Terry Jones' Medieval Lives Quotes

“The Renaissance invented the Middle Ages in order to define itself; the Enlightenment perpetuated them in order to admire itself; and the Romantics revived them in order to escape from themselves. In their widest ramifications ‘the Middle Ages’ thus constitute one of the most prevalent cultural myths of the modern world. BRIAN STOCK, Listening for the text”
― Terry Jones, Terry Jones' Medieval Lives

“One of the most influential imports that Europeans brought back from the crusades was the humble button. This transformed women’s fashion as clothes no longer had to be loose enough to be pulled over their heads. Fashionable women were able to emphasize their figures, combining tight corsetry with long, flowing skirts and sleeves. Femininity, of course, was also a weapon that could be used to control men, and the power of noblewomen in the game of courtly chivalry was greater than that of any man. The”
― Terry Jones, Terry Jones' Medieval Lives

“Poetry was alive and dangerous.”
― Terry Jones, Terry Jones' Medieval Lives

“In the United States medical treatment is the third highest cause of death (iatrogenic death) after cancer and heart disease. So, despite our undoubted progress in understanding the chemistry and biological structure of the body, and great advances in the techniques of medical intervention, we are not exceeding the achievements of medieval doctors as much as we might expect. In their terms we are doing worse, because the objective of their care was not necessarily to save the body (which would, of course, be wonderful) but to help save the soul by allowing patients to know the hour of their death, and prepare for it. This was itself a genuine medical skill and, again, one that depended on seeing the patient as a human being.”
― Terry Jones, Terry Jones' Medieval Lives

“They would also read and be read to – silent reading was regarded as highly suspect, a sign of being antisocial or melancholy, suitable only for scholars.”
― Terry Jones, Terry Jones' Medieval Lives

“Labour had become expensive and your average lord could now make more money out of sheep than he could out of his peasants. There was more wool on sheep, for a start, and you could also eat them – which is possible with peasants but socially taboo – so the lords started to throw the expensive, troublesome and uneatable peasants off their land and replace them with sheep. The”
― Terry Jones, Terry Jones' Medieval Lives

“Criminal law, in which the state detects the offence, takes the accused to court and demands and imposes punishment, simply did not exist in early medieval society.”
― Terry Jones, Terry Jones' Medieval Lives

“Today we expect but one thing from our doctors: to make us better. The medieval doctor was trying to do a lot more than that. He was taking care of the soul as well as the body. Unlike modern doctors he did not try to stop a patient dying at all costs . . . rather, if death seemed inevitable, he was duty-bound to try and help him or her die in the best possible way for their immortal soul.”
― Terry Jones, Terry Jones' Medieval Lives

“world of elliptical allusions and allegory. And a lot of what they wrote was designed”
― Terry Jones, Terry Jones' Medieval Lives

“The story of the Lady of Shalott created an extraordinarily resonant echo in the Victorian and Edwardian imagination; Pre-Raphaelite artists, looking for images that expressed what they saw as a truly medieval perspective, returned to it time and time again. Tennyson provided them with the narrative, a story in which the lady is cursed only to see the world through a mirror. When she spies Lancelot she is smitten and looks directly at him: the mirror shatters and she is doomed. She sets out on a pathetic boat trip to Camelot, but by the time she arrives the curse has had its effect and she is dead. It is an image of womanhood as essentially confined and restricted; full participation in the world is forbidden and fatal. This is sentimentally regretted, but tragically unalterable. Tennyson was retelling a genuine medieval tale, but he transformed it utterly. In the original story the lady was not weak and helpless at all, and she was not under any curse. Nor was she passive and pathetic. She was a wilful, stubborn woman who boldly declared her passionate love for Lancelot. Her tragedy was that it was not returned. The story was retold in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur in the fifteenth century, and there too the Lady of Shalott was portrayed as a real, flesh and blood woman whose declaration of love was unashamed (‘Why should I leave such thoughts? Am I not an earthly woman?’) and who wrote to Lancelot as an equal. In fact, pretty well every time we find an apparently helpless woman in medieval literature she turns out to be not quite what we were looking for.”
― Terry Jones, Terry Jones' Medieval Lives

“Brewing was often viewed as an appropriate activity for widows, who found it hard to farm land.”
― Terry Jones, Terry Jones' Medieval Lives

“he was able to explain to the clergy that ‘Women are: “Satan’s bait, poison for men’s souls”.”
― Terry Jones, Terry Jones' Medieval Lives

“The situation was rather like that of the mid-twentieth century, when the old vaudeville comedians – with their distinctive repertoire of hand-me-down material culled from many years of touring music halls – found themselves displaced by the university-educated satirists of the television age who wrote their own fresh material every week.”
― Terry Jones, Terry Jones' Medieval Lives

“Labour had become expensive and your average lord could now make more money out of sheep than he could out of his peasants. There was more wool on sheep, for a start, and you could also eat them – which is possible with peasants but socially taboo – so the lords started to throw the expensive, troublesome and uneatable peasants off their land and replace them with sheep.”
― Terry Jones, Terry Jones' Medieval Lives

“medieval monarchs was reassuringly downmarket. For example,”
― Terry Jones, Terry Jones' Medieval Lives