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This is hard indeed to do; yet if we ponder upon a chapter of ancient or mediaeval history, it seems to me some glimmer of a chance of doing so breaks in upon us.
Such were the bases on which the unity of mediaeval civilization had to depend. There was a contracted world, which men could regard as a unity, with a single centre of coherence.
Cambridge University Press. Williams & Norgate. H. Rashdall, Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages. Clarendon Press. A.L. Smith, Church and State in the Middle Ages. Clarendon Press. H.O. Taylor, The Mediaeval Mind. Macmillan. P. Vinogradoff, Roman Law in Mediaeval Europe. Harper.
But perhaps the best way to get a full sense of the storied antiquity, forming as it were the background to those mediaeval documents which in Mr. Almost every page of this tale points to traditions and personages of the most remote antiquity, and is instinct with the very breath of the primitive world.
Personal "cleanliness" was not higher than among savages now. A lover is loused by his lady after the mediaeval fashion. CHRISTIANITY In the first nine books of Saxo, which are devoted to heathendom, there is not much save the author's own Christian point of view that smacks of the New Faith.
"We cannot help dressing Virgil as a Roman, and giving him a 'classical profile' and 'statuesque carriage, but Dante's visual image of Virgil was probably no less mediaeval, no more based on a critical reconstruction of antiquity, than his entire conception of the Roman poet.
Daniel Granger had done this. He had said to an accomplished architect, "I give you the house of my choice; make it what it was in its best days. Improve wherever you can, but alter as little as possible; and, above all, no modernising." Empowered by this carte blanche, the architect had given his soul to dreams of mediaeval splendour and had produced a place which, in its way, was faultless.
But in the case, for instance, of Spinoza, the Amsterdam Synagogue was much more anxious to dissociate itself from the heresies of Spinoza than to compel Spinoza to conform to the beliefs of the Synagogue. And though this power of excommunication might have been employed by the mediaeval Rabbis to enforce the acceptance of a creed, in point of fact no such step was ever taken.
Dante's tremendous words are more than enough to move wholesome horror in any thinking soul: 'Leave hope behind, all ye who enter here. They are said to be unfeeling, grim, and mediaeval, incredible in this enlightened age; but is there any way out of them, if we take into account what our nature is moulded to need and cling to, and what 'godless' men have done with it?
Little by little it assumed shape and colour in my imagination, until at last it was as clearly present to me as if I had seen it with my bodily eyes. I have it before me at this instant; it was the figure of a man in mediaeval costume, in trunk and hose and doublet, and his clothing was red on one side and yellow on the other.
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