If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh?
I like not such grinning honour as Sir Walter hath. Give me life (5.3.57–58).
Can honour set-to a leg? Falstaff asks, at the brink of battle.
Monks were strictly forbidden to change what they thought were mistakes in the texts they were copying.
He obliterated by the praiseworthy use he made of leisure the stain he had incurred through his active exertions in former days.
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.
We are terrified of future catastrophes and are thrown into a continuous state of misery and anxiety, and for fear of becoming miserable, we never cease to be so, always panting for riches and never g...
Violators of the edict were threatened with eternal damnation and a fine of 10 ducats.
Unlike many other animals, who are endowed at birth with what they need to survive, human infants are almost completely vulnerable:
The early founders of monastic orders did not regard copying manuscripts as an exalted activity; on the contrary, as they were highly aware, most of the copying in the ancient world had been done by e...
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...
It is extremely dangerous to have a state run by someone who governs by impulse.
Instead, he wrote, quoting Lucretius, there were multiple worlds, where the seeds of things, in their infinite numbers, would certainly combine to form other races of men, other creatures. Each of the...
In the course of the vicious Gothic Wars of the mid-sixth century and their still more miserable aftermath, the last commercial workshops of book production folded, and the vestiges of the book market...
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.
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.
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.
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...