Book by the Spanish friar Luis de Granada, Of Prayer and Meditation. Printed in Paris in 1582, the book opened with a letter by the translator, Richard Harris, lamenting the rise of Schism, Heresy, In...
At Cambridge, a graduate in grammar in the late Middle Ages was required to demonstrate his pedagogical fitness by flogging a dull or recalcitrant boy.
A few months after he penned his Dialogue in Praise of the Papal Court, poor Lapo died of plague at the age of thirty-three.)
You bitches, sows, screech-owls, night owls, she-wolves, blood suckers, [who] cry Give, give! without ceasing (Prov. 30:15–16). Come now, hear me, harlots, prostitutes, with your lascivious kisses, yo...
With his contrasting vision of anxious, work-obsessed, overly disciplined Italians and happy-go-lucky, carefree Germans,
Unappeasable desire and the fear of death are the principal obstacles to human happiness, but the obstacles can be surmounted through the exercise of reason.
The parchment is hairy
The group shared a combination of extreme marginality and arrogant snobbishness.
The exercise of reason is not available only to specialists; it is accessible to everyone.
Something happened in the Renaissance, something that surged up against the constraints that centuries had constructed around curiosity, desire, individuality, sustained attention to the material worl...
Shakespeare believed that . . . tyrants and their minions would ultimately fail, brought down by their own viciousness and by a popular spirit of humanity that could be suppressed but never completely...
ITALIANS HAD BEEN book-hunting for the better part of a century, ever since the poet and scholar Petrarch brought glory on himself in the 1330s by piecing together Livy’s monumental History of Rome an...
I am committed by trade to urging people to attend carefully to the verbal surfaces of what they read. Much of the pleasure and interest of poetry depends on such attention.
Everyone understood that Latin learning was inseparable from whipping. One educational theorist of the time speculated that the buttocks were created in order to facilitate the learning of Latin.
Can honour set-to a leg? Falstaff asks, at the brink of battle.
Although insecurity, overconfidence, and murderous rage are strange bedfellows, they all coexist in the tyrant’s soul. He has servants and associates, but in effect he is alone. Institutional restrain...
Acediosus, sometimes translated as apathetic, refers to an illness, specific to monastic communities, which had already been brilliantly diagnosed in the late fourth century by the Desert Father John...
Our sense that a library is a public good and our idea of what such a place should look like derived precisely from a model created in Rome several thousand years ago.
Progress—like those cartoons that begin with an ape and end with a man sitting at a computer—now gets lost in a hundred detours and false starts, intersecting paths and dead ends. It is difficult to f...
And in the margins of surviving monastic manuscripts there are occasional outbursts of distress: The parchment is hairy19 … Thin ink, bad parchment, difficult text … Thank God, it will soon be dark.