"Mediaeval" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Heinrich von Beringen Stephan Caxton Sloane The scope and language of the Chess-book Authors quoted and named Biblical names and allusions Xerxes the inventor of Chess! Sidrac John the monk Truphes of the Philosophers Helinand Classical allusions Mediaeval allusions and stories John of Ganazath St. Bernard The dishonest trader The drunken hermit A violent remedy Murder of Nero Theodorus Cyrenaicus Democritus of Abdera Socrates disguised Didymus and raised letters for the blind ...
— Game and Playe of the Chesse - A Verbatim Reprint Of The First Edition, 1474 • Caxton
... aged fifty-one in 1526, was destined to live on another thirty-eight years, and, after the death of Clement, to witness the election of five successive Popes. The span of his life was not only extraordinary in its length, but also in the events it comprehended. Born in the mediaeval pontificate of Sixtus IV., brought up in the golden days of Lorenzo de' Medici, he survived the Franco-Spanish struggle for supremacy, watched the progress of the Reformation, and only died when a new Church and a new Papacy had been established by the Tridentine ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... sound theory; and, secondly, so many truths have been established beyond contravention, that the latitude for hypothesis is much less than it once was. Nine tenths of the guesses which might have occurred to a mediaeval philosopher would now be ruled out as inadmissible, because they would not harmonize with the knowledge which has been acquired since the Middle Ages. There is one direction especially in which this continuous limitation of guesswork by ever-accumulating ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... chivalry the most solemn oath was taken on the peacock's body, roasted whole and adorned with its gay feathers, as Shallow swore "by cock and pie." I saw the fairest of all the fair dames at a grand mediaeval banquet proudly bearing the bird to the table. The woman who hesitates is lost. I bought the pair, and ordered them boxed for ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... is one country in Europe in which, by virtue of a marvellous strength and tenacity of the historical intellect, and of filial devotedness to the memory of their ancestors, there have been preserved down into the early phases of mediaeval civilisation, and then committed to the sure guardianship of manuscript, the hymns, ballads, stories, and chronicles, the names, pedigrees, achievements, and even characters, of those ancient kings and warriors ...
— Early Bardic Literature, Ireland • Standish O'Grady
... in Europe a passion for what were called the Occult sciences. It had always been haunting the European imagination. Mediaeval monks had long ago transformed the poet Virgil into a great necromancer. And there were immense excuses for such a belief. There was a mass of collateral evidence that the occult sciences were true, which it was impossible ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... on the day of our departure, and with an adroit privacy, which in a layman would have been sly, presented her, in right of his holy calling, with a little book, the binding of which was mediaeval and costly, and whose letter-press dealt in a way which he commended, with some points on which she was not satisfactory; and she found on the fly-leaf this little inscription:—'Presented to Miss Millicent Ruthyn by an earnest well-wisher, 1st December 1844.' A text, very neatly ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... we must turn our eyes in the other direction and give attention to certain phases of Greek and of Oriental thought which were destined to play a most important part in the development of the Western mind—a more important part, indeed, in the early mediaeval period than that played by those important inductions of science which have chiefly claimed our attention in recent chapters. The subject in question is the old familiar one of false inductions or pseudoscience. In dealing with the early development of thought and with Oriental ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... originally heathen Teutonic character is overlaid there with admixtures of Christian chivalry. In the Edda and other Scandinavian sources, the tale appears in fragmentary and lyrical shape, but in a purer version, without additions from the new faith or from mediaeval chivalry. It is in the Sigurd-, Fafnir-, Brynhild-, Gudrun-, Oddrun-, Atli-, and Hamdir Lays of the Norse Scripture that the original nature of the older German songs, which must have preceded the epic, can best be guessed. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... in upon shaving-glasses; and gleaming brass cans; upon all the jolly trappings of the day; the bright, inquisitive, armoured, resplendent, summer's day, which has long since vanquished chaos; which has dried the melancholy mediaeval mists; drained the swamp and stood glass and stone upon it; and equipped our brains and bodies with such an armoury of weapons that merely to see the flash and thrust of limbs engaged in the conduct of daily ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... He most certainly was not an Anarchist. Christ, like Satan, claimed the throne. He set up a new authority against an old authority; but He set it up with positive commandments and a comprehensible scheme. In this light all mediaeval people—indeed, all people until a little while ago—would have judged questions involving revolt. John Ball would have offered to pull down the government because it was a bad government, not because it was a government. Richard II. would have blamed ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... battle is fought, must be fought by the men themselves. The present dodge of the Manchester school is to cry out against us, as Greg did. 'These Christian Socialists are a set of mediaeval parsons, who want to hinder the independence and self-help of the men, and bring them back to absolute feudal maxims; and then, with the most absurd inconsistency, when we get up a corporation workshop, to let the men work on the very independence and self-help of which they talk so ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... work, certain of the "Contes Drolatiques." These were written, as he tells his mother, for relaxation, as a rest from harder labor. One would have said that no work would have been much harder than compounding the marvellously successful imitation of mediaeval French in which these tales are written. He had, however, other diversions as well. In the autumn of 1832 he was at Aix-les-Bains with the Duchess of Castries, a great lady, and one of his kindest ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... any kind with our landlady's opulent figure, we found a difficult acrobatic mental feat. She presented to the eye outlines and features that could only be likened, in point of prosperity, to a Dutch landscape. Like certain of the mediaeval saints presented by the earlier delineators of the martyrs as burning above a slow fire, while wearing smiles of purely animal content, as if in full enjoyment of the temperature, this lady's sufferings were doubtless an invisible discipline, the hair shirt which her hardened cuticle felt ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... been sitting in the shadow, and addressed me in good English—a small, slim personage, clad in a sort of black velvet tunic (as it seemed), and with a mass of auburn hair, which gleamed in the moonlight, escaping from a little mediaeval birretta. In a tone of the most insinuating deference he asked me for my "impressions." He seemed picturesque, fantastic, slightly unreal. Hovering there in this consecrated neighbourhood, he might have passed for the genius of aesthetic hospitality—if the genius of ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... of mason-work that had been stately tower or belfry once, beneath splintered arches that led but from one scene of ruin to another, and ever our gloom deepened, for it seemed that Ypres, the old Ypres, with all its monuments of mediaeval splendour, its noble traditions of hard-won freedom, its beauty and glory, was passed away ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... may have seen it on a spring morning. It was in May, and there was a haze over the meadowland by the river which blurred shapes and colours. St. Catherine's was no longer a ruin; the buildings on the hill faded into the trees; the clothes of wanderers by the riverside took on mediaeval brightnesses, lost modern forms; and into the foreground ran three bare-headed, yellow-haired children, and in their brown arms great bunches of cuckoo-flowers. So might one returning from the Martyr's chapel have seen the path to the ferry in the days when the ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... one in the way in which they regard the scientific criminologists, eugenists, collectivists, pragmatists, post-impressionists, and most of the other "ists" of recent times, as an army of barbarians invading the territories of mediaeval Christendom. But while Mr. Chesterton is in the gap of danger, waving against his enemies the sword of the spirit, Mr. Belloc stands on a little height apart, aiming at them the more cruel shafts of the intellect. It is not that he is less courageous than ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... touched upon, but then how well Angelico communicates the feeling with which it inspired him! Yet simple though he was as a person, simple and one-sided as was his message, as a product he was singularly complex. He was the typical painter of the transition from Mediaeval to Renaissance. The sources of his feeling are in the Middle Ages, but he enjoys his feelings in a way which is almost modern; and almost modern also are his means of expression. We are too apt to forget this transitional ...
— The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance - With An Index To Their Works • Bernhard Berenson
... body and legs and wrapped them about him, tying the hind legs as a girdle round his waist. The effect on the whole was bad. It was even irreverent—like one of those mediaeval pictures of a monk changed into a beast by the ministrations of Satan. At the very best the ensemble resembled a humpbacked cow sitting on her haunches ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... who presided at the table. It must have been just such a scene when the ordinance was first instituted in Jerusalem; and I could not get rid of the inquiry, 'Shall one of us go out like Judas and betray him?'" It is a significant fact that those most accustomed to mediaeval forms, when regenerated by the Spirit, relish them the least; and the more spiritual they become, the more they crave the simple forms of the New Testament, because they draw the least attention to themselves, and fix it most completely ...
— Woman And Her Saviour In Persia • A Returned Missionary
... phrase," we said, "as if you felt the essential unreality of your censure. Aren't you aware that mediaeval Florence, mediaeval Siena, must have looked, with their innumerable towers, like our sky-scrapered New York? They must have ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... reckoned you should be a spoil-sport!" said she, licking her spoon as in duty bound before she plunged it in the jelly—a piece of etiquette in which young ladies at that date were carefully instructed. The idea of setting a separate spoon to help a dish had not dawned upon the mediaeval mind. ...
— The White Lady of Hazelwood - A Tale of the Fourteenth Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... biographies presented in parallel columns. My own preliminary chapter to this book—a mere explanation of the presence of the dukes of Burgundy in the Netherlands—grew into an account of a sovereign whom they deposed and was published under the title of A Mediaeval Princess. ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... under his hand, St. Martin, with his customary serenity, takes off his own episcopal stole, or whatsoever flowing stateliness it might be, throws it on the destitute shoulders, and passes on to perform indecorous public service in his waistcoat, or such mediaeval nether ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... elsewhere, except in Rome itself. But it contains, in the next place, what Rome does not contain—perfect examples of the great twelfth-century Lombardic architecture, which was the root of all the mediaeval art of Italy, without which no Giottos, no Angelicos, no Raphaels would have been possible: it contains that architecture, not in rude forms, but in the most perfect and loveliest types it ever attained—contains those, not in ruins, nor in altered and hardly decipherable fragments, but in churches ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... on, past a series of villa residences enclosed in varnished palings and adorned with that mediaeval abundance of turrets, balconies, and cheap stained-glass, which is accepted nowadays as a guarantee of the tenant's culture, and a satisfactory substitute for effective drainage. After the villas came a church, ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... low fellows called Abbad Kattaleen, hold a slip of ground downwards between Es-Salt and the Jordan. Es-Salt is a populous and thriving town, the only one in all that country. Kerak, to the south, may be as large, and contain more remnants of mediaeval strength, but its affairs are ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... manner have claimed it as the abode of departed kings and chiefs, then these pleasant fancies may be compared with that ancient theory mentioned by Plutarch, that hell is in the air and elysium in the moon, and again with the mediaeval conception of the moon as the seat of hell, a thought elaborated in profoundest bathos by Mr. ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... walk. He translated most of his emotions into motion. So he set off briskly, turning into the crowded part of the city. Here were narrow, winding streets; old houses that overhung above and almost touched, shutting out all but a thin line of sky; mediaeval doorways of heavy oak and iron that opened into courtyards, where once armed men had lounged, but where now broken wagons and other riffraff ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... anywhere. It was when Mr. Casaubon was quitting her that Naumann had first seen her, and he had entered the long gallery of sculpture at the same time with her; but here Naumann had to await Ladislaw with whom he was to settle a bet of champagne about an enigmatical mediaeval-looking figure there. After they had examined the figure, and had walked on finishing their dispute, they had parted, Ladislaw lingering behind while Naumann had gone into the Hall of Statues where he again saw Dorothea, ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... superstition, it is not necessary to reconstruct the earliest period in the history of society, nor even to study contemporary savage life, for the superstitious intelligence and the superstitious method survive {236} in every stage of development. They appear, for example, in mediaeval Christianity; in Clovis's appeal to Christ on the battle-field: "Clotilda says that Thou art the Son of the living God, and that Thou dost give victory to those who put their trust in Thee. I have besought my gods, but they give me no aid. I see well that their strength is naught. ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... what the inspiring power, of those architectural wonders that transport the impress of mediaeval piety across the ocean of so many centuries? Wordsworth, referring to some ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... ornament, lace, is chiefly confined to wearing it, and their researches into its quality and price. A few minutes' attention to Mr. Kohl will enlighten them on other subjects connected with what is to them a most interesting topic, for lace is associated with recollections of mediaeval history, and with the palmy days of the Flemish school of painting. More than one of the celebrated masters of that school have selected, from among his laborious countrywomen, the lace-makers (or, as they are called in Flanders, Speldewerksters), pleasing ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various
... compound. The Jew was always a man of moods, and his religion responded to those varying phases of feeling and belief and action. Hence such varying judgments have been formed of him and his religion. If, after the mediaeval philosophy had attempted to systematise Judaism, the religion remained unsystematic, it is easy to understand that in the earlier centuries of the Christian Era contradictions between past and present, between different strata of religious thought, caused no trouble ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... of beautiful illustrations of Mediaeval Art, that Messrs. Sotheby and Wilkinson will sell by auction on Monday next the entire stock of the magnificent publications of Mr. Henry Shaw, F.S.A., whose Dresses and Decorations of the Middle Ages are a type of the whole. Such an opportunity of securing ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 235, April 29, 1854 • Various
... a moment on the ideas we have so far reached. They would more than suffice to describe the whole tragic fact as it presented itself to the mediaeval mind. To the mediaeval mind a tragedy meant a narrative rather than a play, and its notion of the matter of this narrative may readily be gathered from Dante or, still better, from Chaucer. Chaucer's Monk's Tale is a series ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... which rendered the age of feudalism and chain-armour memorable in history, none were more remarkable or important than the 'armed pilgrimages' popularly known as the Crusades; and, among the expeditions which the warriors of mediaeval Europe undertook with the view of rescuing the Holy Sepulchre from the Saracens, hardly one is so interesting as that which had Louis IX. for its chief ...
— The Boy Crusaders - A Story of the Days of Louis IX. • John G. Edgar
... and poetic charm; I can think of nothing in my various travels at all like this little Acropolis of Brie and Champagne, whether seen in a distance in the railway, or from the ramparts that still encircle it as in the olden time. It is indeed a gem; miniature Athens of a mediaeval princedom, that although on a small scale boasted of great power and splendour; tiny Granada of these Eastern provinces, bearing ample evidence of past literary and ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... liking, to the chivalrous pageant unrolled for us in the "Conquest of Granada." The former are more characteristic and the more enduring of Irving's writings, but as a literary artist his genius lent itself just as readily to Oriental and mediaeval romance as to the Knickerbocker legend; and there is no doubt that the delicate perception he had of chivalric achievements gave a refined tone to his mock heroics, which greatly heightened their effect. It may almost be claimed that Irving did for Granada and the ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... their due effect as Basil, in the ramble across Goat Island, touched them with the reflected light of Mr. Parkman's histories,—those precious books that make our meagre past wear something of the rich romance of old European days, and illumine its savage solitudes with the splendor of mediaeval chivalry, and the glory of mediaeval martyrdom, —and then, lacking this light, turned upon them the feeble glimmer of the guide-books. He and Isabel enjoyed the lurid picture with all the zest of sentimentalists dwelling upon the troubles ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... is thus being created with common human and economic interests, and the clan feeling, which was so powerful an influence in early and mediaeval civilisations, with all its power of generating passionate loyalties, is born anew in the modern world. Our ancient Irish records show little clans with a common ownership of land hardly larger than a parish, but with all the patriotic feeling of large nations held with an intensity ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett
... the mediaeval church, too, encouraged charitable giving in the main "as a species of fire insurance." The poor, when they were thought of at all, were too likely to be regarded as a means of saving the giver's soul. This view of poverty is either quite dead or dying, but ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... not believe the possibility of wealth, though always of course in the background, was ever near enough his hope to be considered a motive for action. Rather was it a dream, remote, something to be gained to-morrow, but never to-day, like the mediaeval Christian's idea of heaven. His interest was in the search. For that one could see in him a real enthusiasm. He had his smattering of theory, his very real empirical knowledge, and his superstitions, like all prospectors. ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... In mediaeval times it had no doubt been a main defence of the place. It was very deep in parts, especially at the waist or narrow that was spanned by the decayed bridge. There were hundreds of carp and tench in it older than any He in Cumberland, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... subterranean tunnels only that approach is possible, and up a flight of steps that you make your first acquaintance with a "coin perdu" of the town, a corner without character, without size, without the least promise of the beauty that is hidden further off. Of all those great gates through which the mediaeval city welcomed her dukes or sallied out against her enemies, but one is left, the Porte Guillaume Lion close by the quays, at the end of the Rue des Arpents, which is as faded and decrepit as ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... birds of the air as if it had been a tree, and loaded with their nests, a representation of the outward Church as established under Constantine the Great; in the leaven that is mixed among the three measures of meal, the pervading and transforming influence of Christianity in the mediaeval Church among the barbarous races of Europe; in the parable of the treasure in the field, the period of the Reformation; in the parable of the pearl, the contrast between Christianity and the acquisitions of modern culture and secularism; and in the last ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... useless to tell me about them. I can't alter them. I was born like that.' The fatal weakness of this argument is, first, that it is based on a complete falsity; and second, that it puts you in an untenable position. Human nature does change. Nothing can be more unscientific, more hopelessly mediaeval, than to imagine that it does not. It changes like everything else. You can't see it change. True! But then you can't see the grass growing—not unless you ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... specimens here that can only by equaled in De Quincey's best work. Read the peroration of the "Lamp of Sacrifice" and you will not need to be told that this is the finest tribute to the work of the builders of the mediaeval cathedral. Here is a ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... began to feel very uncomfortable. Under pleasanter, more normal circumstances he would have thoroughly enjoyed a long exhaustive inspection of a house which had probably been remodelled, early in the eighteenth century, on the site of a mediaeval building. ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... knowledge of the southern hemisphere. Under the word perioikos, Liddell and Scott explain that 'antipodes meant "those who were in opposite parallels and meridians." The word Antipodes was adopted into the Latin language, and occurs in two of the Fathers, Lactantius and Augustine. By the mediaeval church to believe in the antipodes was regarded as heresy. 'O.E.D.' quotes two examples of the early use of the word ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... with the habits of the present day. The other curtain had been thrown down years before,—how or why nobody could tell me, but not improbably in some of the domestic wars which fill and defile the annals of mediaeval Europe. In those days the loss of it must have been a serious one; but for the modern occupant it was a real gain,—letting in the air and sunlight, and opening a pleasant view of green plantations from every window ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... than Attic, quality—for there is something akin to it in certain Greek archaic sculpture—is to be found, already perfect and most essential, in the facades of the early mediaeval churches of Pistoia. Is to be found; because this quality, tense and restrained and distributed with harmonious evenness, reveals itself only to a certain fineness and carefulness of looking. ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... Europe and our own toddling America. Directly we scratch the surface and look for the beginning of applied arts, the lead takes us inevitably to the oldest civilisation. It would seem that in a study of fabrics which are made in modern Europe, it were enough to find their roots in the mediaeval shades of the dark ages; but no, back we must go to the beginning of history where man leaped from the ambling dinosaur, which then modestly became extinct, and looking upon the lands of the Nile and the ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... rod, the son crouching and gambolling beside him in a manner indescribable, and presently began to extend the circle of this dance among the acres of cooked food. Whatever they leaped over, whatever they called for, became theirs. To see mediaeval Dante thus demean himself struck a kind of a chill of incongruity into our Philistine souls; but even in a great part of the Samoan concourse, these antique and (I understand) quite local manners awoke laughter. One of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... into relation with the five senses. He is, further, the reputed author of a work 'On the Soul,' and the reputed compiler of a famous anthology, 'A Choice of Pearls,' which appeared, with an English translation by B.H. Ascher, in London, in 1859. In his poetry, which, like that of other mediaeval Hebrew poets, Moses ben Ezra, Judah Halevy, etc., is partly liturgical, partly worldly, he abandons native forms, such as we find in the Psalms, and follows artificial Arabic models, with complicated rhythms and rhyme, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... The mediaeval Irish scholars catalogued their native literature under several heads, probably as an aid to the memory of the professional poets or story-tellers whose stock-in-trade it was, and to one of these divisions they ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... of this piece to give anything like a connected story, even of the slightest, of the course of events between the conquest of Duke William and the fully developed mediaeval period of the fourteenth century, which is the England that I have before my eyes as Mediaeval or Feudal. That period of the fourteenth century united the developments of the elements which had been stirring in ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... a mediaeval atmosphere, although the scene is laid in the Cotswolds in the year of grace 1898. The story is well constructed, and is a good example of the widely imaginative type of fiction that is so eagerly devoured by young ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... in mediaeval Art, the devout fervor of the earlier time and the veracity of the later, the deference of the painter to his theme, is profoundly interesting as history, but it was conditioned also by the limitations ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... watching trains go by on the Great Western line. Once he blew off his eyebrows while making some experiment with explosive chemicals; his hands were always smudged with dark, mysterious stains, and his room was like that of a mediaeval alchemist, littered with retorts, bottles, and test-glasses. Before leaving school he invented a flying machine (heavier than air), and an unsuccessful attempt to start it on the high road caused him to be the victim of much ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... stay in Brest did not give me a better opportunity to see the mediaeval churches and castles in the vicinity. But war is serious business with no time for sightseeing and on the third night after our arrival, we received our orders to march at 4 o'clock the following morning. It was a restless night for ...
— In the Flash Ranging Service - Observations of an American Soldier During His Service - With the A.E.F. in France • Edward Alva Trueblood
... of wild animals as contrasted with domesticated beasts, as wild sheep and wild fowl, in Columella, vii. 2; viii. 12, or wolves, in Propertius, iii. 7, or mice, in Pliny, xxx. 22. (Occasionally it is used of men, as in Pliny, viii. 79.) The meaning was the same in mediaeval Latin (Du Cange, Glossarium, Niort, 1886, tom. vii. p. 686) and in Old French, as "La douce voiz du loussignol sauvage" (Michel, Chansons de chatelain de Coucy, xix.). In the romance of Robert le Diable, in ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... there, where they had fallen in the destruction of the original building. It was not hard to get down, and the space was not large. It was bounded by the old wall on one side, and most of the other was taken up by a part of a rectangular mass of masonry, of rough mediaeval construction, which ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... way of taking it for granted," said Mr Williams, "that the subsidy idea is a kind of mediaeval idea. Raise a big enough shout and you get things taken for granted in economics for a long while. Conditions keep changing, right along, all the time, and presently you've got to reconsider. There ain't any sort of ultimate ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... souls, who had delighted in the mediaeval splendours of Venice, dreamed of a Venice still more romantic—a Venice with all her glories of art tinged with the glamour and witchery of the Arabian Nights, a Venice whose blue waterways reflected stately palms and golden minarets. Other souls, like myself, less simple ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... very capable of writing a ballad, I admit; also that, through Blind Harry's Wallace, he may have known all about "sowies," and "portculize," and springwalls, or springald's, or springalls, mediaeval balistas for throwing heavy stones and darts. But Hogg did not know or guess what a springwall was. In his stanza xiii. (in the MS. given ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... variety either of orange or purple. It never can be represented by umber, unless altered by contrast.' It is curious how far the significance of this remark extends, how exquisitely it illustrates and confirms the mediaeval sense ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... admitted his transcendent claims. The way to know him, is to compare him, not with nature, but with other men. How many ages have gone by, and he remains unapproached! A chief structure of human wit, like Karnac, or the mediaeval cathedrals, or the Etrurian remains, it requires all the breadth of human faculty to know it. I think it is truliest seen, when seen with the most respect. His sense deepens, his merits multiply, with study. When we say, here is a fine ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... perhaps, returned spirits.... I can't say; but I have been there, and heard their curious warnings and manifestations. There is something definable there, in the periphery of those ancient ruins. A malignant spiritual force lurks within that mediaeval stronghold. While it haunts those musty halls it is madness for any man ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... southern government are strikingly different in type from those one meets elsewhere whether in Peking or the provincial capitals. The latter men are literally mediaeval when they are not late Roman Empire, though most of them have learned a little modern patter to hand out to foreigners. The former are educated men, not only in the school sense and in the sense that they have had some special training for their jobs, but in the sense that they think the ideas ...
— China, Japan and the U.S.A. - Present-Day Conditions in the Far East and Their Bearing - on the Washington Conference • John Dewey
... beliefs of his temperament. So sure was he of his own goodness, so natural was it with him to love and to be brave, that he unhesitatingly ascribed all the evil of the world to the working of some force which was unnatural, accidental, anti-human. If he had grown up a mediaeval Christian, he would have found no difficulty in blaming the Devil. The belief was in his heart; the formula was Godwin's. For the wonder, the miracle of all this unnatural, incomprehensible evil in the world, he found a complete explanation in the doctrine that "positive institutions" have ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... and mediaeval art now exhibiting in John Street, Adelphi, I was struck with the number of gilt cups, called in the catalogue hanaps. The word was new to me; but I have since met with it (as frequently happens after ...
— Notes & Queries No. 29, Saturday, May 18, 1850 • Various
... identical stories are current? What is the pressure that makes neoplatonic gossips of the fourth century circulate the same marvels as spiritualist gossips of the nineteenth? How does it happen that the mediaeval saint, the Indian medicine-man, the Siberian shaman (a suggestive term), have nearly identical wonders attributed to them? If people wanted merely to tell "a good square lie," as the American slang has it, invention does not seem to have such ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... tenure by which a religious corporation holds lands on condition of praying for the soul of the donor. In mediaeval times many of the wealthiest fraternities obtained their estates in this simple and cheap manner, and once when Henry VIII of England sent an officer to confiscate certain vast possessions which a fraternity of monks held by frankalmoigne, "What!" said the Prior, ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... and fasting. The Indian's address was therefore more or less gratuitous, and he hastened to remark: "Thank you, Shangi; that's very good, and you've put it poetically. You've turned a shooting-excursion into a mediaeval romance. But we'll get down to business now, if you please, and make the romance a fact, beautiful enough to send to the 'Times' or the New York 'Call'. Let's see, how would they put it in the Call?—'Extraordinary Discovery —Herd of buffaloes found ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Courcelles. Nobody there. The Princess had gone abroad, they told him, that very morning. A terrible fit of despair came over him, and he went home instead of to the club, so as not to have to talk and answer questions. His spirits sank even lower at the sight of his great mediaeval erection and its front, in the style of the Tour de la Faim, all covered with bills; it suggested the piles of overdue accounts. As he felt his way in, he was greeted by a smell of fried onions filling ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... outlived its faculties, and its creative power had failed, it sank into the ocean of the past—a sphinx, with her riddle guessed,—and mediaeval civilization arose, founded upon Christianity and Germanism. There are times in the world's history when change seems to be abrupt, the old to be swept away and all things made new at a stroke, as if ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... look at this," he said, opening his well-thumbed Baedeker: "'Santa Maria Sopra Minerva (Pl. D. 4), erected on the ruins of Domitian's temple of Minerva, the only mediaeval Gothic church in Rome. Begun A.D., 1280; was restored and repainted in 1848-55. It contains several admirable works of art, in ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... unenforceable New York Adultery Act as a typical product; and lastly, the general ploughing up and emotional discussion of sexual matters, with compulsory instruction in "sex hygiene" as its mildest manifestation and the mediaeval fury of the vice crusade as its worst. Differing widely in their targets, these various Puritan enterprises had one character in common: they were all efforts to combat immorality with the weapons designed for crime. In each of them there was a visible effort to erect ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... leaping through caverns of ice, and in dangers unseen and therefore more dreadful, they passed a restless journey through the mountains, and arrived at the charming village of Martigny, over which the monastery presided like the fortress of a mediaeval castle protecting the feudal territory of the petty ruler. Wearied, but pleased at the novel situation into which chance had cast them, Charles and Henry approached the venerable pile with feelings of reverence they had never felt. The silence of the tomb reigned around, and the old gate was closed. ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... hardly term that an "unlucky event" for Christians. A Friday moon is considered unlucky for weather. It is the Mohammedan Sabbath and was the day on which Adam was created. The Sabeans consecrated it to Venus or Astarte. According to mediaeval romance, on this day fairies and all the tribes of elves of every description were converted into hideous animals and remained so until Monday. In Scotland it is a great day for weddings. In England it is not. Sir William Churchill says, "Friday is my ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... civilization of officials, of nobles, of priests, and of the crown." Of course, Bakounin says here much that is historically true. Thieves, marauders, highwaymen, bandits, brigands, villains, mendicants, and all those other elements of mediaeval life for whom society provided neither land nor occupation, often organized themselves into guerilla bands in order to war upon all social and civil order. But Bakounin neglects to mention that it was these very elements that eagerly ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... anything so dreadful. But being a prudent old gentleman he refrained from uttering these words at Podgorica, where the Skup[vs]tina had met; a better plan was to communicate with the Press Association, in the hope that many editors would print his words. If it was a final anti-climax for a mediaeval prince—ah well, what is life but one long anti-climax? He would protest against the constitution of the Skup[vs]tina. He had by no means given his approval to the new election laws; and if, contrary to his own practice, the gendarmes were having nothing to do with the urns, ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... dinner," substituted Lorry, and they returned to the Regengetx. The dining hall was spacious and beautiful, a mixture of the oriental and the mediaeval. ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... hardy pirates of the Baltic; Served, before any of those, the venerable and harmless men of Ethiopia; Served the making of helms for the galleys of pleasure, and the making of those for war; Served all great works on land, and all great works on the sea; For the mediaeval ages, and before the mediaeval ages; Served not the living only, then as ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... of the sores which plagued them and stowed them away in the ark.(4) The custom of making a wax statuette of an enemy, and piercing it with pins or melting it before the fire, so that the detested person might waste as his semblance melted, was common in mediaeval Europe, was known to Plato, and is practised by Negroes. Some Australians take some of the hair of an enemy, mix it with grease and the feathers of the eagle, and burn it in the fire. This is "bar" or black magic. The boarding under the chair of a magistrate in ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... mediaeval town surrounded by its ancient walls and towers, possesses relics of yet earlier fortifications within the present ones. One of these relics is the so-called Weissthurm, still dominating the narrow streets ...
— Pictorial Photography in America 1921 • Pictorial Photographers of America
... documents, that have been accumulating for hundreds of years in the public and private collections of Europe, and has most patiently and laboriously culled from them annals and facts having the most direct and momentous bearing upon the acts and thoughts of our mediaeval forefathers, and upon the events and persons of these mediaeval times. By means of this last type of work, the researches of the antiquary have to a wonderful degree both purified and extended the history of this and of ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... unbelievable myths (such as, among a thousand others, that Massacre of the Innocents which never took place).... bore their listeners by a Tibetan repetition of creeds that have ceased to be credible.... Mutually contradictory propositions.... Prayers and litanies composed in Byzantine and mediaeval times.... the want of actuality, the curious silliness which has, ever since the destruction of Jerusalem, hung about the exposition of Christianity.... But if the Bishops continue to fuss about the trappings of religion.... the maintenance of codes compiled by people who ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... common numerals are Arabic in origin is not an old one. The mediaeval and Renaissance writers generally recognized them as Indian, and many of them expressly stated that they were of Hindu origin.[2] {3} Others argued that they were probably invented by the Chaldeans ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith
... Chambers (The Mediaeval Stage, I, 383, note 2; II, 190, note 4) calls attention to a "theatre" belonging to the city of Essex as early as 1548. Possibly the Latin document he cites referred to an amphitheatre of some sort near the city which was used for dramatic performances; at any rate "in theatro" ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... found in the most glittering restaurant in the Palais Royal. If one add the background of exquisite mountains, the middle distance of flowery slopes, where herds of long-haired goats, sheep, and gray oxen are feeding among the skeletons of broken aqueducts, ruined tombs, and shattered mediaeval towers, and the foreground made up of picturesque groups of peasants, who lounge about the door, and come and go, and men from the Campagna, on horseback, with their dark, capacious cloak and long ironed staff, who have come from counting their oxen and superintending ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... Ruscinonis had flourished, from the time of Augustus until its destruction by Theodoric. And nearest of all these to him were the Longobardo church and the ancient houses and the dismantled fortress and the ruined walls of what had been the fief of the Toralba, the mediaeval fortified town of Ruscino. It still kept this, its latest, name, but it kept little else. Thrice a thousand centuries had rolled over it, eating it away as the sea eats away a cliff. War and fire and time ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... Mediaeval London. With a Frontispiece in Photogravure, Four Plates in Colour, and many other Illustrations. Super-royal 8vo, sewed, 5s. nett; cloth, gilt top, 7s. nett. Also extra crown 8vo, ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... predatory origin and of an irresponsible character.[2] In nearly all instances, but more particularly among the nations that are accounted characteristically modern, the existing establishments have been greatly altered from the mediaeval pattern, by concessive adaptation to later exigencies or by a more or less revolutionary innovation. The degree of their modernity is (conventionally) measured, roughly, by the degree in which they have departed from the mediaeval pattern. ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... years, but that twenty would be necessary in order to know anything about it worthy to be written. And perhaps the largest part of the knowledge worth having lies in the change from the ancient capital of the Empire to the mediaeval seat of ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... the storm was gathering. In a distant province of Russia at first, then on the banks of the Volga, and finally in Moscow itself, the old cry was raised, the hideous mediaeval charge revived, and the standard of persecution unfurled against the Jews. Province after province took it up. In Bulgaria, Servia, and, above all, Roumania, where, we were told, the sword of the Czar had been drawn to protect the oppressed, Christian atrocities ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... over the road from Matelle to Nalandi Senadoora, to the curious rock temple at Dambool, near which is the fortified rock of Sigiri, and a few miles further are the vast ruins of Topari, or Ponamira, the mediaeval capital of Ceylon. It is full of wonderful ruins, some of them among the oldest in the world. The Ranhol Dagoba, the Jayti Wana Rama, and the Galle Wihara and rock temple, carved out of the living rock, are alone worth a long journey to see. Then think of visiting Anajapoora, ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... to the boy scouts, both because of their quaint mediaeval costume and the long lances which they carry in their hands, are the rangers of Hampstead Heath. Feudal retainers of the L.C.C., they sally ever and anon from their lairs with lances couched to spear up the pieces of paper which the people of London have left behind; and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 26, 1920 • Various
... across a darker square like a cavern-mouth, flitted the living phantoms of the street. It seemed a fit setting for his fears. "I am lost," he thought; lost among goblins, marooned in the age of barbarism, shut in a labyrinth with a Black Death at once actual and mediaeval: he dared not think of Home, but flung his arms on the littered desk, ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... fine churches, among which the magnificent cathedral was pre-eminent, and with many other stately edifices. The population was thrifty, active, and turbulent, like that of all those Flemish and Walloon cities which the spirit of mediaeval industry had warmed for a time into ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... yard without that announcing cry. It was mediaeval, the Blight said, positively—two lorn damsels, a benighted knight partially stripped of his armor by bush and sharp-edged rock, a gray palfrey (she didn't mention the impatient asses that had turned homeward) and she wished I had a horn to wind. I wanted a "horn" badly enough—but ...
— A Knight of the Cumberland • John Fox Jr.
... are fashioned after a human pattern, and clusters of figures are modeled in a congruous and modern manner. But aside from changes of this kind, the new and magnificent edifice upon Hempstead Plains is a perfect example of the elaborate and picturesque Gothic structures of mediaeval days. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... as if he were facing a postponed dread. "Moya, dear," he began in a forced tone, "I can't help my constraints and convictions that bore you so, any more than you can help your light heart—God bless it—and your theory of class which to me seems mediaeval. I have cringed to it, like the coward a man is when he is in love. But now I want you ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... dress; her arms hung at her sides and her hands were clasped in front; her head was bent downward a little, and her dark eyes fixed. But her awkwardness was as pretty as that of some angular seraph in a mediaeval carving, and in her timid gaze there seemed to lurk the questioning gleam of childhood. "What is this for?" her charming eyes appeared to ask; "why have I been dressed up for this ceremony in a white frock ...
— Eugene Pickering • Henry James
... out of the mediaeval conception of the Teutonic state. While the ancient state appears at the beginning of its history as [Greek: polis] or civitas, as an undivided community of citizens, the monarchical Teutonic state is from the beginning dualistic in form,—prince and people form no integral unity, but stand opposed ...
— The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens • Georg Jellinek
... every sentence he writes of the Middle Ages; always vital, right, and profound; so that in the matter of art, . . .there is hardly a principle connected with the mediaeval temper, that he has not struck upon in those seemingly careless and too rugged rhymes of his. There is a curious instance, by the way, in a short poem *1* referring to this very subject of tomb and image sculpture; all illustrating just one of those phases of local human character which, though ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... active life. His brother, at this time, appeared to him to be of a more pleasure-loving and adventurous disposition; and there exists a letter to his mother in which, after contrasting, with obvious allusion to Chaucer's "Prologue", the mediaeval ideals of the Knight and the Clerk, he adds: "C. is the Knight and I the Clerk, deriving more keen pleasure from the perusal of a musty old volume than in pursuing adventure out in the world." But about the middle of his Harvard career, a marked change came over his habits of thought and of ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... and every member who joins a society and pays a subscription has a right to have some say at least in the way the subscriptions are to be spent. If they don't, it's 'taxation without representation', a bad old mediaeval custom that it's taken some countries a revolution to get rid of. I put it to the meeting—Are you willing to sit down and be tyrannized over by the Sixth? Do you mean to go on paying your shillings, ...
— The Leader of the Lower School - A Tale of School Life • Angela Brazil
... sphere of Latin Christianity, by which the exhortation of the New Testament is understood to be an exhortation to grief over sin, as the primary and principal idea of the term. One step farther and penitence was contracted into penance, and associated with mediaeval ideas unknown to the New Testament, and the English Version made by Romanists now represents John and Jesus and Peter as saying (poenitentiam agere) do penance. From a late Latin compound (repoenitere) comes our English ...
— God's Plan with Men • T. T. (Thomas Theodore) Martin
... which can enclose a space, thus satisfying the mind the easiest of any, is nigh universal in symbolism. It is seen in the Egyptian pyramids, whose sides are equilateral triangles with a common apex, in the mediaeval cathedrals, whose designs are combinations of such triangles, in the sign for ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... 'avoid me to-day. If I were superstitious, I should even beg for an interest in your prayers. I am in the black fit; the evil spirit of King Saul, the hag of the merchant Abudah, the personal devil of the mediaeval monk, is with me—is in me,' tapping on his breast. 'The vices of my nature are now uppermost; innocent pleasures woo me in vain; I long for Paris, for my wallowing in the mire. See,' he would continue, producing a handful of silver, 'I denude myself, I am not to be trusted with ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... were made, draped with magnificent fulness, lined with white watered silk, and bordered with a gimp fit to trim a Portuguese princess' bodice. The material was silk brought from Canton, on which Chinese patience had painted Oriental birds with a perfection only to be seen in mediaeval illuminations, or in the Missal of Charles V., the pride of the Imperial ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... gorgeous in all the glory of the very latest fashions in upholstery; hall Algerian; dining-room Pompeian; drawing-room Early Italian; music-room Louis Quatorze; billiard-room mediaeval English. The dinner was as magnificent as dinner can be made. Three-fourths of the guests were the haute gomme of the financial world, and perspired gold. The other third belonged to a class which Mr. Smithson described somewhat contemptuously as the shake-back ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... Walter Cranston Larned, author of the "Churches and Castles of Mediaeval France," then the art critic for the News, contributed to it a series of papers on the Walters gallery in Baltimore. These attracted no small attention at the time, and were the subject of animated discussion in art circles in Chicago. They ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... dairy, have been advantageously modified by the results of the fruitful labors of modern scientific investigators. But the art of cookery is at least a century behind in the march of scientific progress. The mistress of the kitchen is still groping her way amid the uncertainties of mediaeval methods, and daily bemoaning the sad results of the "rule of thumb." The chemistry of cookery is as little known to the average housewife as were the results of modern chemistry to the old alchemists; and the attempt to make wholesome, palatable, and nourishing food by the ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... found occasions for satisfying both, he could not have lived in Paris and London at all, but would have gone back to Constantinople, which is the last refuge of romance in Europe, the last hiding-place of mediaeval adventure, the last city of which a new Decameron of tales could still be told, and might ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... the present century there began to be a disposition to grant to mediaeval times their proper place in the history of the preservation and dissemination of books, and Merryweather's Bibliomania in the Middle Ages was one of the earliest works in English devoted to the subject. Previous to that ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... time we arrived at Kirkwall, where we stayed a fortnight, in the course of which we were soon invited to Mr. Balfour's castle at Shapinshay. I call to mind in that mediaeval-looking stronghold (but it is a modern structure) his splendid banqueting-room, lighted by the illuminated points of twelve stags' heads, each having twelve tynes, thus 144 of them, ranged on the sides of that ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... period onwards frequent mention is made of "felt hattes," "beever hattes," and other like names. Throughout mediaeval times the wearing of a hat was regarded as a mark of rank and distinction. During the reign of Elizabeth the caprices of fashion in hats were ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... had declined, and population had decreased in this ancient and curious place. Painters knew it well, and prized its mediaeval houses as a mine of valuable material for their art. Persons of cultivated tastes, who were interested in church architecture of the fourteenth century, sometimes pleased and flattered the Rector by subscribing to his fund for ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... imperial visit he meant to assert any supremacy over England. Sigismund assured them he did not, and was allowed to land. We may look to this English parade of independence as our last reminder of the old mediaeval conception of the Emperor as being at least in theory the overlord of the whole ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... was in danger of being as warped as a busy city man's is liable to become. His work had become an engrained habit, and, being a bachelor, he had hardly an interest in life to draw him away from it, so that his soul was being gradually bricked up like the body of a mediaeval nun. But at last there came this kindly illness, and Nature hustled James Stephens out of his groove, and sent him into the broad world far away from roaring Manchester and his shelves full of calf-skin authorities. At first he resented it deeply. Everything seemed ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle |
