Middle Ages

Music historians have learned that the language and approach of musical theory in the Middle Ages were borrowed directly from medieval grammar and rhetoric.

— Middle Ages

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?

— Middle Ages

The medieval social organization was a personal one. The relations between the squire and serf, between master and artisan, were direct, and sometimes intimate. The personal quality mitigated and obscured the social injustice and inequality...

— Middle Ages

This idea of Death as the lawless one... who strikes at random, arose early in mediaeval tradition, and is represented in the well known Dances of Death... Parallel with this notion... has run in the mind of the folk a vague idea of Chance as that which obeys no rule and defies all measure and prediction. The two conceptions cross one another in the medieval representation of Death seizing the gambler's dice-box and casting the dice with him for his life.

— Middle Ages

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.

— Middle Ages

There is almost never a sharp break nor a total dissimilarity between periods which adjoin in time. Thus the Middle Ages inherited much from ancient times, and many features of our present civilization may be traced back several centuries into medieval history. This illustrates how one age dovetails into its successor, no sharp line being drawn between them, but some features of the old life continuing for some time after innovations have been made in other respects.

— Middle Ages

Many of the greatest accomplishments of the Middle Ages were either anonymous or the work of countless laborers.

— Middle Ages

Every young Roman of condition was a Roman jurist. And the study of the law, thus made a leading branch of a liberal education, continued so through the middle ages—continues so still.

— Middle Ages

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.

— Middle Ages