The Middle Ages Quotes

“The culture of a given time and place is a product of inherited tradition, of the recovery of lost or obscured forms of thought, of innovation. Such seeds, fertilized by prosperity, tended by leisure, and warmed by the sun of peace, may produce an abundant bloom.”
― Morris Bishop, The Middle Ages

“(Virginity was regarded with superstitious awe, perhaps because there was so little of it.)”
― Morris Bishop, The Middle Ages

“The human spirit inclines readily toward heresy, arguing against imposed doctrine and challenging the institution that prescribes it.”
― Morris Bishop, The Middle Ages

“What can a historian say of this almost incredible tale of an illiterate peasant girl who altered the course of history, who daunted kings, who outgeneraled generals, who rose above human capacities to sainthood? Was Joan an agent of divine purpose, or does she illustrate the extraordinary secret powers of the human spirit?”
― Morris Bishop, The Middle Ages

“Joan then turned on Paris. The campaign was hampered by the new king’s indecision - or cowardice. In the attack, Joan was wounded in the thigh by a crossbow bolt. (A plaque on the Café de la Régence in the Place du Palais-Royal marks the spot.)”
― Morris Bishop, The Middle Ages

“The spirit of the Reformation was already abroad. Instinctive reformers, angry men, muttered so loudly that their words became audible.”
― Morris Bishop, The Middle Ages

“The poor, unable to comprehend economic theory, blamed their increasing poverty on the machinations of the great and proposed to better their lot by killing their masters. In France, ravaged by the Hundred Years War, the rebel mood showed itself in town and country. In Paris, the Estates General of 1355, led by the provost of merchants, Etienne Marcel, made revolutionary demands to control the national finances and hence the kingdom. Marcel turned demagogue, courted the mob, invented the famous phrase, “the will of the people,” and also the liberty cap of red and blue. But as happens so often, the rebel defeated his own purposes by his exorbitance. In July 1358, Marcel was assassinated.”
― Morris Bishop, The Middle Ages

“By the end of the fifteenth century, people were seeking something still newer. What they sought, and what they found, was Modern Times.”
― Morris Bishop, The Middle Ages

“The earliest compositions for instruments alone date from the thirteenth century. These were performed at courtly functions. We hear of a fourteenth-century concert by an orchestra with thirty-six kinds of instruments.”
― Morris Bishop, The Middle Ages

“Laymen were able to make a career as composers and performers. Every prince and cardinal had his musical staff and cappella, his private orchestra. Especially in northern Italy, a public of musical connoisseurs existed, stimulating composers to seek subtle, tenuous effects. Technical mastery and the conquest of difficulties were recognized and applauded.”
― Morris Bishop, The Middle Ages

“it is said that the prostitutes’ guild of Paris offered a window or a chalice for Notre Dame. It was decided that the gift could be accepted, but would receive no publicity.”
― Morris Bishop, The Middle Ages

“The building of a suitable house for God stretched men’s imaginations and abilities to the utmost. First came the idea, the inspiration, which hardened into purpose, which sought and found the means to bring the great achievement into being.”
― Morris Bishop, The Middle Ages

“The character of a great Gothic church is to be soaring, open, spiritual, defiant of earth’s gravity, reaching to heaven, not because of, but “in spite of the stone,” as the art historian Wilhelm Worringer has said.”
― Morris Bishop, The Middle Ages

“Conscious symbolism governed medieval representation. Grammar, for instance, was pictured as an old woman with a knife and file to operate on students’ mistakes. Rhetoric was an imposing woman whose dress was ornamented with the figures of speech.”
― Morris Bishop, The Middle Ages

“Art and architecture were a single unit; only later did they take separate courses. (It is curious that today, with all our wealth, our builders cannot afford the decorative beauty customary in the relatively poor Middle Ages.)”
― Morris Bishop, The Middle Ages

“The crown of medieval literature is Dante’s Divine Comedy. It must be found in every list of great books, on every five-foot shelf. It is the greatest Catholic poem, as Paradise Lost is the greatest Protestant poem. It is a personal confession, an exhortation to virtue, a science-fiction story of a journey through the hell of sin and the purgatory of reformation to the heaven of salvation, and an encyclopedia of current philosophical, theological, and scientific thought, the whole fitted into a frame of magnificent poetry. The Divine Comedy surpasses the Middle Ages; it was written for all ages. It is an eternal book.”
― Morris Bishop, The Middle Ages

“In the beginning, poetry rather than prose was the dominant form, for poetry was the normal expression of the literary impulse before writing came to confuse culture. Long after the book appeared, literature was heard rather than read.”
― Morris Bishop, The Middle Ages

“Laymen, as well as clerics, were allured by the joys of authorship. The professional writer, the homme de lettres, appeared. A few, such as Dante and Petrarch, had university training; most had their education from life. They made no direct profit from their works, though Boccaccio, who was always broke, rented his manuscripts to copyists. The writers’ reward came from their celebrity and intellectual distinction, which brought them church livings or free lodging and gifts from princes or nobles. Thus, the first female professional writer, Christine de Pisan, supported herself and her children at the French court in the early fifteenth century.”
― Morris Bishop, The Middle Ages

“The great agent of enlightenment was paper. It originated in China about the first century A.D., journeyed slowly westward to the Near East, and entered Christendom by way of Spain in the twelfth century. Improvements were made in methods of manufacture. Unlike papyrus and parchment, paper was both durable and cheap. For the first time, a merchant could afford to keep detailed accounts, an ordinary man could write a letter at small cost, a scholar could take ample notes and give free rein in his books to his natural garrulity.”
― Morris Bishop, The Middle Ages

“Without external encouragement - which could sometimes become very strong - the world’s literary and scholarly store would be scanty indeed. “Publish or perish” is nothing new; at the University of Bologna a professor was required to present his yearly disputation for publication and was heavily fined for dereliction.”
― Morris Bishop, The Middle Ages

“Medical science in the West began with the import of Greek and Arabic texts, especially the works of Galen and Avicenna, in the eleventh century. Salerno in Italy established the first medical school. It seems to have been astonishingly enlightened. After Salerno, medical schools were organized at Bologna, Montpellier, and elsewhere.”
― Morris Bishop, The Middle Ages

“Grosseteste’s disciple at Oxford, the Franciscan friar Roger Bacon, has gained a wider reputation than his master. He held that all natural phenomena are the results of force acting on matter and that force is invariably subject to natural law. He upheld experimentation, believing that results reached “by argument” should be tested in practice. Bacon was a dreamer; he prophesied the coming of mechanical transport on land and water and in the air, and of a world ruled by a technocracy of supermen-scientists. In the meantime, he suggested “crusades of learning” to the Muslim lands to win the Saracens over to Christianity by impressing them with European knowledge. Bacon was a fascinating figure, but modern writers are inclined to downgrade his scientific achievements in comparison with those of Grosseteste.”
― Morris Bishop, The Middle Ages

“Albertus Magnus, a thirteenth-century Dominican philosopher who performed experiments on plants, asserted: “Natural science does not consist in ratifying what others have said, but in seeking the causes of phenomena.”
― Morris Bishop, The Middle Ages

“The scholastic method encouraged subtlety, intellectual agility, a sharpening of scholarly wits. It provoked a rage for philosophy, which occupied the schools at the expense of humanistic and scientific studies. Compromising by nature, it did not lead to the discovery of great final truths. It led, rather, to aridity, spiritual casuistry, and, with its ever more fine-spun distinctions, to absurdity.”
― Morris Bishop, The Middle Ages

“Man’s exile is ignorance; his home is knowledge,” said the twelfth-century Bishop Honorius of Autun. And Saint Anselm of Canterbury: “I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe that I may understand.”
― Morris Bishop, The Middle Ages

“The word universitas means no more than “the corporation.” Its first recorded appearance is in a letter of Pope Innocent III in 1208 or 1209. The first university was at Salerno in Italy, followed by others at Bologna, Paris, Montpellier, and Oxford. They gained a relative independence from their local bishops and put themselves under the control of the pope, who was likely to be more liberal than the bishops and was at least much farther away.”
― Morris Bishop, The Middle Ages

“Pirenne describes the craft guild system as “industrial Malthusianism.” It guaranteed full employment for its members but left too many workers outside. It tended to exploit consumers for the benefit of the guildsmen; it was unsuited to the rising industrial capitalism of the towns, especially in Italy and Flanders. It limited production and working hours, demanded extra pay for overtime work, forbade innovation and the invention of new labor-saving tools. (The modern parallels are obvious.)”
― Morris Bishop, The Middle Ages

“The apprentice was bound for a term of years to a master, who engaged to teach him the trade’s mysteries, to treat him as a good father would, to tend his spiritual and moral welfare, to beat him for his benefit.”
― Morris Bishop, The Middle Ages

“It was expected that a proper burgher would leave from a third to a half of his movable property for uses that would benefit the public and his own estate in the next world. Now the state takes over such functions by means of inheritance taxes. The judgment of the state is substituted for that of the decedent, and the merit of voluntary well-doing is lost.”
― Morris Bishop, The Middle Ages

“The power of the businessmen has a curious exemplification. The year began at Easter, anywhere from March 22 to April 25. This made an intolerable calendar for merchants, who required fixed dates for contracts and loans. For the beginning of their year, they chose the minor Feast of the Circumcision, January 1, the date on which the Romans had also inaugurated their year. Business practice was transformed by the introduction of Arabic numerals, with the invaluable zero. The Arabic system was introduced to the West in the twelfth century; it immediately conquered the commercial world.”
― Morris Bishop, The Middle Ages