Middle Passage

“ Nay, I will even confess to you that I have my private doubts whether the Middle Ages are over yet—whether any period comes to an end at a given epoch, but does not rather still subsist, diminished yet puissant, stealing in unnoticed currents along the vast veins and secret fabric of the world. ”

“ Could any scales weigh, could any words measure the suffering which must have been endured? Is it strange that, with every aspiration thwarted, hope stifled, Europe sank into the long sleep of the Middle Ages? ”

“ The long interval, commonly known by the name of the middle ages, which immediately preceded the revival of letters in the western part of Europe, forms the most melancholy blank which occurs, from the first dawn of recorded civilisation, in the intellectual and moral history of the human race. ”

“ Between these two languages, in the North and the South of what is now France, there was in the Middle Ages a kind of division of labour. The North took narrative poetry, the South took lyric; and French narrative and Provençal lyric [47] poetry in the twelfth century between them made the beginning of modern literature for the whole of Europe. ”

“ The early Middle Ages—the times before Love came, and with it the gradual dignifying of all realities which had been left so long to mere gross or cunning or violent men—the early Middle Ages have left behind them one of the most complete and wonderful of human documents, the letters of Abélard and Héloïse. ”

“ The causes making the Middle Ages a characterizable period in human history have been scanned. We observed the antecedent influences as they finally took form and [Pg 526] temper in the intellectual atmosphere of the latter-day pagan world and the cognate mentalities of the Church Fathers. We followed the pre-Christian Latinizing of Provence, Spain, Gaul, and the diffusion of Christianity throughout the same countries, where, save for sporadic dispossession, Christianity and Latin were to continue, and become, in the course of centuries, mediaeval and Romance. ”

“ And the art of the Middle Ages was the fantastic, far-fetched, and often morbid production of nations of crusaders and theologians, burning heretics, worshipping ladies, seeing visions, and periodically joining hands in a vertiginous death-reel, whose figures were danced from country to country. ”

“ It is possible now to think of the Middle Ages and their literature without prejudice on the one side or the other. As no one now thinks of despising Gothic architecture simply because it is not Greek, so the books of the Middle Ages may be read in a spirit of fairness by those who will take the trouble to understand their language ”

“ And it is as the most singular instance of such conditions that I should wish to study, in themselves, their causes and effects, the great differences existing between the ancients and ourselves on the one hand, and the men of the genuine Middle Ages on the other, in the degree of interest taken respectively by each in external nature, the seasons and that rural life which seems to bring us into closest contact with them both. ”

“ On the other hand, the Middle Ages have been glorified by many writers; ‘the Age of Chivalry’, the ‘Ages of Faith’ have often been contrasted with the hardness of the age of enlightenment, rationalism, and material progress; they are thought of as full of colour, variety, romance of all sorts, while modern civilization is represented as comparatively dull, monotonous and unpicturesque. ”

“ We see by this that our chronicles of the middle ages have nothing to envy in those of the East. Most of them, it is true, are of an extreme dryness, and have neither precision nor method. But still some few of them do not appear unworthy of attracting the attention of scholars and men of taste. ”

“ Too many people still think that the Middle Ages are merely a stagnant pit which lies between the heights of classical and of Renaissance civilization, and that all our legacy from the past was carried over the bridges which Renaissance thinkers threw across the medieval pit to the firm ground of Graeco-Roman learning. ”

“ The middle ages had, in France, their spiritualists, their materialists, their pantheists, their rationalists, their mystics, and their sceptics, not very clear or refined in their notions, but such as lacked neither profundity in their general view of the questions, nor ingenious subtilty in their argumentative process. ”

“ The Middle Ages, knowing that everything on earth is a sign and a figure, that the only value of things visible is in so far as they correspond to things invisible—the Middle Ages, when consequently men were not, as we are, the dupes of appearances—made a profound study of this science, and made it the nursing mother and the handmaid of mysticism. ”

“ It is not from caprice or idleness that the somewhat minute examination thus given to the opening centuries of the Dark |The Central Middle Ages to be more rapidly passed over.| or early Middle Ages will now be exchanged for a more rapid flight over the central portion of the same division of history. ”

“ The present work is not occupied with the brutalities of mediaeval life, nor with all the lower grades of ignorance and superstition abounding in the Middle Ages, and still existing, in a less degree, through parts of Spain and southern France and Italy. ”

“ In the Middle Ages the treatment of language was in a sense more historical. The Middle Ages started with the hypothesis, derived from the book of Genesis, that in the early world all men were of one language and of one speech. ”

“ THE early part of the Middle Ages had been an era of pioneering and of settlement. A new people, who thus far had lived outside the wild range of forest, mountains and marshes which protected the north-eastern frontier of the Roman Empire, had forced its way into the plains of western Europe and had taken possession of most of the land. ”

“ Yet the thirteenth century does not only illustrate the crowning glories of the Middle Ages: it suggests new modes of thought that indicate that the Middle Ages themselves are passing away. The triumph of the Church bore 8with it the seeds of its own ruin, in the world of thought as well as in the world of action. ”

“ Summary.—Looking at the internal history of the French language as a whole, there is no such strongly marked division as exists between Old and Middle English, or even between Middle and Modern English. Some of the most important changes are quite modern, and are concealed by the traditional orthography ”

“ There is no way save by entering the mediaeval depths, penetrating to the rationale of the Middle Ages, learning the doctrinale, or emotionale, of the modes in which they still present themselves so persuasively. ”

“ The noted historians of Europe, in describing the conditions, manners, politics, learning and culture, in all their aspects, of early, medieval and modern times, unanimously record that during the ten centuries constituting the Middle Ages, from the beginning of the sixth century of the Christian era till the close of the fifteenth, Europe was in every respect and to an extreme degree, barbaric and dark. ”

“ We have found a truly Purgational Middle state, with its sense of succession, its mixture of joy and suffering, and its growth and fruitfulness, to be profoundly consonant with all our deepest spiritual experiences and requirements. ”

“ Further, from the fifth century after Christ until the fifteenth, that period defined as the Middle Ages, such terrible struggles and fierce upheavals, such ruthless encounters and horrifying acts, were the rule among the peoples of Europe, that the Europeans rightly describe those ten centuries as the Dark Ages. ”

“ We are sometimes disposed to think and speak of the Middle Ages, as though by that term was to be understood a period including several centuries, during the whole of which society was governed by the same laws, and made but little progress. ”

“ When, therefore, we represent to ourselves the learned world of the Middle Ages crowding to the universities that were starting up in almost every provincial capital of France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, we must not forget that a quiet undercurrent was always flowing in an opposite direction, though it had no power to overcome the strong full tide of fashion. ”

“ The results of this contact were felt first in Spain and Italy, but the new civilization became generally manifest throughout western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This is the period of which I shall speak this afternoon, and I shall now remind you of some things in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that were modern in character, so that you may not be surprised when I suggest that modern science, too, began in the middle ages. A book has been written recently on what we owe to the Greeks; let us see what we owe to the middle ages. ”

“ I admire at the piety of the Middle Ages, which founded the monastic tribes of men, which wrote the theologies, scholastic and mystic both, still speaking to the mind of men, or in poetic legends insinuated truth ”

“ For in truth, while the most fertile and fertilising ideas of the Middle Ages had exhausted, or were rapidly coming to exhaust, their influence upon the people, the forms of the doctrines of the Church—even of the most stimulative as well as of the most solemn among them,—had grown hard and stiff. ”

“ We are especially apt to forget that this small race, contracted now to the extreme confines of Europe, in the midst of those rocks and mountains where its enemies have driven it, is in possession of a literature, which in the Middle Ages exerted an immense influence, changed the current of European imagination, and imposed upon almost the whole of Christianity its poetical motifs. ”

“ Middle Ages, is a term used in connection with European history to denote the period beginning with the fall of the Roman Empire in 476, and closing with the invention of printing, the discovery of America, and the revival of learning in the 15th century. ”

“ Even after the adoption in Europe of the Christian era, a great variety of methods of dating—national, provincial and ecclesiastical—grew up and prevailed for a long time in different countries, thus renewing in modern times the difficulties experienced in ancient times from diversities of reckoning. An acquaintance with these various methods is indispensable to the student of the charters, chronicles and legal instruments of the middle ages. ”

“ Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. ”

“ Passion, sensuality, ferocity, superstitious ignorance, and fear characterized the age. It is supposed that western Europe was overpopulated and that the crusades operated a beneficial reduction of numbers.441 These facts may account for the gigantic mass phenomena in the early Middle Ages. ”

“ Touching the origin of particular places, the great historians of the Middle Ages are equally communicative. In the accounts they give of them, as well as in the lives they write of eminent men, the history usually begins at a very remote period ”

“ Apparent Superiority of the Middle Ages.—The Middle Ages present in the Church an institution with an absolutely universal aim, involving the whole of humanity,—an aim, moreover, which—presumedly—concerned man's highest interests ”

“ The middle of the century is thus also the center of a circle of activity whose radius extends for about two decades on either side, passing thence into thinner aired intermediate zones,—transition periods from the eighteenth and to the twentieth centuries, seasons whose energies are potential, or spent, rather than vigorously kinetic. ”

“ In the East, where, in our travels, we have sometimes the surprise of finding ancient customs still living {221} which we can at home only study in books, the fashion for buffoons and mimics survives, and even remains the great distraction of princes. ”

“ which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going à la Sainte Terre," to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a Sainte-Terrer," a Saunterer,—a Holy-Lander. ”

“ And when she asked if he could give her something more definite than a Christian name by which to trace this unknown man among his large and scattered acquaintance, he wrote the name of a Middle Western city, adding: “You can find out from the fellows. ”

“ The Middle is, moreover, associated in India with the idea of immovability, repose and centrifugal power and rule, incorporated in the supreme divinity whose symbol is the wheel and who is represented as dual and quadruple in nature, i. ”

“ There is something dark and wintry about the atmosphere of the later Middle Ages. ”

“ If it were a real effort to live in the Middle Ages, your life would be one perpetual prevarication. ”

“ The subjects which he has chosen, however, are of both historic and dramatic importance, and they have the added value of giving the modern reader a clear picture of the state of semi-lawlessness which existed in Europe, during the middle ages. ”

“ For if we omit the Dark Ages, and, turning suddenly from the civilization of classical Greece and Rome, raise the curtain on, say, thirteenth-century England, we are struck by a remarkable transformation. An attempt has been made in previous chapters to trace the general changes of meaning in certain key-words of human thought and feeling, such as God and love, life and death, heaven and hell,... When we reach medieval Europe, it is necessary to add a new class of key-word altogether. ”