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Medieval — news, coverage & facts — IJR

Notable quotes

“Music historians have learned that the language and approach of musical theory in the Middle Ages were borrowed directly from medieval grammar and rhetoric.”
— Thomas Binkley Companion to Medieval & Renaissance Music (1997) "The work is not the performance"
“The human imagination has seldom had before it an object so sublimely ordered as the medieval cosmos. If it has an aesthetic fault, it is perhaps, for us who have known romanticism, a shade too ordered. For all its vast spaces it might in the end afflict us with a kind of claustrophobia. Is there nowhere any vagueness? No undiscovered by-ways? No twilight? Can we never really get out of doors?”
— C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1964)
“The alchemical conception of different substances as forms of the one thing, that is, portions of the same entity concealed in different wrappings, prevailed throughout the Middle Ages, and did not wholly disappear until towards the end of the eighteenth century.”
— , A History of Chemical Theories and Laws (1907) p. 6.
“Our conception of chance is one of law and order in large numbers; it is not that idea of chaotic incidence which vexed the mediaeval mind.”
— Karl Pearson, "The Chances of Death" (1895) Lecture before the (Jan. 1895) as quoted in Karl Pearson, The Chances of Death, and Other Studies in Evolution (1897) Vol. 1, pp. 15.
“Many of the greatest accomplishments of the Middle Ages were either anonymous or the work of countless laborers.”
— Lynn Thorndike, The History of Medieval Europe (1917)
“It is in effect impossible to draw any decided line between the periods of Ancient and Mediaeval history. We have chosen to commence the latter from the battle of Tours, because it was then that the kingdoms and manners of Europe began to assume somewhat of the form they retained during the middle ages.”
— Charlotte Mary Yonge, Landmarks of History. Middle Ages: From the Reign of Charlemagne to that of Charles V (1853)

Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.