Discover the most popular and inspiring quotes and sayings on the topic of Medievalists. Share them with your friends on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, and let the world be inspired by their powerful messages. Here are the Top 100 Medievalists Quotes And Sayings by 96 Authors including Scott Lynch,Patrick Rothfuss,Leo Tolstoy,Tamora Pierce,Jacques Roumain for you to enjoy and share.
This is where you and I are headed ... Look for us in history books and you'll find us in the margins. Look for us in legends and you might just find us celebrated
Thieves, Heretics, and Whores
But the peasants - how do the peasants die?
I was nuts for stuff in the Middle Ages when I was just in the third and fourth grades.
Peasants are a rude lot, and hard: life has hardened their hearts, but they are thick and awkward only in appearance; you have to know them. No one is more sensitive to what gives man the right to call himself a man: good-heartedness, bravery and virile brotherhood.
What baron or squire Or knight of the shire Lives half so well as a holy friar.
The notion that human life is sacred just because it is human life is medieval.
I am a keen medievalist and like going around museums and ruins and finding out about the people and local culture. I'm not one for sitting by a pool or lying on a beach. I also like to sketch while I'm on holiday, if I have time.
I am not in any way opposed to medieval studies (or for that matter Latin).
When you look at the original 'Paradise Lost' film, you see three kids who can't defend themselves, being persecuted in a medieval way - witchcraft, satanic worship. It was kind of primitive.
We need knew knights, but without swords.
There were some ages in Western history that have occasionally been called Dark. They were dark, it is said, because in them learning declined, and progress paused, and men labored under the pall of belief. A cause-effect relationship is frequently felt to exist between the pause and the belief.
It is as though a portal in time has opened, and the Christians of the 14th century are pouring into our world.
With the breakdown of the medieval system, the gods of chaos, lunacy, and bad taste gained ascendancy.
The Encyclopedia
the advance artillery of reason, the armada of philosophy, the siege engine of the enlightenment ...
Firstly, the farmers, the most stupid set of people in existence, who, clinging to feudal prejudices, burst forth in masses, ready to die rather than cease to obey those whom they, their fathers and grandfathers, had called their masters; and submitted to be trampled on and horse-whipped by.
They belonged to the long and honorable human tradition that had spawned the Luddites, the flat-earthers, various bible-thumping faithies, the scientographers, and the back-earthies, not to mention all the other forms of the true believers that had parasitized human society over the millennia.
Typography fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration
We thought ourselves kings of the ages. Now we find that all our civilisation has been nothing but a brief, brightly lit nursery, where we have played with paper crowns and wooden sceptres.
The next time somebody announces that he plans to get Medieval on your ass, tell him you're going to get Renaissance on his gonads.
In the Middle Ages, cathedrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.
Technically, I'm a knight. My family goes back a thousand years in the Naples area. We're a titled, noble people.
Strange how blind people are! They are horrified by the torture chambers of the Middle Ages, but their arsenals fill them with pride!
The Middle Ages were long preoccupied with the nature of the concept, or of the notion which the intellect abstracts from the object; but they never doubted that its content was borrowed from the content of the object, still less that the object really existed.
Italianate Englishmen are incarnate devils ... for they first lustfully condemn God, then scornfully mock his word, and also spitefully hate and hurt all the well wishers thereof ... They count as fables the holy mysteries of religion.
I developed a passion for the Middle Ages the same way some people develop a passion for coconuts.
The perceptions of middle age have their own luminosity.
With the ascension of Charles I to the throne we come at last to the Central Period of English History (not to be confused with the Middle Ages, of course), consisting in the utterly memorable Struggle between the Cavaliers (Wrong but Wromantic) and the Roundheads (Right but Repulsive).
They are Nietzsche's over-men, these primitive Albanians - something between kings and tigers.
Those for whom the world is not enough: saints, conquerors, poets, and all lovers of books.
Could I but know all, I would have the faith of a Breton peasant woman
This life, this entire world, was a crucible. It was the crusade of their times, and they were the knights, the warriors.
In times like these, who had either the leisure or the inclination to indulge in a touch of elegance?
The men of England,- the men, I mean, of light and leading in England.
Dark, primitive magic. Swords Against Death.
Sadistic brutality and mystical feeling go always hand in hand when the normal capacity for orgastic experience is lacking. This was as true of the inquisitors of the medieval church, of the cruel and mystical Philip II of Spain, as it is of any modern mass murderer.
The Middle Ages hangs over history's belt like a beer belly. It is too late now for aerobic dancing or cottage cheese lunches to reduce the Middle Ages. History will have to wear size 48 shorts forever.
The countryside they
Nobles by the right of an earlier creation, and priests by the imposition of a mightier hand.
The medieval university looked backwards; it professed to be a storehouse of old knowledge. The modern university looks forward, and is a factory of new knowledge.
Health, money. That's what people worried about in the 14th century as much as today. I find it so much more interesting than the supposed activities of kings, queens, generals.
They were the makers and enslavers of that life, and above all doubt the originals of the fiendish elder myths
They love truth flourishing, who do not love it when it is confuting. They dare handle and look on the sword with delight when in a rich scabbard, who would run away to see it drawn.
Knight without fear and without reproach.
the modern return to heathenism has been a return not even to the heathen youth but rather to the heathen old age. But
We were king's men, knights, and heroes ... but some knights are dark and full of terror, my lady. War makes monsters of us all."
"Are you saying you are monsters?"
"I am saying we are human. You are not the only one with wounds, Lady Brienne
Anglo Saxons: To blame for everything.
When a Mannerist artist breaks rules he does so on the basis of knowledge and not of ignorance. A considerable amount of North European architecture of the sixteenth century must be excluded for these reasons.
I envy them, those monks of old; Their books they read, and their beads they told.
We can appreciate but not really understand the medieval town. We cannot comprehend its compactness, the contiguity of all its buildings as a single uninterrupted whole.
Not out of those, on whom systems of education have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or to build the new, but out of unhandselled savage nature, out of terrible Druids and Berserkirs, come at last Alfred and Shakespeare.
As you travel around medieval England you will come across a sport described by some contemporaries as 'abominable ... more common, undignified and worthless than any other game, rarely ending but with some loss, accident or disadvantage to the players themselves'. This is football.
We forget how bawdy and brutal the Middle Ages were.
The fashion just now is a Roman Catholic frame of mind with an Agnostic conscience; you get the mediaeval picturesqueness of the one with the modern conveniences of the other
The common herd of "burghers", those cattle, complete with horns, who turn millstones with their bare hands.
We are the heirs of the ages
Hear all ye angels, progeny of light, Thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, powers.
It was then, I think, that I discovered that the best way of bringing a medieval subject home to my generation was not to be medieval in its treatment.
If it were a real effort to live in the Middle Ages, your life would be one perpetual prevarication.
A gang of unpredictable ruffians by day who turned to enthralling storytellers after dark. I would sometimes join them, and listen for a great part of the night to some of the finest fairy tales and most romantic legends it has ever been my fortune to hear.
...early medieval Ireland sounds like a somewhat crazed Wisconsin, in which every dairy farm is an armed camp at perpetual war with its neighbors, and every farmer claims he is a king.
But our depraved age does not deserve to enjoy such a blessing as those ages enjoyed when knights-errant took upon their shoulders the defence of kingdoms, the protection of damsels, the succour of orphans and minors, the chastisement of the proud, and the recompense of the humble.
You end up with this succession of periods when everything was marvellous - from King Arthur to the medieval times, Ivanhoe, chivalry, Henry VIII, Merry England, the Blitz
Obtruded on us by the Scottish historians. [* Chron. Sax. p. 19.] [** W. Malms, p. 19.]
Los Padres have everything and the people have nothing; 'tis the masterpiece of reason and justice. For my part, I know nothing so divine as Los Padres who make war on Kings of Spain and Portugal and in Europe act as their confessors; who here kill Spaniards and at Madrid send them to Heaven.
What were the living dead, Wolgast thought, but a metaphor for the misbegotten march of middle age?
The ameliorating march of the last few centuries has been initiated by the heretics of each age, though I concede that the men and women denounced and persecuted as infidels by the pious of one century are frequently claimed as saints by the pious of a later generation.
It was a kind of eleemosynary institution,
I'm really a classicist at heart - with a bit of madness!
When we want culture more than potatoes, and illumination more than sugar-plums, then the great resources of a world are taxed anddrawn out, and the result, or staple production, is, not slaves, nor operatives, but men,
those rare fruits called heroes, saints, poets, philosophers, and redeemers.
With the World War II era, there's so much written material to draw on. When you go back to the 14th century, you have to imagine more.
ideas whose inaccuracy was atoned for by their honest simplicity, were derived not from books, but from a tradition at once ancient and direct, unbroken, oral, degraded, unrecognisable, and alive.
an unlovely gaggle of contrary old codgers".
O cowardly amd tyrannous race of monks, persecutors of the bard, and the gleemen, haters of life and joy! O race that does not draw the sword and tell the truth! O race that melts the bones of the people with cowardice and with deceit! ("The Crucifixion Of The Outcast")
Knights are cavalry, bishops are archers, rooks are cannons and queens are wizards.
the Poor Men of Lyons,
Old ideas from an old man about an old vision of Europe.
Numberless have been the systems of iniquity contrived by the great for the gratification of this passion in themselves; but in none of them were they ever more successful than in the invention and establishment of the canon and the feudal law.
For hundreds of years the monks have held the pen, and what they have written is what we take to be our history, but I do not believe it really is. I believe they have suppressed the history they don't like, and written one that is favourable to Rome.' Henry
We have fought long and hard to escape from medieval superstition. I, for one, do not wish to go back.
There may have been disillusionments in the lives of the medieval saints, but they would scarcely have been better pleased if they could have foreseen that their names would be associated nowadays chiefly with racehorses and the cheaper clarets.
A country peopled by peasants, priests and pixies.
The medievalist has the capacity, and the desire, to harmonize. He believes the planets sing in harmony; why cannot technology also sing?
Painters
and storytellers, including poets and playwrights and historians, they are the justices of the Supreme Court of Good and Evil, of which I am now a member, and to which you may belong someday!
People were thicker than bees, in those narrow streets, and the men were dressed in all the outrageous, outlandish, idolatrous, extravagant, thunder-and-lightning costumes that ever a tailor with the delirium tremens and seven devils could conceive of. There
It'd be nice to be what they call a Renaissance man.
We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity
romantic love and gunpowder.
Should we Knights, in years to come, dwindle into memory, perhaps the world will recall that in the days of our demise we stood, hewing at the fetters of captive men.
They were Catholic, my lovers,
All in an access of crossing themselves,
Particularly their fingers
Behind their suspendered backs
And that was the women.
There is something dark and wintry about the atmosphere of the later Middle Ages.
Men of Science. If they are worthy of the name they are indeed about God's path and about his bed and spying out all his ways.
Moujiks. Right. What's a moujik?" the Tsar asked.
"Peasants, your majesty."
"Pheasants?"
"No! Peasants.
All who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers.
The Moors exist in eternal twilight, in the pause between the lightning strike and the resurrection. They are a place of endless scientific experimentation, of monstrous beauty, and of terrible consequences.
It is good to know there are some true knights still.
I have a master's degree in medieval literature. Wyverns - or firedrakes, if you prefer - were once common in European mythology and legends." "But you . . . you're my accountant," Sarah sputtered. "Do you have any idea how many English majors are accountants?" Vivian asked with raised eyebrows.
If there was anything obviously heroic about medieval surgery, it was the patient.
The final argument of kings
The members of the circle ... [were] performing a peculiar caper based on Mrs. Shawcross's fancy of what a Saxon dance might have seemed like. ("Did Saxons dance?" Pamela asked. "You never think of them dancing.")
Men for whom reason begins with the Revival of Learning, men for whom religion begins with the Reformation, can never give a complete account of anything, for they have to start with institutions whose origin they cannot explain, or generally even imagine.