Francesca of the Lilies. Then it had been the study of a Cardinal of the Middle Ages or of a mediaeval noble devoted to the arts. In what respect did it differ now? The massive table of cedar of Lebanon, figured in ivory and mother o' pearl with the Rape of Proserpine, the work of a pupil of Benvenuto Cellini, remained, as also did the prie-dieu, enriched with ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... Thus in the middle ages there was, with a large number of cities, a decisive moment when the building of city halls and cathedrals became a violent passion, which had to be satisfied at any price; the life of the community depended upon it. Security and strength, public order, centralization, nationality, country, ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... whatever he wished on a pile, in which the thing stolen might be hidden. Upon the completion of this investigation if the stolen property was found in the pile, the suit ceased." The Filipinos also practiced customs very similar to the "judgments of God" of the middle ages, such as putting suspected persons, by pairs, under the water and adjudging ...
— History of the Philippine Islands Vols 1 and 2 • Antonio de Morga
... This work is important; first, as a record, generally accepted as eminently trustworthy, and second, for its literary excellence, in which sense it has been held in peculiar esteem. George Saintsbury remarks that those chronicles "are by universal consent among the most attractive works of the Middle Ages." They comprize one of the oldest extant examples of French prose. The passage here given was translated for this collection from the old French by Eric Arthur Bell. A translation by T. Smith was published ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... in 1492, repeats the island of Antillia, and inserts beyond it to the west, the isle of St Brandan or Ima, from a fabulous work of the middle ages. Occasion has already occurred to notice two other ancient pretended discoveries of the New World: the fabulous voyages of the Zenos, another Venetian tale; and the equally fabulous Portuguese island of the Seven Churches, abounding in gold, and inhabited ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... given any stability to his existence must have been the monotonous necessity of paying heavily for the privilege of being whatever for the moment he was. But when one begins to think of these things one finds oneself wondering why anybody in the Middle Ages, except kings and tax collectors, ever took the ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... changes which affected the family during the Middle Ages and the still more striking changes which came through the Reformation, we must now devote ourselves to the study of the problems of the family as it exists at present. The religious theory of the family which prevailed during the Middle Ages, ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... held his ground, unmoved. His bearing was a curious blend of diffidence and aggressiveness. He was determined, but apologetic. A hired assassin of the Middle Ages, resolved to do his job loyally, yet conscious of causing inconvenience to his victim, might have looked ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... and during that time he dies in torment In Sister Helen we touch the key-note of Rossetti's creative gift. Even the superstition which forms the basis of the ballad owes something of its individual character to the invention and poetic bias of the poet. The popular superstitions of the Middle Ages were usually of two kinds only. First, there were those that arose out of a jealous Catholicism, always glancing towards heresy; and next there were those that laid their account neither with orthodoxy nor unbelief, and were purely pagan. The former were the offspring ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... the Confessor we learn the town owed certain rights connected with its market, and during the Middle Ages it was an important centre for the trade of the district. On account of this market, and from the fact that the greater part of the abbey lands lay on the left bank of the river, it would seem probable that ...
— Evesham • Edmund H. New
... be if you had lived so much in the Middle Ages as I have done these last few years! The cathedral was a very good place four or five centuries ago; but it is played out now... I am not modern, either. I am more ancient than mediaevalism, if you ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... to dower a daughter or to pay for her entrance into a convent. It has been suggested that this method of seeking to benefit the deserving poor denoted a morbid tendency in Michelangelo's nature; but any one who is acquainted with Italian customs in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance must be aware that nothing was commoner than to dower poor girls or to establish them in nunneries by way of charity. Urbino, for example, by his will bound his executors to provide for the marriage of two honest girls with a dowry of twenty florins ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... their task to carry Law, Culture, Liberty and Industry into the East of Europe. All Friedrich's Lands, with the exception only of some Old-Saxon territory, had, by force and colonization, been painfully gained from the Sclave. At no time since the migrations of the Middle Ages, had this struggle for possession of the wide Plains to the east of Oder ceased. When arms were at rest, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... was perhaps the basis of the sympathetic telegraph of the Middle Ages, which is first described in the MAGIAE NATURALIS of John Baptista Porta, published at Naples in 1558. It was supposed by Porta and others after him that two similar needles touched by the same lodestone were sympathetic, so that, although far apart, ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... this piece of land is very curious. To a foreigner the entrance of Holland is like the first page of a great epic entitled, The Struggle with the Sea. In the Middle Ages it was nothing but a wide gulf with a few small islands. At the beginning of the sixteenth century this gulf was no longer in existence; four hundred years of patient labor had changed it into a fertile plain, defended by embankments, traversed by canals, populated by villages, and known as Flemish ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... of hair, it is, still at Assisi; concerning which, and the general use of camels' hair, or sackcloth, or briars and thorns, in the Middle Ages, together with seal-skins (not badgers'), and rams' skins dyed gules, by the Jews, and the Crusaders, as compared with the use of the two furs, Ermine and Vair, and their final result in the operations of the Hudson's Bay Company, much casual notice will be ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... 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 ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... verdure between the towering mountains of Pichincha and Antisana, Cotacachi and Cayambi. This was the centre of the most ancient native civilization after that of Titicaca. Here, while the darkness of the Middle Ages was settling over Europe, dwelt the Quitus, whose origin is lost in the mists of fable. Then, while Peter the Hermit was leading his fanatic host against the Saracens, the Cara nation waged a more successful crusade, and supplanted the Quitus. ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... chosen, however, are of both historic and dramatic importance, and they have the added value of giving the modern reader a clear picture of the state of semi-lawlessness which existed in Europe, during the middle ages. "The Borgias, the Cenci, Urbain Grandier, the Marchioness of Brinvilliers, the Marchioness of Ganges, and the rest—what subjects for the pen of Dumas!" ...
— Widger's Quotations from Celebrated Crimes of Alexandre Dumas, Pere • David Widger
... necessities. Theoretical interests may lead to the founding of private associations such as the Greek philosophers' schools; public schools owe their origin to the social need for professional training. Thus during the Middle Ages the first schools were called into being by the need of professional training for ecclesiastics, the first learned profession, and a calling whose importance seemed to demand such training. Essentially ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... stared in horror. "But my dear fellow, no checkup since January 1963! We aren't in the Middle Ages, you know. ...
— An Ounce of Cure • Alan Edward Nourse
... law in an office where there are many 'patent cases,' will bear witness. Eighteen hundred years ago, the inventor was crucified—lest his malleable glass should injure Ephesian or other silversmiths. During the middle ages, they burnt him alive. In the times of Worcester he seldom escaped prison, for to be a 'projector' was a charge which greatly aggravated that of treason; while in France, where they managed these things better, according to the views of the day, they simply cast him ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... for poetry, good or bad. The Dark Horse itself was about a knight in the Middle Ages, you know. Great nonsense it was, too. Matthews used to read me passages from time to time. When he gave up the regiment he left me the book as a farewell gift. He said I was the only man he knew who really sympathized with him in the affair. I've got it still. ...
— A Prefect's Uncle • P. G. Wodehouse
... be praised appropriately as a still delightful old city that has managed to retain to a quite singular degree the outward aspect and charm of the Middle Ages, one feels that one has left one's self without any proper stock of epithets with which to appraise at its proper value the charm and romance of Bruges. Of late years, it is true, this world-famed capital of West Flanders has lost something of its old somnolence and peace. Malines, ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris
... yawning muzzle, than the rounded and neatly-polished butt. The huge mouth seems to dilate as you look upon it. You already begin to fancy you behold the leaden mass—the three-ounce bullet—issuing from its stronghold, like a relentless baron of the middle ages, going forth under his grim archway, seeking only whom he may devour. The sight is apt to diminish the influence of skill. Nerves are necessary to such sportsmen, and nerves become singularly untrue when frowned upon through such ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... we might be captured?" Lucile questioned, eagerly. "That would be some adventure. You might almost imagine we were living in the Middle Ages——" ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... would incline to quit hold of the earlier and less definite tradition, and to consider Saint Serf as contemporary with Adamnan, the celebrated Abbot of Iona, and distinguished biographer of Saint Columba. St. Serf founded many churches, and his reputation in the Middle Ages for the neat and appropriate miracles attributed to him may be reckoned the measure of his eminence among Scotland's early evangelists. Wyntoun gives a quaint dialogue between St. Serf and the enemy of mankind, ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... their vendettas of blood descending from father to son? That was once the prevailing fashion of revenge. Yet even before the day when Columbus sailed had certain communities matured beyond it. This sprout of the Middle Ages flourishes fresh and green some five hundred miles and five hundred years from New York. In the single State of Texas you will find a contrast more violent still. There, not long ago, an African was led upon a platform in a public place for people to see, and tortured slowly to death ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... the seven states of physical matter—to "earth, water, air and fire," or to translate from mediaeval symbolism to modern accuracy of expression, to the solid, liquid, gaseous and etheric conditions. It has long been the custom to pity and despise the ignorance of the alchemists of the middle ages, because they gave the title of "elements" to substances which modern chemistry has discovered to be compounds; but in speaking of them thus slightingly we have done them great injustice, for their knowledge on this subject was really wider, not narrower, than ours. They may or may not ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... not only monasteries, but seats of learning, as in Europe in the Middle Ages, and here the Doctrines were subjected to brilliant analysis and logical subtleties which had almost superseded the living faith. In that cold atmosphere the spirit of Shiran Shonin could not spread its wings, though for twenty ...
— Buddhist Psalms • Shinran Shonin
... Middle Ages we find the sword and spear still holding sway, with the bow as an important accessory for the use of the common soldier. As for the knight, he became an iron-clad champion, so incased in steel ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... energy of the soul, the same awe, rooted in the blood of our race, which manifest themselves in the early and Middle Ages, determine the character of the religious history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the fifteenth century, suffering and the presence of suffering, the law of tragedy of which we have spoken, add ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... 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, when, in 1412, fearfully ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... "Treacle Bible," 1584, Jeremiah viii., v. 22, this passage is rendered: "Is there not treacle at Gylead?" Venice treacle, or triacle, was a famous antidote in the middle ages to all animal poisons. It was named Theriaca (the Latin word for our present treacle) from the Greek word Therion, a small animal, in allusion to the vipers which were added to the triacle by Andromachus, physician to the ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... definite is known of Greek literature before them. Homer is now recognized as the first poet of antiquity, not only in the order of time; but it took Europe many centuries to discover that fact. During the Middle Ages the second-rate Virgil was held to be a much greater genius than Homer, and it was in England, as Professor Christ notes (69), that the truer estimate originated. Pope's translation of the Homeric poems, with all its faults, helped to dispel the mists ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... the redemption of prisoners. This need had been known even when Rome's power was at its height, for Cicero[25] specifies the redemption of men captured by pirates as one of the ways in which the generously minded were wont to spend their money. The practice lasted down continuously through the Middle Ages. Gaguin, the historian of France, Erasmus' first patron in Paris, was for many years General of the Trinitarians, and made a journey to Granada to redeem prisoners who had been taken fighting against the Moors. Even in the eighteenth century, ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... relation to morals? And the answer is to the same effect, that morals must take care of themselves. There is a one-sided truth in these answers, if they are regarded as condemnations of the interference with commerce in the last century or of clerical persecution in the Middle Ages. But 'laissez-faire' is not the best but only the second best. What the best is, Plato does not attempt to determine; he only contrasts the imperfection of law with the wisdom of the ...
— Statesman • Plato
... mean. An' I sez to myself,—'ef they wuz like he is, an' wuz ez plenty in the Middle Ages ez they make 'em out ter be, then it's a pity we wuzn't back right in the center ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... Missals, and Books of Hours showed the influence of the culture, the talent, and the tastes of Erin. Surely here there should be opportunity and scope enough for the production of the works of the painter's hand. The ancient states of Italy, her cities and communities of the Middle Ages, were those who cherished most their native painters, and the names of many of those who covered the glowing canvases of Italy with immortal work are known often from the designation of some obscure township where they ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell
... unknown parts, which produced the same effect upon an inhabitant of Rue Montmartre as the places upon an old map of the world, marked with the mysterious words 'Mare ignotum', would upon a savant of the Middle Ages. There were many houses in this ancient suburb; curious old buildings, nearly ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the monastery on the Porto Fino road was like a pleasant little glimpse into the brighter realities of the Middle Ages. The place, which is used as a home of rest for convalescent Carthusians, chanced to be quite empty and deserted; the Bavarian rang a jangling bell again and again and at last gained the attention of an old gardener working in ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... 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
... persons outside the former limited sacred circle; the pretence of protecting the Emperor, advanced by these rising powers, partly in order to gain prestige by using his imperial name in support of their local ambitions, and partly because—as during the Middle Ages in the case of the Papacy—no one cared to brave the moral odium of annihilating a venerable spiritual power, even though gradually shorn of its temporal rights ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... juncture tend to discreet legislation. Were the Unionists and Secessionists but as Guelphs and Ghibellines? If not, then far be it from a great nation now to act in the spirit that animated a triumphant town-faction in the Middle Ages. But crowding thoughts must at last be checked; and, in times like the present, one who desires to be impartially just in the expression of his views, moves as among sword-points presented ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... minstrels, when the mediaeval romancers gathered it up, and interweaving it with the traditions of Arthur and Charlemagne, produced those strange compositions which are so entirely the product and repository of the habits, superstitions, and sympathies of the Middle Ages that they serve to ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... some plainly rage. [4734]Leo Afer saith, that in Africa a man shall scarce find a maid at fourteen years of age, they are so forward, and many amongst us after they come into the teens do not live without husbands, but linger. What pranks in this kind the middle ages have played is not to be recorded. Si mihi sint centum linguae, sint oraque centum, no tongue can sufficiently declare, every story is full of men and women's insatiable lust, Nero's, Heliogabali, Bonosi, &c. [4735] Coelius Amphilenum, sed Quintius Amphelinam depereunt, &c. They neigh after ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... deny gloriousness to all mankind; too cowardly for whimsy and derring-do, they assert whimsy and derring-do ceased at the very latest no later than the middle ages; flickering little tapers themselves, their feeble eyes are dazzled to unseeingness of the flaming conflagrations of other souls that illumine their skies. Possessing power in no greater quantity than is the just due of pygmies, they cannot conceive of ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... not 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 him up the Adige Valley to ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... stone of Ensisheim on the Rhine, at which philosophy once smiled incredulously, regarding it as one of the romances of the middle ages, may now be admitted to sober attention as a piece of authentic history. A homely narrative of its fall was drawn up at the time by order of the Emperor Maximilian, and deposited with the stone in the church. It may thus be rendered: "In the year of the Lord 1492, on Wednesday, which was Martinmas ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... party went in at the heavy door: the clashing sound of the bolt and chains, the yelping of the dogs, the guns glistening in the glimmer of light which came in through the cloister, made a scene which must often have had its counterparts in the feudal keeps of the Middle Ages, when the robber knights returned ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... time they were trained to acquit themselves with credit in those encounters celebrated as combats at the barriers. At the sieges of cities, during the middle ages, knights of the besieging army were in the habit of going to the barriers, or grated palisades of the fortress, and defying the garrison to break a lance for the honour of their ladies. Indeed, this was ...
— The Boy Crusaders - A Story of the Days of Louis IX. • John G. Edgar
... its painted houses, its green gardens and the Apennines in the background! But what noise! What crowds! Out of every three men on the street, one is a monk and another a soldier. Florence is sad, it is the Middle Ages living in the midst of modern life. How can any one endure those grilled windows and that horrible brown color with which all the houses are soiled? What could we do at Rome? We are not traveling in order to forget ourselves, much ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... return, and which were but too ready to vent themselves on both sides in ugly words and deeds. That hateful severance between the classes was, I believe, an evil of recent growth, unknown to old England. From the middle ages, up to the latter years of the French war, the relation between the English gentry and the labourers seems to have been more cordial and wholesome than in any other country of Europe. But with the French Revolution came a change for the worse. The Revolution ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... "I hold my crown," he said, "by the favor of God, and I am responsible to Him for every hour of my government." Much under the influence of the two scholars Niebuhr and Ranke, he hated the ideas of the French Revolution, and dreamed of an ideal Christian state like that of the Middle Ages. He was caricatured by the journals of the day, and laughed at by the wits, including Heine, and pictured as a king with "Order" on one hand, "Counter-order" on the other, ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... about death? Does she possess a soul? Does she think she has one? Her religion is an obscure chaos of theogonies as old as the world, treasured up out of respect for ancient customs; and of more recent ideas about the blessed final annihilation, imported from India at the epoch of our middle ages by saintly Chinese missionaries. The bonzes themselves are puzzled; what a muddle, therefore, must not all this become, when jumbled together in the childish brain ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... copyists who—strange to say—were both smatterers enough to betray their little knowledge by converting Pervigilium into Per Virgilium (scilicet, "by Virgil"): thus helping us to follow the process of thought by which the Middle Ages turned Virgil into a wizard. Here and there the texts become quite silly, separately or in consent; and just where they agree in the most surprising way—i.e. in the arrangement of the lines—the conjectural emendator is invited to do his worst by a note at the head of ...
— The Vigil of Venus and Other Poems by "Q" • Q
... 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 ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... service from his employees, and accordingly he made it worth their while to be faithful. He was liberal to them because liberality paid him. His position in the world was somewhat like that of a robber baron in the Middle Ages, carving out a kingdom with the help of loyal followers. The people he plundered were the outsiders, and a certain share of the ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... to Wagner's other conceptions what the 'Winter's Tale' is to Shakespeare's other works. Its fantasy is founded on gayety and drollery, and it has called up the Nuremberg of the Middle Ages, with its guilds, its poet-artisans, its pedants, its cavaliers, to draw forth the freshest laughter in the midst of the highest, the ...
— The Loves of Great Composers • Gustav Kobb
... and of these it is probable that truth is lasting only in so far as it is a function and manifestation of beauty—a projection of feeling in terms of idea. The world is a charnel house of dead religions. Where are all the faiths of the middle ages, so complex and yet so precise? But all that was essential in the beauty of the middle ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... evidently much appearance of the Monkish frauds of the middle ages; but still they are evidences of the tradition of the country that such a gift had been made by Patrick to Mac-Carthen. And as we advance higher in chronological authorities, we find the notice of this gift stripped of much of its acquired garb ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... service you push the [123] doors in vain against the closely serried shoulders of the good people of Amiens, one and all in black for church-holiday attire. Then, one and all, they intone the Tantum ergo (did it ever sound so in the Middle Ages?) as the Eucharist, after a long procession, rises ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... wander over the earth as a spirit, till his wife, tired of his coming back again so often, put a stop to it by having his mummy burnt. He gives us for the first time Eastern tales in a Greek dress, and we thus learn the source from which Europe gained much of its literature in the Middle Ages. The Alexandrian author of greatest note at this time was the historian Appian, who tells us that he had spent some years in Rome practising as a lawyer, and returned to Egypt on being appointed to a high post in the government of his native city. ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... only when it becomes a very virulent disease that it becomes an epidemic. Possibly again that is the meaning both of cosmopolitanism and imperialism. Anyhow the tribes sitting by Afric's sunny fountains did not take up the song when Francis of Assisi stood on the very mountain of the Middle Ages, singing the Canticle of the Sun. When Michael Angelo carved a statue in snow, Eskimos did not copy him, despite their large natural quarries or resources. Laplanders never made a model of the Elgin Marbles, with a frieze of reindeers instead of ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... quite sure how far the old Romans engaged in such pursuits themselves, as well as admitting from outside those who did, with their worships. They indicate also the growth of an industrial population, organised in gilds, as in the Middle Ages; here beyond doubt the workers were mainly of native birth. Lastly, they indicate an advance in military efficiency and, as a result of this military progress, some change in the relation of Rome to ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... table; upon her right sat the most distinguished-looking man Mavis had ever seen. Tall, finely proportioned, with noble, regular features, surmounted by grey hair, he suggested to Mavis a fighting bishop of the middle ages: she wondered who he was. The soldier on her left talked incessantly, but, to Mavis's surprise, he made no mention of his campaigns; he spoke of nothing else but rose culture, his persistent ill-luck at flower shows, the ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... by way of Pontarlier, and anyone who is interested in the Burgundian and Spanish wars of France should take this opportunity of seeing what may be seen of the town of Dole and its massive church-tower. The sieges of Dole made it very famous in the later middle ages, more especially the long siege under Charles d'Amboise, at the crisis of which that general recommended his soldiers to leave a few of the people for seed,[46] and the old sobriquet la Joyeuse was punningly changed to la Dolente. It has had other claims upon fame; for if Besancon ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... which found expression in the name,—the House of Claes. The whole spirit of ancient Flanders breathed in that mansion, which afforded to the lovers of burgher antiquities a type of the modest houses which the wealthy craftsmen of the Middle Ages ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... and her master likewise. John, when you're on horseback you look like a young knight of the Middle Ages. Maybe, some of the old Norman blood was ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... to be a means of grace, I would prefer hell. I had a thousand times rather associate with the Pagan philosophers than with the inquisitors of the Middle Ages. I certainly should prefer the worst man in Greek or Roman history to John Calvin; and I can imagine no man in the world that I would not rather sit on the same bench with than the Puritan fathers and the founders of orthodox churches. I would trade off my harp any minute for a seat in the other ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... their new quarters seemed rather weird and strange on this first evening of their arrival. After being accustomed to electric light and modern bedrooms, it was a great change to walk upstairs with candles to antique chambers that might have belonged to the Middle Ages. ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... Clairvaux and his literary labours. These were not all self-imposed. Among his correspondents were persons in all ranks of life; and his letters, no less than his formal treatises, prove his influence as one of the most deeply spiritual teachers of the Middle Ages. ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... decorative paintings in which Cabanel has represented the principal episodes of the history of St. Louis. But the largest historical canvases on the walls of the gallery are those by J.P. Laurens, belonging to the museums of Florence, of Havre, of Nantes and of Toulouse. Laurens delights in the Middle Ages, gloomy and stately periods of ecclesiastical domination and feudal violence. He is the painter of tortures and of tombs (the Exhumation of Pope Formosus, The Interdict, Francis Borgia before the Coffin of Isabella of Portugal), but his vigorous and severe ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... wherever there is an unusual personage in a district we are commended to his or her care. Sometimes it is one of the 'grand quality,' and often it is an Ossianic sort of person like Shaun O'Grady, who lives in a little whitewashed cabin, and who has, like Mr. Yeats's Gleeman, 'the whole Middle Ages under his frieze coat.' The longer and more intimately we know these peasants, the more we realise how much in imagination, or in the clouds, if you will, they live. The ragged man of leisure you meet on the road may be a ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... onset of the troops who were still shouting "Remember Jackson!" and who were led on by a plumed knight out of the Middle Ages, shaking a great sabre and now singing at the top of his voice his favorite line, "Old Joe Hooker, won't you come ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Iron Arm, the first of the great Counts of Flanders, had established a fortress here to withstand the invasion of the Normans. After that Furnes appears repeatedly with varying fortunes in the turbulent history of the Middle Ages, until in the thirteenth century it was razed to the ground by Robert of Artois. In the next three hundred years, however, it must have entirely recovered its position, for in the days of the Spanish Fury it was one of the headquarters of the Inquisition and of ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... from the north and south walls of the church, and the central space was thus left clear. This method of extension of the church by adding north and south chapels to the nave was pursued throughout the middle ages. The thirteenth century plan of Acton Burnell is virtually identical with the tenth or eleventh century plan of Worth. In aisled churches, such transeptal additions are simply outgrowths of the aisle walls, and were not necessarily planned with any regard to the spacing ...
— The Ground Plan of the English Parish Church • A. Hamilton Thompson
... praise, he made a collection of pathetic sentences, some of which he placed at the end of each psalm; several of which are found in certain manuscript psalters, as Fleury takes notice. The learned Fabricius, in his Latin Library of the middle ages, calls them an illustrious monument of the piety of this holy prelate. St. Anscharius died at Bremen in the year 865, the sixty-seventh of his age, and thirty-fourth of his episcopal dignity; and was honored with miracles. His name occurs in the Martyrologies soon after his death. In the ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... monk's outpourings, that renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly. Maggie was still panting for happiness, and was in ecstasy because she had found the key to it. She knew nothing of doctrines and systems—of mysticism or quietism; but this voice out of the far-off Middle Ages was the direct communication of a human soul's belief and experience, and came to Maggie as ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... peculiarly strong inducements to European enterprise. He also had an 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 an island, and the Isthmus ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 392, Saturday, October 3, 1829. • Various
... Hundreds must really, to judge by their conduct, have been so confused by terror and anxiety as to be unable to decide whether they desired to have or not to have, to be poor or rich. If a Roman or a man of the Middle Ages had been suddenly brought into view of the scene, he would have concluded without hesitation that a ruthless invader was coming down the island; that his advanced guard was momentarily expected; and that anybody found by his forces in possession of Western Union, or Harlem, or ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... have the true clannish spirit, and a hatred and rivalry exist between them that remind one of the stories of the Middle Ages. ...
— The Great Round World And What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 22, April 8, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... contrived reed-covered structures, of the building of which the Japanese have the knack, and the Governor asked some of us to say a few words. Then on a raised platform in the open there was enacted a comic interlude such as might have been seen in England in the Middle Ages. In the evening I was bidden to a dinner of the officials responsible for the day's doings. The Governor made a kindly reference to my labours and the local M.P. presented me with a kimono length of the cotton material ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... nothing of Serb and Bulgar under the Turks. There is no single document nor anything else that speaks of hatred between them. On the contrary, they were always on friendly terms. The antagonisms of the Middle Ages, as Mr. Taylor surely knows, were the work of rulers who paid no attention to the national will; there was at that time no national consciousness, and just as a Serbian would wage war with a Bulgarian prince, so would ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... the water) the principle (found elsewhere abundantly) is recognized that it is the innocent person that suffers and the guilty that is uninjured.[1669] The ordeal as a civil process continued in Europe until the Middle Ages. In the submersion in water of a woman suspected of being a witch the principle of decision was the same as is now practiced in Ashantiland and India—if the woman was drowned it was a sign that she was innocent, but if she rose unharmed from the water she was adjudged guilty ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... a gymnastic exercise. Acute powers of observation and memory might be developed by studying Chinese characters; acuteness in reasoning might be got by discussing the scholastic subtleties of the Middle Ages. The simple fact is that there is no isolated faculty of observation, or memory, or reasoning any more than there is an original faculty of blacksmithing, carpentering, or steam engineering. Faculties mean simply ...
— Moral Principles in Education • John Dewey
... monks stepped into the cloister, and a deep and unbroken silence reigned around, interrupted only by the sweet songs of the birds and the light movements of their wings. The building was in the noble style of the middle ages, and stood out in grand and harmonious proportions against the ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... of male jealousy in the history of marriage are truly incredible. I may mention the iron girdles with locks—the so-called girdles of chastity—which we still see in certain museums, which the knights of the Middle Ages put on their wives when they set off to the wars, in order to appease their jealousy. Many savage peoples do not content themselves with severely punishing adultery in woman, even by death, but even simple conversations with a strange man. Jealousy transforms marriage into a hell. It is often exalted ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... Make reflections on the German army, also on war generally. Chat about Frederick the Great. (Read Carlyle's history of him, and pick out the interesting bits.) The Drachenfels. Quote Byron. Moralise about ruined castles generally, and describe the middle ages, with your views and ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... the highwaymen of the Middle Ages to extort gold from their captives were renewed here and there to secure conversions: the feet of the victims were scorched, they were strappadoed, suspended by the feet; young mothers were tied to the bedposts, while their infants at the breast were writhing with ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... with the certainty of one who has his lecture before 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 ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... of the modern drama itself. The dramatic arts of Greece and Rome had never been wholly forgotten. Their traditions survived in Italy in the crude pantomime performances of the common people. Practically, however, the Middle Ages invented a new dramatic art of their own, developed from the gorgeous religious pantomime of the church services. The theatre was born of the cathedral; the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... beginning or end of a dynasty does not always indicate the beginning or the end of a definite period of China's social or cultural development. We have tried to break China's history down into the three large periods—"Antiquity", "The Middle Ages", and "Modern Times". This does not mean that we compare these periods with periods of the same name in Western history although, naturally, we find some similarities with the development of society and ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... the two classes into which, from the earliest times, the population of the Roman State was divided, the former of which possessed rights and privileges not conceded to the latter, and stood to them as patrons to clients, like the baron of the Middle Ages to the vassals. This inequality gave rise to repeated and often protracted struggles in the commonalty, during which the latter gradually encroached on the rights of the former till the barrier in civic status, and even in social to some extent, was as good ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... most ancient times many philosophers have imagined vaguely that one species can be transformed into another. This doctrine seems to have been adopted by the Ionian school from the sixth century before our era.... Undoubtedly also the same opinion reappeared on several occasions in the middle ages, and in modern times; it is to be found in some of the hermetic books, where the transmutation of animal and vegetable species, and that of metals, are treated as complementary to one another. In modern times we again find it alluded to by some philosophers, and especially ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... th' time iv his life," said Mr. Dooley. "Not since th' Hohnezollern fam'ly was founded be wan iv th' ablest burglars iv th' middle ages has anny prince injyed such a spree as this wan. Ye see, a prince is a gr-reat man in th' ol' counthry, but he niver is as gr-reat over there as he is here. Whin he's at home he's something th' people can't help ...
— Observations by Mr. Dooley • Finley Peter Dunne
... indefatigable lecturer. His publications include a volume of sermons and addresses, "Plain Talks to the Colored People of America," "Appeal to the King," "The Comparative Status of the Negro at the Close of the War and To-day," "The Struggle for Supremacy Between Church and State in the Middle Ages," and "The American and the African Negro." He has now ready for the press a volume of "University Addresses" and a volume of "Discussions in Philosophy and Theory;" also "The History of the Education ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... keep built of bevelled stones of a large size. Several of them measure from fifteen to eighteen feet in length, and are from five to six feet thick.[465] They were probably quarried by Giblite "stone-cutters," but placed in their present position during the middle ages. ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... establishment of the confraternity of the Archers of St. Sebastian, which still existed in Ypres when I was there in 1910. This was the last survivor of the famed, armed societies of archers which flourished in the Middle Ages. Seven hundred of these men of Ypres embarked in the Flemish ships which so harassed the French fleet in the great ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... middle ages till the great Art Revival, no one in Europe had skill enough for the purpose. It appears, therefore, that unless we adopt the somewhat strained hypothesis that a highly civilized society, now utterly extinct, once existed on this continent, we are forced to search for our sculptor among the European ...
— The American Goliah • Anon.
... friends! and that is why I took refuge here, as the malefactors used to flee to the sanctuaries in the middle ages." ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... work of negotiation went prosperously on. The minds of the Indians had been already prepared. In La Salle they saw their champion against the Iroquois, the standing terror of all this region. They gathered around his stronghold like the timorous peasantry of the middle ages around the rock-built castle of their feudal lord. From the wooden ramparts of St. Louis,—for so he named his fort,— high and inaccessible as an eagle's nest, a strange scene lay before his eye. The broad flat valley of the Illinois was ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... 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 ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... "are closed only in the historical manuals that are given to pupils to spoil their minds. In reality, barbarians are always barbarians. Israel's mission is to instruct nations. It was Israel which, in the Middle Ages, brought to Europe the wisdom of ages. Socialism frightens you. It is a Christian evil, like priesthood. And anarchy? Do you not recognize in it the plague of the Albigeois and of the Vaudois? The Jews, who instructed and polished Europe, are the only ones who can save it to-day from ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... at home and happiest, his deepest and truest ambitions, were those of an enthusiastic and romantic believer in a great discovery just within his grasp. They were such as the dreams and visions of his great Franciscan namesake, and of the imaginative seekers after knowledge in the middle ages, real or mythical, Albert the Great, Cornelius Agrippa, Dr. Faustus; they were the eager, undoubting hopes of the physical students in Italy and England in his own time, Giordano Bruno, Telesio, Campanella, Gilbert, Galileo, or the founders of the Italian prototype of "Solomon's House" in the New ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... instruction. Here was to be seen King John in his habit as he lived; here appeared the second and third Richards, King Henry, Queen Katherine, and Wolsey; now was presented London, with its inhabitants in the Middle Ages; now, the Venice of Shylock; and, anon, the Bithynia of the days of King Leontes. The spectators applauded the finery and the skill of the embellishments; and their favourable verdict upon these counts carried with it, presumably, ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... or thrown prostrate by her enemies only to astonish the world by a superb display of recuperative powers! It was France that first among the kingdoms of Europe rose from feudal chaos to orderly nationalism; it was France that first among continental countries after the Middle Ages established the reign of law throughout a powerful realm. Though wars and turmoils almost without end were a heavy drain upon Gallic vitality for many generations, France achieved steady progress to primacy ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... gentlemen, you behold a man who has followed the profession of a bandit. I feel no remorse at the recollection, no more than a soldier would feel at having served a campaign under orders from his general. I thought that I was still living in the middle ages. The laws of the land, with all their strength and wisdom, were to me words devoid of meaning. I felt brave and full of vigour; fighting was a joy. Truly, the results of our victories often made me blush; but, as they in no ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... ch. xviii. p. 111. The Hindu sovereigns of Orissa, in the middle ages, bore the style of Gaja-pati, "powerful in ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... In the middle ages the mysterious disease called leprosy was an ever present terror. Other plagues appeared at intervals and disappeared. Leprosy remained. It never left the land. It struck the King on his Throne, the Bishop in his Cathedral, the Abbess in her Nunnery, the soldier in camp, ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... diplomatic European—to say nothing of Madagascar, the steppes of Central Asia, and some of the islands of the Eastern Archipelago—how great an amount of marvel and mystery must have enveloped the countries of the East during the period that we now term the middle ages! By a long and toilsome overland journey, the rich gold and sparkling gems, the fine muslins and rustling silks, the pungent spices and healing drugs of the Morning Land, found their way to the merchant princes of the Mediterranean. These were not all. The enterprising ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various
... Far nearer to them, as an art, are the early gold and silver laces of simple design found amongst the tombs of Mycenae and Etruria, and those of a later date—i.e., the laces of gold used to decorate the vestments of the clergy, and the simple but sumptuous gowns of the Middle Ages. Along with the stole and maniple of St. Cuthbert, which are now at Durham Cathedral, was found a piece of detached gold lace, which must have formed a separate trimming. St. Cuthbert died in 685 A.D., and was buried at Lindisfarne, his body being afterwards transferred to Durham to ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... to afford her amusement and distraction. Delicate and fragile, her face was rather too long for perfect beauty, but there was something spiritual and slender about it, which recalled the faces of the Middle Ages. Her health had been shattered by a hunting accident, and her expression was habitually one of smiling melancholy and of hidden suffering. Her beautiful Venetian red hair grew above a high white forehead; and in addition to the attractiveness of her elegant svelte figure, ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... "man of religion" (homo religionis, homme de religion) was never used in Latin, French, or English to mean a pious man, but exclusively for a man belonging to a religious order. See "History of the word religio in the Middle Ages," by. Professor Ewald Fluegel, of Leland Stanford Junior University—an abstract of which is printed in Transactions of American Philological Association, 1902, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIV, 1630-34 • Various
... transcendentalists, so strangely devised and became enamored of,—the grotesque views of men and things, the funny universe altogether, which made up both the popular and the learned thought of the Middle Ages,—the Buddhistic Orient, with its subtile metaphysical illusions, its unreal astronomical heavens, its habits of repose and its tornadoes of passion,—such are instances of great diversities of character, which would be hardly accountable to each other on the supposition of mutual sanity. They ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various |
