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“... In​  Northanger Abbey, Catherine Morland finds history tiresome because it’s peopled with ‘men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all’. From antiquity until as late as the 1970s, most history was written by men, for men, about men. Its pages seldom noted women’s doings, and they were even more rarely its authors. In the medieval West, a few women wrote lyrics and religious texts; they did not write history ...”

“... The best place​ to begin Elizabeth Allen’s study of sanctuary seeking in medieval England is the coda: ‘Sanctuary in Southwest Georgia, 1962’. Here Allen vividly recounts an incident from the American civil rights movement in which her father, Ralph Allen, played an important role. He was one of two white college students who joined 38 Black activists in a voting rights campaign ...”

“... Historians​ usually exclude gossip and rumour from their sources, or use them with caution. In her new book about Eleanor of Aquitaine, Karen Sullivan does the opposite. She looks at what friends, enemies, troubadours and chroniclers as late as the 16th century had to say, often relaying it with the phrase ut dicebatur, ‘as it was said’. Eleanor has been many things to many people, from the arbiter of a Court of Love in Andreas Capellanus’s treatise De Amore to the acerbic power broker played by Katharine Hepburn in A Lion in Winter ...”

“... When an innkeeper’s​ daughter accused the monk Marinos, a hardened ascetic, of fathering her child, his brethren were appalled. But Marinos, meekly confessing his sin, accepted the punishment of exile and even nursed the infant with milk supplied by shepherds. After several years, the monks readmitted him to the usual monastic routine, along with extra penitential labours ...”

“... Fifty years ago, Walter Ong startled classicists with the proposal that learning Latin offered medieval and Renaissance boys a rite of passage not unlike Bushman puberty rites. Torn from the company of women, the initiate was sequestered with his peers in a clubhouse-like schoolroom, trained in the special language of an elite, disciplined by flogging, and formed by a regimen geared to inculcate moral and intellectual toughness ...”

“... This book​ begins with a paradox: we speak incessantly of death, yet can’t say anything about it because it has no being. A subsidiary paradox has long puzzled medievalists: ‘It is hard to tell, when you read only the poetry of the late 14th century, that the Black Death had ever arrived,’ D. Vance Smith writes. There is nothing in all English literature to parallel Boccaccio’s famous account in the Decameron ...”

“... some versions) their faithful dog. This carol, like some of the secular ballads Hirsh includes (‘Barbara Allan’, ‘The Three Ravens’, ‘The Unquiet Grave’), exists in numerous variants that are still in the repertoire of folk-singers. Hirsh does not translate his Middle English texts, nor does he normalise spellings ‘as if to imply that all of ...”

“... Albertus Magnus​ , the Dominican friar born sometime around 1200 and canonised in 1931, is often called the patron saint of natural scientists, but he might as well be called the patron saint of curiosity. The 38 volumes of his collected works cover not only theology, law and logic, but almost every science known to his era: zoology and botany, physiology and medicine, astronomy and astrology, geography, mineralogy – even its troublesome stepchild, alchemy ...”

“... on five discs, beginning with Canticles of Ecstasy in 1994.* When their director, the incomparable Barbara Thornton, died shortly after the release of Saints in 1998, the medieval performance world lost not only an extraordinary voice, but one of its most learned and impassioned interpreters. These recordings, ethereal yet earthy, stand as a lasting memorial ...”

“... as a requirement for sainthood, with the result that many favourites (including my patron, St Barbara) were decommissioned in the 1960s. Other casualties included the dog-headed St Christopher and St Catherine of Alexandria, who was said to have bested fifty pagans in philosophical argument. Medieval authorities may have been more credulous, but they too ...”

“... Almost everything​ we know about medieval culture is written on the skins of dead animals. Turning sheep and calves into parchment is a messy, smelly business. But when we read medieval texts in print editions all that mess disappears – so we no longer see what the authors of the Middle English ‘Charters of Christ’ saw when they compared God’s sacrificial Lamb to the lambs that supplied their writing material ...”

“... For every medieval manuscript we possess, scholars estimate that at least ten have perished. The compendium of Latin saints’ lives known as the Golden Legend, with its staggering thousand exemplars, must have been second only to the Bible in popularity. Compiled by the Dominican Jacobus de Voragine around 1260, it became a standard text on every preacher’s bookshelf and was translated into every vernacular ...”

“... Few medieval enterprises​ have been as romanticised or as vilified as the Crusades. Aside from the bitter legacy of hate they left in the Middle East, they also wrought havoc in Europe. Departing crusaders routinely attacked Jews, giving them the options of slaughter or forced baptism (many preferred collective suicide). In the Fourth Crusade of 1202-4, the Venetians diverted the army from Egypt to sack Constantinople, while the Albigensian Crusade of 1209-29 devastated a flourishing Occitanian culture ...”

“... Nine hundred years ago, a celebrity philosopher fell in love with his star student and seduced her. Peter Abelard’s once brilliant lectures grew tepid, while his love songs placed the name of Heloise on every tongue. Passionate letters flew, and the Parisian gossip mill went into overdrive – until pregnancy, as so often, betrayed the secret. Much against Heloise’s will, Abelard insisted on marriage to soothe her enraged uncle Fulbert, and spirited their child off to his sister’s farm in Brittany ...”

“... Once upon​ a time, runs a medieval tale, a jealous wife quarrelled with another woman for flirting with her husband. As the women fought, the alleged flirt broke the wife’s nose and ruined her looks for ever, provoking her husband to have affairs in earnest. The moral of the story? ‘This is a good example for all good ladies and gentlewomen about how they ought to bear things graciously ...”