Medieval Europe Quotes

“[Charles the Fifth], pretty much every way worked to hold up the pillars of the medieval world order: monarchic power, domination by the Catholic Church, feudal land management, divine right, mercantile colonialization, and obedience to authority along the strict metaphysical line of the great chain of being.”
― Russell Shorto, Amsterdam: A History of the World's Most Liberal City

“Il tuo destino ha fatto molto scalpore a Costanza. Non vi era persona alla quale io chiedessi che non sapesse darmi una risposta.”
― Iny Lorentz

“So twined is mine
own self with thine, that the love
could not die whilst my heart told me
thou still lived. It is green yet, and
strong, and hath waited only for this
day. When I saw Aedan, and knew
that thou wast nearby, my soul didst
rise up and fly!”
― Sarah Brazytis, In God is My Hope

“The general impression left on the medieval mind by its official teachers was that all love - at least all such passionate and exalted devotion as a courtly poet thought worthy of the name - was more or less wicked. And this impression, combining with the nature of feudal marriage as I have already described it, produced in the poets a certain wilfulness, a readiness to emphasize rather than conceal the antagonism between their amatory and their religious ideals. Thus if the Church tells them even that the ardent lover of his own wife is in mortal sin, they presently reply with the rule that true love is impossible in marriage. If the Church says that the sexual act can be 'excuse' only by the desire for offspring, then it becomes the mark of a true lover, like Chauntecleer, that he served Venus

"More for delyt than world to multiplye".”
― C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition