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SCHOLAR ISLAND |
MEDIEVAL
"The chief glory of the Middle Ages was not, as Henry Adams thought, its cathedrals, its epics, its vast structures of scholastic philosophy, or even its superb music, which Adams' nieces learned to sing for his delectation; it was the building for the first time in history of a complex civilization which was upheld not on the sinews of sweating slaves and coolies but primarily by nonhuman power. The century which achieved the highest expression of the cult of the Virgin Mary likewise first envisaged the concept of a labor-saving power technology which has played so large a part in the formation of the modern world."
Lynn White, jr.
The Dynamo & The Virgin Reconsidered
M.I.T. Press
"People can't decide when the Middle Ages ended. Personally, I think we're still in them. After all, if this is the last age, then any quibbles about eras within it are rather pointless. However, there was one event of the middle of the fourteenth century that changed Europe and the Near East from being basically optimistic about the future to being frightened of it. The Apocalypse was no longer a distant, event that one could laugh at in plays and stories. It walked the streets. Representations of the monsters no longer came from visions of nightmares but one's own village.
The plague had come."
-Sharan Newman
The Real History of the End of the World
"To look up at the towering medieval universe is much more like looking at a great building. The 'space' of modern astronomy may arouse terror , or bewilderment or vague reverie ; the spheres of the old present us with an object in which the in its harmony. That is the sense in which our universe is romantic, and theirs was classical."
C. S. Lewis
"Would I trade the time in which I live for any other? Never. But would anyone from another time trade for mine? I think not. Take a northern European medievalist, ca. 650. Would he like painless dentistry and potatoes? Surely. Would he give up a world where God reigns supreme and the universe is in complete order down to the finest detail for a world where nothing is certain, where God has been exiled to the sidelines, and where the quantity of human slaughter, poverty, and misery is unparalleled even by medieval standards? I seriously doubt that he would surrender a life of certitude and faith so that he could surf the Web and eat processed food off plastic plates."
Henry Warwick
The Greatest Inventions of the Past 2,000 Years" ed by John Brockman
"The Medieval Lady--Everything changed in the l2th century--in this new world the soul sets out on a pilgrimage of love. The longing of the heart on some member of the opposite sex. For the first time in History, there developed a passionate interest in 'unfulfilled desire', a total sublimation of love, a thirst for fusion with the principal of beauty itself, an absorbing fascination for the idea of love almost as a religion itself. In (1398) Marshall Boucicault--founded the 'order of the White Lady' , dedicated to the defense of oppressed women and more particularly of maidens in distress."
Amaury de Riencourt
"Medieval theologians divided the world into two realms the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Satan.
"For 1500 spelled the end of the high Middle Ages, the beginning of the age of exploration, the end of Christendom, and the rise of the modern world system in the new world economy. 1500 was the beginning of the shift from a centripetal, sacred world view to a centrifugal, secular world view; it was the beginning of the shift from Christian to commercial civilization. It was indeed the end of a world. "
William Irwin Thompson
Darkness Scattered Light
"�.More than that: not only many aspirations of our modern radicals were already realized in the middle ages, but much of what is described now as Utopian was accepted as a matter of fact. "We are laughed at when we say that work must be pleasant, but-everyone must be pleased with his work. " A medieval Kuttneberg ordinance says, "and no one shall, while doing nothing, appropriate for himself what others have produced by application and work."
Kropotkin
Mutual Aid
"In short, if a scarcity visited the city, all had to suffer from it more or less; but apart from the calamities, so long as the free cities existed no one could die in their midst from starvation, as is unhappily too often the cases in our own times."
Kropotkin
Ibid
"In fact, the more we learn about the medieval city, the more we are convinced that at no time has labor enjoyed such conditions of prosperity and such respect as when city life stood at its highest."
Ibid
"Medieval people lived in this daily expectation of a miracle; and to make that miracle credible, the Church held up the cosmic miracle of Christ�s death and resurrection, for the salvation of Man."
Lewis Mumford
The condition of Man
"Property and inheritance were abiding concerns-obsessions, really-in the late Middle Ages, especially among the merchant class to which the Chaucer's belonged; and armed seizure, kidnapping, and trumped-up lawsuits were not uncommon ways to gain possession of them. Englishmen of Chaucer's day were not like the stereotypical stiff-upper-lip English of modern times, who are the children of the Enlightenment and the Empire; they were more like their Norman forebears, hot-tempered and given to extremes when among equals (they cultivated reserve before inferiors or superiors). They wept freely in public, flew into rages, swore copious and imaginative oaths, carried on almost operatic blood feuds and endless legal battles. The mortality rate was high in medieval times and life more precarious; we find more recklessness and terror, more resignation and despair, and more gambling with fortune. More violence, too, or violence of a more vengeful ostentatious kind: decapitated heads displayed on spikes or bodies hanging from a gibbet was their style, where mug shots in the post office is ours."
-Donald R. Howard
"Medieval Europe was largely barbaric and was completely devoid of organized civilization. Yet, the history books offer no mention as to exactly what transformed the archaic Medieval European society from barbarism to modernism. Often, the Crusaders are mentioned, the implication being that their excursions, regardless of how devious, contributed to the advancement of civilization. yet, the scope of the atrocities perpetrated by the Crusaders is seldom if ever portrayed. Some of these texts suggest that while the Crusades were a dark era in European culture, they served as a channel for the advancement of Western civilization through contact with the Islamic one. Certain authors suggest that the Crusaders were largely responsible for the renovation of European civilization. This is a highly distorted and inaccurate portrayal of that violently murderous, disgusting stage in human history. The Crusaders were motivated only by plunder. The civilization of Islam was instilled with the obligation to enhance humanity, and this is precisely what it achieved."
Dr. Kasem Khaleel
The Arab Connection
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Book: "The History of Medieval Life" by David Nicolle
Book: "Life in Medieval ATimes" by Marjorie Rowling
Book: "Atlas Of The Medieval World" by Rosamond McKitterick
Book: "The Oxford Illustrated History of Medieval Europe" Ed by George Holmes
Book: "Readings in Medieval Philosophy" by Andrew B. Schoedinger
Book: "Bernard of Clairvaux: Great Medieval Thinkers" by Gillan R. Evans
Book: "Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe" by Thomas Cahill
Book: "The Lady in Medieval England, 1000-1500" by Peter Cross
Book: "The Book Of The Medieval Knight" by Stephen Turnbull
Book: "The Medieval Art of Love: Objects and Subjects of Desire" by Michael Camille
Book: "Venus and Mars: The World of the Medieval Housebook" by Christoph Graf zu Waldburg Wollegg
Book: "The Death of Kings: Royal Deaths in Medieval England" by Michael Evans
Book: "Power and Profit: The Merchant in Medieval Europe" by Peter Spufford
Book: "The Assassins: The Story of Medieval Islam's Secret Sect" by W.B. Barlett
Book: "The Medieval Kingdoms of Nubia: Pagans ,Christians and Muslims Along the Middle Nile" by Derek A. Welsby
Book: "Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre-and Postmodern" by Carolyn Dinshaw
Book: "The Local Merchants of Prato: Small Entrepreneurs in the Late Medieval Economy" by Richard K. Marshall
Book: "Legends of Chivalry: Medieval Myth" by Tony Allan et. al.
Book: "Life in a Medieval Castle" by Tony McAleavy
Book: "The Medieval Underworld" by Andrew McCall
Book: "Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception" by Aron Gurevich
Book: "City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe" by Barbra A. Hanawalt and Kathryn L. Reyerson eds.
Book: "Medieval Obscenities" by Nicola F. McDonald, Ed
Book: "A Vanished World; Medieval Spain's Golden Age of Enlightenment" by Chris Lowney
Book: "Medieval Art, Second Edition by Marilyn Stokstad
Book: "The Last Knight: The Twilight of the Middle Ages and the Birth of the Modern Era" by Norman F. Cantor
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