More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
January 24 - February 3, 2019
“History never repeats itself,” said Voltaire; “man always does.”
Tuchman’s Law, as follows: “The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold” (or any figure the reader would care to supply).
the Christian religion as it then was: the matrix and law of medieval life, omnipresent, indeed compulsory. Its insistent principle that the life of the spirit and of the afterworld was superior to the here and now, to material life on earth, is one that the modern world does not share, no matter how devout some present-day Christians may be. The rupture of this principle and its replacement by belief in the worth of the individual and of an active life not necessarily focused on God is, in fact, what created the modern world and ended the Middle
the generality of mankind is not made for renunciation.
The gap between medieval Christianity’s ruling principle and everyday life is the great pitfall of the Middle Ages.
Man himself was the formulator of the impossible Christian ideal and tried to uphold it, if not live by it, for more than a millennium.
When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down.
Violent, destructive, greedy, fallible as he may be, man retains his vision of order and resumes his search.
The castle’s predecessor, the Roman villa, had been unfortified, depending on Roman law and the Roman legions for its ramparts. After the Empire’s collapse, the medieval society that emerged was a set of disjointed and clashing parts subject to no central or effective secular authority. Only the Church offered an organizing principle, which was the reason for its success, for society cannot bear anarchy.
Not citizen to state but vassal to lord was the bond that underlay political structure. The state was still struggling to be born.
Clearing, the first act of civilization,
That conflict between the reach for the divine and the lure of earthly things was to be the central problem of the Middle Ages.
The claim of the Church to spiritual leadership could never be made wholly credible to all its communicants when it was founded in material wealth.
The private wars were the curse of Europe which the crusades, it has been thought, were subconsciously invented to relieve by providing a vent for aggression.
In the expanding economy of the 12th and 13th centuries, the profits of commerce and agricultural surplus brought
burghers and peasants the cash to pay for rights and liberties.
As distinct from a hole in the roof, these chimneys were a technological advance of the 11th century that by warming individual rooms, brought lords and ladies out of the common hall where all had once eaten together and gathered for warmth, and separated owners from their retainers. No other invention
brought more progress in comfort and refinement, although at the cost of a widening social gulf.
The clergy
were to pray for all men, the knight to fight for them, and the commoner to work that all might eat.
The platform rested on three lions, couchant, one devouring a child, one a dog, and in between them, a third, quiescent.
Pagan, barbarian, feudal, Christian, accumulated out of the shrouded past, here was medieval
society—and the many-layered elements of Western man.
Christianity was the matrix of medieval life:
governed birth, marriage, and death, sex, and eating, made the rules for law and medicine, gave philosophy and scholarship their subject matter. Membership in the Church was
not a matter of choice; it was compulsory and without alternative, which gave it a hold not easy to dislodge.
The act of faith through prayer was what counted. It was not justice one received from the Church but forgiveness.
More than comfort, the Church gave answers. For nearly a thousand years it had been the central institution that gave meaning and purpose to life in a capricious world. It affirmed that man’s life on earth was but a passage in exile on the way to God and to the New Jerusalem,
No one doubted in the Middle Ages that the vast majority would be eternally damned.
No matter how few were to be chosen, the Church offered hope to all.
Salvation was permanently closed to non-believers in Christ, but not to sinners, for sin was an inherent condition of life which could be canceled as often as necessary by penitence and absolution.
The Christian ideal was ascetic: the denial of sensual man. The result was that, under the sway of the Church, life became a continual struggle against the senses and a continual engagement in sin,
accounting for
the persistent need for a...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
according to St. Augustine “Business is in itself an evil,”
St. Jerome’s dictum was final: “A man who is a merchant can seldom if ever please God”
To ensure that no one gained an advantage over anyone else, commercial law prohibited innovation in tools or techniques, underselling below a fixed price, working late by artificial light, employing extra apprentices or wife and under-age children, and advertising of wares or praising them to the detriment of others.
The textile industry was the automobile industry of the Middle Ages,
That the Jews were unholy was a belief so ingrained by the Church that the most devout persons were the harshest in their antipathy, none more so than St. Louis. If the Jews were unholy, then killing and looting them was holy work.
Lepers too were targets of the Pastoureaux on the theory that they had joined the Jews in a horrible compact to poison the wells, and their persecution was made official by a royal ordinance of 1321.
what people believe about their own time becomes a factor in its history.
In Toulouse and Carcassonne during the next 35 years the Inquisition prosecuted 1,000 persons on such charges and burned 600. French justice was corrupted and the pattern laid for the fanatic witchcraft persecutions
of subsequent centuries.
Shrines possessing saints’ relics relied for revenue on popular confidence that a particular saint was in a position to make a personal appeal to the Almighty.
The relations of countries and rulers depended not at all on common borders or natural interest but on dynastic connections and fantastic cousinships which could make a prince of Hungary heir to the throne of Naples and an English prince claimant to Castile.
Of all the characteristics in which the medieval age differs from the modern, none is so striking as the comparative absence of interest in children.
Maternal love, like sex, is generally considered too innate to be eradicable, but perhaps under certain unfavorable conditions it may atrophy. Owing to the high infant mortality of the times, estimated at one or two in three, the investment of love in a young child may have been so unrewarding that by some ruse of nature, as when overcrowded rodents in captivity will not breed, it was suppressed.
spiced wine, the favorite medieval drink;
On the whole, babies and young children appear to have been left to survive or die without great concern in the first five or six years.
What psychological effect this may have had on character, and possibly on history, can only be conjectured.
