Almost everywhere, medieval culture was also by and large French culture. Medieval men and women wore French fashions, emulated French manners, imitated French chivalric traditions, mimicked French troubadours, read French sagas, and prayed in French-inspired Gothic cathedrals. Of another Gallic architectural wonder, the nation’s abbeys, the chronicler Joinville likened them to illuminations of a manuscript in azure and gold. Of the University of Paris, a young Irish scholar exclaimed, it is “the home and nurse of theological and philosophical science, mother of liberal arts, mistress of
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