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Mediaeval   Listen
adjective
Mediaeval  adj.  (Written also medieval)  Of or relating to the Middle Ages; as, mediaeval architecture.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Mediaeval" Quotes from Famous Books



... he said. "But it's the best I can do, anyway. Do you remember what the mediaeval mummer said, when he came bearing his ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... imperturbable demeanour. Her reserve and dread of comments made her so undemonstrative and repressive to her Captain that there were those who doubted whether she cared for him at all, or only looked on her wedding as a mediaeval maiden might have done, as coming naturally a few years after she had grown up. Ernley Armytage knew better, and so did her parents. The wedding was hurried on by Captain Armytage's appointment to a frigate on the coast ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... gazing, his eyes aglow with interest, around the mediaeval cabin. "Don't doubt a dozen murders at least were pulled ...
— Their Mariposa Legend • Charlotte Herr

... in England who could do justice to this picture of the mediaeval Arab. Captain Burton is perhaps the only one who joins to the necessary linguistic knowledge that varied practical experience of Eastern life which alone in many cases can supply the true meaning of a troublesome passage or an accurate comment upon it. His aim is to make the book in ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... sighted Cozzen's Hotel, and shortly drifted across the parade ground of West Point, its huge battlemented gray walls making one fancy he was looking down into the inner court of some great mediaeval castle. Then we drifted out over the Hudson toward Cold Spring until, caught by a different current, we were swept along the course of ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson

... Giraldus Cambrensis came to Oxford and read his Expugnatio Hiberniae in public lectures, and entertained the doctors of the diverse faculties and the most distinguished scholars. [Footnote: Bishop Stubbs's "Lectures on Mediaeval and Modern History," p. 141, 8vo, 1886.] Oxford was doubtless at that time more renowned, but Cambridge followed not far behind. If the friars settled at Cambridge early in their career, it was because there was ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp

... beach, and he would see it. He did so, leaving his sea-chest behind him, and there, about two hundred paces from the land, and built upon a solitary mountain of rock, measuring half a mile or so round the base, he perceived a vast mediaeval pile of fortified buildings, with turrets towering three hundred feet into the air, and edged with fire by the setting sun. He gazed on it with perplexity. Could it be that this enormous island fortress belonged to him, ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard

... opulent vitality reproduce, in their splendors and their sins, the actual presences of those dead men and women, now more unreal substance than the dust of their shrouds. He liked to carry this mediaeval Iliad round with him, and, taking it out at propitious places, go jotting his pencil down the page. He had heard it called an incomprehensible puzzle of poetry; it gave him pleasure, then, to unriddle and proclaim ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various

... drew up in front of a stone apartment house; and Jill, getting out, passed under an awning through a sort of mediaeval courtyard, gay with potted shrubs, to an inner door. She was impressed. The very atmosphere was redolent of riches, and she wondered how in the world Uncle Chris had managed to acquire wealth on this scale in the extremely short space ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse

... question in my own mind, and, I believe, none in that of any other long-practised student of mediaeval art, that in pure structural Gothic the church of St. Urbain at Troyes is without rival in Europe. Here is a rude sketch of its use of the crocket in the spandrils of its external tracery, and here are the waves of the Greek sea round the son ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin

... internal structure and arrangement. The former, however, can only, I think, be said to be realized in the case of architecture of the highest class, and when taken collectively as a typical style. For instance, we can all pretty well agree that the mediaeval cathedral expresses an emotion of aspiration on the part of its builders. The age that built the cathedrals longed to soar in some way, and this was the way then open to it, and it sent up its soul in spreading vaults, and in pinnacles ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 633, February 18, 1888 • Various

... the States surrendered their power to make war, did they make the single exception of the United States, and reserve the privilege of declaring war against them at any moment? If we are a congeries of mediaeval Italian republics, why should the General Government have expended immense sums in fortifying points whose strategic position is of continental rather than local consequence? Florida, after having cost us nobody knows how many millions of dollars and thousands of lives to render ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various

... by the nature of the typical negroes themselves. Impulsive and inconstant, sociable and amorous, voluble, dilatory, and negligent, but robust, amiable, obedient and contented, they have been the world's premium slaves. Prehistoric Pharaohs, mediaeval Pashas and the grandees of Elizabethan England esteemed them as such; and so great a connoisseur in household service as the Czar Alexander added to his palace corps in 1810 two free negroes, one a steward on an American merchant ship and the other a body-servant whom John ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

... She gave me her miniature in a medallion. I wore it over my heart, a practice much affected by men; but one day, while idly rummaging about a shop filled with curiosities, I found an iron "discipline whip" such as was used by the mediaeval flagellants. At the end of this whip was a metal plate bristling with sharp iron points; I had the medallion riveted to this plate and then returned it to its place over my heart. The sharp points pierced my bosom with every movement and caused such strange, voluptuous anguish that ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset

... in Quedlinburg. I still remember with pleasure Steuerwald's beautiful winter landscapes, into which he so cleverly introduced the mediaeval ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... In mediaeval days, when men fought hand to hand, there must have been advantage in combined and precise movement. When armies were mere iron machines, the simple endeavour of each being to push the other off the earth, then the striking ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome

... and sudden rock, crowned with one of the triumphs of Italian Gothic, the glorious cathedral. After toiling up the ladder-like paths which lead from the plain to the summit of the bluff, and passing through the grand mediaeval gateway along the slanting streets, where even the peasants dismount and walk beside their donkeys, seeing nothing within the whole small compass of the walls save what speaks of the narrowest and humblest life ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various

... was at the front of the house, up-stairs, overlooking the Quemado Road. It made Sylvia's eyes glisten. It contained a piano, and a rather tiny divan in russet leather, and maple-wood furniture, and electric fixtures which made you think of little mediaeval lanterns. But the bride looked at these things somewhat as if she were inspecting a picture, painted in bold strokes: as if they would become obscure if she went too close—as if they couldn't possibly be hers ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge

... to the birthday of Christ. This number seven typifies the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost; it represents the seven miseries of mankind, ignorance, eternal punishment, the slavery of the devil, sin, gloom and exile from our fatherland, which is Heaven. And those wonderful men of mediaeval days tell us why we have need of a Teacher, O Sapientia; of a Redeemer, O Adonai; of a Liberator, O Radix Jesse; of a Guardian, O Clavis David; of a brilliant Instructor, O Oriens; of a Saviour to bring us, Gentiles, back to our Great Father, God; O Rex gentium; ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley

... Society, Dr. Atchley's Parish Clerk and his Right to Read the Liturgical Epistle (Alcuin Club Tracts), and other works, give much information with regard to the antiquity of the office, and to the duties of the clerk of mediaeval times; and from these books I have derived much information. By the kindness of many friends and of many correspondents who are personally unknown to me, I have been enabled to collect a large number of anecdotes, recollections, facts, and biographical sketches ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield

... which the following pages offer a prose translation is contained in the mediaeval Dutch version of the Lancelot, where it occupies upwards of five thousand lines, forming the conclusion of the first existing volume of that compilation. So far as our present knowledge extends, ...
— The Romance of Morien • Jessie L. Weston

... and gleaming brass cans; upon all the jolly trappings of the day; the bright, inquisitive, armoured, resplendent, summer's day, which has long since vanquished chaos; which has dried the melancholy mediaeval mists; drained the swamp and stood glass and stone upon it; and equipped our brains and bodies with such an armoury of weapons that merely to see the flash and thrust of limbs engaged in the conduct of daily life is better ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf

... approach is possible, and up a flight of steps that you make your first acquaintance with a "coin perdu" of the town, a corner without character, without size, without the least promise of the beauty that is hidden further off. Of all those great gates through which the mediaeval city welcomed her dukes or sallied out against her enemies, but one is left, the Porte Guillaume Lion close by the quays, at the end of the Rue des Arpents, which is as faded and decrepit as ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook

... Ireland is the one country in the world over which financiers have not cast their net, possibly because they would catch next to nothing there. So we, who escaped the civilisation of Roman law, almost escaped the philosophy of the mediaeval church, were entirely untouched by the culture of the Renaissance, remained a kind of Gideon's fleece when the dew of the industrial system of the 19th century was moistening Europe, are now left untouched by the new civilisation ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham

... Renaissance revolted against the teachings of the mediaeval church, the disposition to return to nature was insolently strong. Natural impulses were glorified, the physical world attracted attention, and even began to be studied. Hitherto it had been thought deserving of study only because in a few respects ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer

... his shroud wrapped ever higher; nor the tale of the finger of the bronze Venus closing over the wedding-ring, whether told by Morris in verse patterned like some tapestry, or by Merimee in terror of cynical reality, or droned by the original mediaeval professional story-teller, none of these are genuine ghost-stories. They exist, these ghosts, only in our minds, in the minds of those dead folk; they have never stumbled and fumbled about, with Jemima Jackson's maiden aunt, among the ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee

... laughed at him openly," she continues, "and told him some men knew better. What did he think of the Brownings? 'Oh, he had heard the name; he did not know anything of them. Since Scott, he read no modern writer; Scott WAS GREATER THAN HOMER! What he liked were curious, old, erudite books about mediaeval and northern things.' I said I knew little of such literature, and preferred the writers of our own age, but indeed I was no great student at all. Thereupon he evidently wanted to astonish me; and, talking of Ireland, said, 'Ah, yes; a most curious, mixed race. First ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins

... known to the Mosaic, Roman, and old English law. Gad, sir, the Jews might have made you MARRY his widow or sister. An old custom, and I think superseded—sir, properly superseded—by the alternative of ordeal by battle in the mediaeval times. I don't myself fancy these pecuniary fashions of settling wrongs,—but ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... mind like the sight of a mighty range of mountains. They recall primitive feelings of fear before the great unknown, they tower above the human form with a colossal imperturbability which withers our importance and confuses our standards of value. Victor Hugo never quite freed himself from the mediaeval dread of the mountains or the mediaeval speculation on their meaning. His letters to his wife from the Alps and Pyrenees record his impressions with a painstaking and detailed accuracy which does not forget the black-and-yellow spider performing somersaults ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby

... production of art or nature, but very unlike any bird previously observed by the wondering spectators in either museum or menagerie, or even on the painted panels that emblazon the crude and extravagant conceptions of mediaeval heraldry. In the catalogue, the really ingenious piece of workmanship was entitled a 'Life-size model of the dodo'—a name, our readers know, appertaining to a now extinct bird, the very existence of which was at one time ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various

... disappointment and its ironical promptings were but fleeting. Five minutes' drive and we were in the true Jena with the real flavor of mediaeval-ism about us. Here is the hostelry where Luther met the Swiss students in 1522. There is nothing in that date to suggest our Iowa village, nor in the aspect of the hostelry itself, thank fortune. And there rises the ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams

... of the mediaeval conception of the Teutonic state. While the ancient state appears at the beginning of its history as [Greek: polis] or civitas, as an undivided community of citizens, the monarchical Teutonic state is from the beginning dualistic in form,—prince ...
— The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens • Georg Jellinek

... priceless literary heritage has been waiting, precariously subjected to the vicissitudes of earthly circumstance. Like a lone great manuscript within the cloister of a mediaeval monk, Brann's work might have perished utterly soon after its creation, like a song of magic music held but fleetingly within the heart that ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... "As I gazed the mediaeval bosses of the tabernacle of Orcagna seemed to melt and flow into their primal forms so that the folded lotus of the Nile and the Greek acanthus were braided with the runic knots and fish-tailed monsters of the North, and all the plastic terror and beauty born of man's hand from the Ganges ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton

... it and to give his favour and protection to those that dwelt around it. Doubtless, as religious ideas advanced and the conception of the nature of the gods became higher, there came the notion that they did not dwell in houses made with hands; yet a Greek temple, just like a mediaeval cathedral, might be made beautiful as a pleasing service and an honour to the deity to whom it was dedicated; and there was a continuous tradition in practice from the lower conception to the higher, nor is it easy to draw the line at any particular ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner

... been touched, and deeply touched, at finding so many of them, on landing for the first time at Liverpool, hurrying off to our quaint old city of Chester to gaze on its old girdle of walls and towers; Roman, Mediaeval, Caroline; its curious 'Rows' of overhanging houses; its fragments of Roman baths and inscriptions; its modest little Cathedral; and the—really very few—relics of English history which it contains. Even two banners ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley

... Champagne is a flat region, beautiful only by virtue of fertility and highly developed agriculture, it is rich in old churches and fine architectural remains. By the Troyes-Belfort route, Provins may be visited. This is, perhaps, the most perfect specimen of the mediaeval walled-in town in France. To my thinking, neither Carcassonne, Semur nor Gurande surpass Hgsippe Moreau's little birthplace in beauty and picturesqueness. The acropolis of Brie also possesses a long and poetic history, being the seat of an art-loving prince, and the haunt of troubadours. ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... it out. To the influence of His character more than to any other cause may be traced the change in the perspective, so to speak, of Virtue, which characterises modern notions of perfection as contrasted with antique ones. Contrast the Greek and Roman type with the mediaeval ascetic, or with the philanthropic type of modern times. Carlyle's ideal is retrograde and an anachronism. Women and patient sufferers find example in Him. But we have in Jesus Christ, too, the highest example of all the stronger and robuster virtues, the more distinctly heroic, masculine; and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren

... there is little to suggest in any degree that the mediaeval kings of England ruled this large portion of France, and at Mont St Michel the only English objects besides the ebb and flow of tourists are the two great iron michelettes captured by the French in 1433. Everyone who comes to the ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home

... dark red hangings, bearing strange devices and inscriptions in long thin Arabic characters. Few rooms in the Kasbah were decorated in this manner, and it had instantly occurred to me that, concealed somewhere, was one of those secret ways which, whether in the Oriental palace, or the mediaeval European castle, are so suggestive of ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux

... for much more than a century when it became possessed through the magnificence of Rede, Bishop of Chichester, of its wonderful library, so that not only has it the oldest quadrangle, but also the oldest mediaeval library in the kingdom. There is not a room in Oxford so impressive with a sense of antiquity. Its lancet windows, its rough desks sticking out from the bookcases, the chains which thwart the project ...
— Oxford • Frederick Douglas How

... is not merely the neighborhood of the cathedral that is mediaeval; the whole city is of ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell

... heat of his quick love, the sweetness of his spiritual intercourse, the joyous melody with which it filled his austere, self-giving life[43]—as the probable result of the reaction of a neurotic temperament to mediaeval traditions. But if, for instance the Oxford undergraduate of to-day realizes Rolle, not as a picturesque fourteenth-century hermit, but as a fellow-student—another Oxford undergraduate, separated from him only by an interval of time—who gave up that university and ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill

... the Anglican Church Illustrated, with Brief Accounts of the Saints who have Churches dedicated in their Names, or whose Images are most frequently met with in England; the Early Christian and Mediaeval Symbols; and an Index of Emblems, is sufficiently described in its title-page. The editor very properly explains that the work is of an archaeological, not of a theological character—and as such it is certainly ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 68, February 15, 1851 • Various

... been burnt, but the beautiful stone facade was still undamaged. A fire engine and horses were quartered under the central tower. There was a quiet air of light and beauty in the quaint old buildings that suggested the mediaeval prosperity of the city. Behind the better class of houses there were the usual gardens, laid out with taste, and often containing fountains and rustic bridges. The French and the Belgians delighted in striving to make a landscape garden in the small ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott

... his collected poems the plays of his boyhood, "The Island of Statues" (1885) and "Mosada" (1886). They were not of Ireland, but the Arcady of the one and the mediaeval Spain of the other he could easily have paralleled in Irish legend, where anything wonderful and tragic is possible. Nor is "The Countess Cathleen" (1892-99), in its presentation of the drama of a woman that sells her soul that the ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt

... memorable sieges during ancient and mediaeval times, than has the city of Syracuse. Athenian, Carthaginian, Roman, Vandal, Byzantine, Saracen, and Norman, have in turns beleaguered her walls; and the resistance which she successfully opposed to some ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.

... selection of the cities brings out a difference between the Jewish right of asylum and the somewhat similar right in heathen and mediaeval times. The temples or churches were usually the sanctuaries in these. But not the Tabernacle or Temple, but the priestly cities, were chosen here. Their inhabitants represented God to Israel, and as such were the fit persons ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... state of affairs is an anachronism in the nineteenth century, a hideous relic of the barbarism and anarchy of mediaeval times. In America, where every man is a czar, so far as the disposal of himself is concerned, the enslavement of the Russians seems a frightful disregard of the rights of man, the nation a giant Gulliver bound down to the earth by chains of creed and custom, of bureaucracy and ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... re-built the ruined city of Bath, and from those who in successive generations succeeded them. The subterranean "passage traced 24ft." from the western side of Lucas's bath, "at the end of which was found a leaden cistern," was not in any way Roman work, but mediaeval, and was formed some time after the construction of the Abbey house, as an aqueduct for the hot water with which the soil was saturated. This construction is the only evidence of an early discovery of this eastward wing ...
— The Excavations of Roman Baths at Bath • Charles E. Davis

... miracle play which he saw performed at San Diego at Christmas, in 1830, as akin to the miracle plays of mediaeval Europe. The actors took the part of Gabriel, Lucifer, shepherds, a hermit, and Bartolo, a lazy vagabond who was the clown and furnished the element of comedy: the whole interspersed with songs and incidents better adapted to the stage than ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn

... introspection increased among them, another derivation for "Mysticism" was found—it was explained to mean deliberately shutting the eyes to all external things.[5] We shall see in the sequel how this later Neoplatonism passed almost entire into Christianity, and, while forming the basis of mediaeval Mysticism, caused a false association to cling to the word even ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge

... and involved with traditions of other schools, and because most of the students will be less familiar with its results than with their own northern buildings. So, these two designs indicating Death and Life in the beginnings of mediaeval art, we will take an example of the progress of that art from our northern work. Now, many of you, doubtless, have been interested by the mass, grandeur, and gloom of Norman architecture, as much as by Gothic traceries; and when you hear me say that the root of all good work lies in natural facts, ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin

... is," the Colonel growled, "that you don't see that their principle is wrong. Through and through mediaeval, through and through despotic. They make a virtue of weakness, a fetich of vested authority. And it isn't American ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)

... of the Roman Empire, the taste for ivory ornament became almost extinct. There were some periods, however, in the early part of mediaeval history when this material was not forgotten: when the caliphs of the East formed of it some of the beautiful ornaments of their palaces; when the Arabian alchemists subjected it to the crucible, and ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various

... posterity, but in the case of such works as the Gamekeeper and Wild Life and with such a precedent as that established by the Natural History of Selborne such anticipation seems more tempting and less hazardous than usual. One has only to think of some mediaeval Jefferies attached to the staff of Robin Hood, and writing about Needwood and Charnwood as his descendant wrote about the South Downs, to imagine an historical document of priceless value and inexhaustible interest. And in years to be, when the ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley

... admits more variety in type than wickedness, and produces more interesting characters. Catherine Benincasa was probably the most remarkable woman of the fourteenth century, and her letters are the precious personal record of her inner as of her outer life. With all their transparent simplicity and mediaeval quaintness, with all the occasional plebeian crudity of their phrasing, they reveal a nature at once so many- sided and so exalted that the sensitive reader can but echo the judgment of her countrymen, who see in the dyer's daughter ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa

... reflected from the other, and we had best admit the fact without asking awkward questions; but they are blended after a perfectly original fashion in the strange phantasmagoria of 'Tancred.' Let the images of crusaders and modern sportsmen, Hebrew doctors and classical artists, mediaeval monks and Anglican bishops, perform their strange antics before us, and the scenery shift from Manchester to Damascus, or Pall Mall to Bethany, in obedience to laws dictated by the fancy instead of the reason; let each of ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen

... "It seems a mediaeval day for me," Jack said, when the details were concluded. "Good-night, gentlemen," he added, after Bill Lang, with fingers that bungled from agitation, had filled his ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer

... storm was gathering. In a distant province of Russia at first, then on the banks of the Volga, and finally in Moscow itself, the old cry was raised, the hideous mediaeval charge revived, and the standard of persecution unfurled against the Jews. Province after province took it up. In Bulgaria, Servia, and, above all, Roumania, where, we were told, the sword of the Czar had been drawn to protect the oppressed, Christian ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus

... Eighteen years seems difficult to put on the screen. In reality this is exactly where the trained movie man sees his chance. Here he can put in anything and everything that he likes, bringing in, in a slightly mediaeval form, all ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock

... group of the Graces in the centre of the main hall. The glory and beauty of ancient sculpture refresh and satisfy beyond expression a sense wholly wearied and well-nigh nauseated with contemplation of endless sanctities and agonies attempted by mediaeval art, while yet as handless as accident or barbarism has left the ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... complete and comprehensive in description, as ordinary books of travel, but which—written in the full enjoyment of summer time in this country, in sketching in the open air, and in the exploration of its mediaeval towns—may perchance impart something of the author's enthusiasm to his unknown readers, when scattered upon the winds ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn

... the stories of this saint are depicted in the mediaeval stained-glass windows of the parish church of St. Neot, a pretty village nestling under the southern slopes of the Bodmin Moor. This church has one of the finest sets of fifteenth and sixteenth century painted ...
— Legend Land, Volume 2 • Various

... as we knocked at Gilchrist's door. A tall, flaxen-haired, slim young fellow opened it, and made us welcome when he understood our errand. There were some really curious pieces of mediaeval domestic architecture within. Holmes was so charmed with one of them that he insisted on drawing it in his notebook, broke his pencil, had to borrow one from our host and finally borrowed a knife to sharpen his own. The same curious accident ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle

... Nothing could stir in the brush without his knowing it, and, welcoming the pursuit, the spirit of challenge was so strong in him that he threw back his head and uttered a long, thrilling cry, the note of defiance, just as the trumpet of the mediaeval knight sang to his enemy to come ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler

... Troilus and Creseide, a mediaeval tale, already attempted by Boccaccio in his Filostrate, but borrowed by Chaucer, according to his own account, from Lollius, a mysterious name without an owner. The story is similar to that dramatized by Shakspeare in his tragedy of the same title. ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee

... thought to be a wonderful sign of progress a few years ago when sixty thousand out of six hundred thousand voters in a certain election in Massachusetts ignored party lines and voted according to the merits of the candidate. One reason that we have so many mediaeval educational institutions is that persons in control have so many fixed ideas. There are few colleges and universities to- day, for instance, in which courses that prepare young women for home- keeping, such as domestic science and domestic art, receive credit toward a degree. Progressive ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry

... self-conscious superiority of laws or race. He subdued the nations only in the name of God, and to all who accepted God he nobly extended the vision of Paradise and a complete equality of earthly squalor. The motives of mediaeval and more recent conquests were the strangest of all. They were usually dynastic. They depended on the family claim of some family man to a title implying actual possession of another country and all its population. There was always one claimant contending against another claimant, this heir ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson

... disadvantage of being reported. As our party-creeds are commonly represented less by ideas than by persons, (who are assumed, without too close a scrutiny, to be the exponents of certain ideas,) our politics become personal and narrow to a degree never paralleled, unless in ancient Athens or mediaeval Florence. Our Congress debates and our newspapers discuss, sometimes for day after day, not questions of national interest, not what is wise and right, but what the Honorable Lafayette Skreemer said on the stump, or bad whiskey said for him, half a dozen years ago. If that personage, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... is always modern and Strauss always mediaeval—try as he may to cover it up in new bottles. He has chosen to capitalize a "talent"—he has chosen the complexity of media, the shining hardness of externals, repose, against the inner, invisible activity of truth. He has chosen the first creed, the easy creed, the philosophy of his fathers, among ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives

... political and religious reaction; and reaction often assumes the aspect of progress, nay, in some cases is identical with progress. Most of the poets, dramatists, and other writers of the Romantic School were, either by affinity or predilection, legitimists and neo-Catholics. Gothic art, mediaeval sentiment, the ancient monarchy and the ancient creed, were blended in their programme with the abrogation of the "unities," and a greater license of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various

... marked the region both in romance and in soberer fact. Its valleys have individual histories; its aged towns and castles, stirring biographies. The provinces on its northern flanks, once a centre, a nucleus, of old French chivalry, are saturated with mediaeval adventure. One visits the Alps to be in the tide of travel, to find health in the air, to feel the religion of noble mountains. In the Pyrenees is all this, and more,—the present and the past as well. As we call down the shades of ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix

... other, but he who loves impassioned prose will find many specimens here that can only by equaled in De Quincey's best work. Read the peroration of the "Lamp of Sacrifice" and you will not need to be told that this is the finest tribute to the work of the builders of the mediaeval cathedral. Here is a ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch

... one of the Persian clans. Achaemenes is a mythical hero rather than a real person; he was, we are told, fed during infancy by an eagle—that mighty eagle whose shadow, according to a Persian belief in mediaeval times, assured the sovereignty to him on whom it chanced to fall. Achaemenes would seem to have been followed by a certain Chaispi—or Teispes—a less fabulous personage, described in the legends as his son. It was, doubtless, during his reign that Assur-bani-pal, in hot pursuit of Tiumman and Khumban-khaldash, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... romantic ideas read into these things are often rather recent romances, things almost like fashionable novels. For instance, the very name of this place, Prior's Park, makes everybody think of it as a moonlit mediaeval abbey; I dare say the spiritualists by this time have discovered the ghost of a monk there. But, according to the only authoritative study of the matter I can find, the place was simply called Prior's as any rural place is called Podger's. It was the house ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton

... suit of mediaeval court clothes, black from head to foot, and fashioned according to the period of the play in which he was acting. But if he had worn the garments of a pierrot or a clown, one would never have noticed it. The man's individuality, magnetic and irresistible, triumphed easily. Mr. Grooten had ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... their laborers into slaves. Drunkenness, dissipation, poverty, disaffection, and misery—that is what you will find in the open villages. Now, in Islip you have an omnipotent squire, and that is an abomination in theory, a mediaeval monster, a blot on modern civilization; but practically the poor monster is a softener of poverty, an incarnate buffer between the poor and tyranny, the ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade

... Bellerding has trotted out part of his collection of mediaeval musical instruments, and some professionals are going to play them. Waldemar is at our table. Come and ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... scullions, lecheurs (who hung about the kitchen to lecher, lick the platters), and all the foul-mouthed rascality of a great mediaeval household; and attacked Hereward cum fureis et tridentibus, with forks ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley

... mediaeval, ancient, and savage cookery at Earl's Court, the Cookeries,' said Logan. 'Couldn't we seduce an artist like Miss Blowser there, I mean thither of course, the night before the dinner, and get her ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang

... bombs from a rigid dirigible. It is to be noted in this case, as in many, that the power to fly was an attribute of evil, not of good—it was the demons who built the chariot, even as at Friedrichshavn. Mediaeval legend in nearly every case, attributes flight to the aid of evil powers, and incites well-disposed people to stick to the solid earth—though, curiously enough, the pioneers of medieval times were very largely of priestly type, as witness ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian

... Scottish cathedrals are all here treated, with representative collegiate and monastic buildings. Reference is also made to parish churches that represent the architecture of the various periods indicated in Chapter II. A survey of Scottish mediaeval architecture will be found in pp. 194-206 that may enable readers to take a comprehensive view of the whole. A study of those treated in particular will lead to a study of those treated of necessity in general, and illustrate the idea that the history of the Scottish Church is the history ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story

... considerable antiquity, with a square tower surmounted, in true West of England style, by a small turret, having a tiny Gothic spire at one corner. The parishioners are proud of their church, and with justice. It contains some good stained-glass windows, two interesting mediaeval monuments, and an exceptionally fine organ. "The Hall" is quite modern, having been built and endowed, in 1867, by a generous parishioner. The large room seats three hundred people, and is fitted up with an organ as large and beautiful as that in the church close by. Village ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various

... every cross-roads the brooding crucifixes hang. The British mind does not like this constant reiteration of mishandling and defeat in the death of Christ. It does not seem to it to be the final message of the Cross. Indeed, it is the product of the mediaeval, monkish mind. It was not until the tenth century that the representations of the Crucifixion showed Our Lord as dead; it was much later before the emphasis was laid on agony and despair. Once from among the debris ...
— On the King's Service - Inward Glimpses of Men at Arms • Innes Logan

... in that belief a tendency to express itself in certain ceremonial practices, which retain in a greater or less degree the character of the ritual observances of which they are the survival. Mr E. K. Chambers, in The Mediaeval Stage, remarks: "If the comparative study of Religion proves anything it is, that the traditional beliefs and customs of the mediaeval or modern peasant are in nine cases out of ten but the detritus of heathen mythology and ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston

... Nile had several mouths, and from many seaports Egypt carried on its trade with the outside world. To-day only Rosetta and Damietta remain to give their names to the two branches by which alone the Nile now seeks the sea. These interesting seaports, mediaeval and richly picturesque, are no longer the prosperous cities they once were, for railways have diverted traffic from the Nile, and nearly all the seaborne trade of Egypt is now carried from Alexandria or Port Said, the northern entrance to ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly

... straight and pale, Gilbert loved her quite naturally, as she loved him—two young people of one class, without other companions, and very often brought together for days at a time in the isolated existence of mediaeval castles. Perhaps Gilbert never realized just how much of his affection for his mother was the result of her willingness to let him fall in love with Beatrix. But the possibility of discussing the marriage was another excuse ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford

... had them. And the rabblement, of course, cheered such an exhibition of stern Radical simplicity, and STOREY called the wig a bauble, though, to my thinking, there's not much bauble about it, and the cocked-hat he called a mediaeval intrusion, though, to my thinking, there were precious few cocked-hats in the Middle Ages. Then he said he would no more serve as Alderman; and the Mayor and the Town Clerk cried—"Alas, good soul!"—and accepted his resignation with ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Nov. 22, 1890 • Various

... acknowledges, at hap-hazard, tempted and led away by the new horizons which the artistic and historical researches her work required kept opening to her view. But the powerful contrast between the two pictures,—of bright, sunshiny, free, sensuous, careless Venetian folk-life, and of the stern gloom of the mediaeval castle, where the more spiritual consolations of existence come into prominence—is singularly effective and original. So also is the charming way in which an incident in the boyhood of young Joseph Haydn is treated by her fancy, in the episode ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas

... not. Their objects were as various as their demands. They were going to raise new buildings, they were going to pay off debts on old buildings, they were going to establish in a picturesque building (engraving of proposed west elevation attached) the Sisterhood of Mediaeval Marys, they were going to give a testimonial to Mrs. Jellyby, they were going to have their secretary's portrait painted and presented to his mother-in-law, whose deep devotion to him was well known, they were going to get ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens

... of November (St. Martin's Day) is the one generally chosen for the distribution of winter clothing to the poor of the parish, and this in commemoration of the mediaeval legend of the holy Bishop Martin, who gave half his ample cloak to a shivering leper who begged of him in the street. Next night, says the legend, he saw in a dream Christ himself clothed in that cloak, and remembered the promise that "inasmuch ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various

... book, but it was quite hard to transcribe on account of so much of it being in mediaeval English, with ...
— Mistress Margery • Emily Sarah Holt

... set in aristocratic circles in the fifteenth century. For that reason there is a great deal of mediaeval English. However, most of the unusual words are explained as they occur, so there is no problem with comprehension. The last chapter is headed "Historical Appendix", and contains potted lives of most of the people whom we meet ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt

... tenure by which a religious corporation holds lands on condition of praying for the soul of the donor. In mediaeval times many of the wealthiest fraternities obtained their estates in this simple and cheap manner, and once when Henry VIII of England sent an officer to confiscate certain vast possessions which a fraternity of monks held by frankalmoigne, "What!" said the Prior, "would ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce

... drawn from one of the most widely-read works of mediaeval times. Its popularity is explained by its scope, which comprises explanations of allusions to natural objects met with in Scripture and elsewhere. It was, in fact, an account of the properties ...
— Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics • Bliss Carman

... of the sixteenth century system as London has done since. The importance of the change of the centre of gravity and exchange from Venice to Antwerp, therefore, lies in this fact. Under the old system of overland and limited trade, Venice could only provide for such puny exchange and flow as the mediaeval system of Europe demanded; she would have been unable to cope with such a flood of inflowing metal as the sixteenth century witnessed, and Europe would ...
— If Not Silver, What? • John W. Bookwalter

... through twice carefully. I will not say that it is the most accurate of his works, but it is probably the most interesting and shows his graphic and dashing style at its best. An admirer of Stubbs told me that his "Lectures and Addresses on Mediaeval and Modern History" would give me a good idea of his scholarship and literary manner and that I need not tackle his magnum opus. But those lectures gave me a taste for more and, undeterred by the remark of still another admirer that nobody ever read his "Constitutional ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes

... cosmopolitan town that has sprung into being beneath the great roof and glitters in the rays of our republican sun. In its rectangularly-planned streets, alleys and plazas every style of architecture is represented—domestic, state and ecclesiastical, ancient, mediaeval and modern. The spirit and taste of most of the races and climes find expression, giving thus the Sydenham and the Hyde Park palaces in one. The reproductions at the former place were the work of English hands: those before us ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various

... lycanthropy," said Maloney, looking bewildered and anxious to keep to plain facts evidently; "I think I have come across the word, but really—really—it can have no actual significance to-day, can it? These superstitions of mediaeval times can hardly—" ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood

... street, opposite to St. Michael's Church, one of the three famous spires of Coventry, you behold a mediaeval edifice, in the basement of which is such a venerable and now deserted kitchen as I have above alluded to, and, on the same level, a cellar, with low stone pillars and intersecting arches, like the crypt of a cathedral. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... the ordinary occupations of woman in the past and present, and in all classes of society in which she is not parasitic, do demand, and have always demanded, a very high versatility and mental activity, as well as physical: that the mediaeval baron's wife who guided her large household probably had to expend far more pure intellect in doing so than the baron in his hunting and fighting; that the wife of the city accountant probably expends today more reason, imagination, forethought, ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner

... place so sweetly simple and unsophisticated that Mrs. Stevenson loved it best of all. After six pleasant days spent there, the motor now mended, they returned by train to Pau and resumed their trip—due east to Carcassonne, that lovely, lovely city, with its mediaeval ramparts and towers, and then on to Cette on the Mediterranean, where they landed in ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez

... avenue you turn sharp round the corner of the court house, and on a steep hill before you you see a mediaeval castle. ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry

... Primacy, for their bastard sons. All these abuses were of old standing. "Early in the thirteenth century certain of the abbots of Jedburgh, supported by their chapters, had granted certain of their appropriate churches to priests with a right of succession to their sons" (see 'The Mediaeval Church in Scotland,' by the late Bishop Dowden, chap. xix. Mac- Lehose, 1910.) Oppressive customs by which "the upmost claith," or a pecuniary equivalent, was extorted as a kind of death-duty by the clergy, were sanctioned by excommunication: ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang

... Tauler in mediaeval times and Woolman in the last century are among the most earnest teachers of the inward life and spiritual nature of Christianity, yet both were distinguished for practical benevolence. They did not separate the two great commandments. Tauler strove with equal intensity ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier



Words linked to "Mediaeval" :   medieval, nonmodern, Middle Ages



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