Paper did not come into general use until the fourteenth century, for more than a thousand years the chief writing material used for books was made from the skins of animals—
Affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is?
You call me misbeliever, cut-throat, dog, And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine,
What human beings can and should do, he wrote, is to conquer their fears, accept the fact that they themselves and all the things they encounter are transitory, and embrace the beauty and the pleasure...
Those who wrote unusually well—in fine, clear handwriting that the other monks could easily read and with painstaking accuracy in the transcription—came to be valued. In the wergild codes that in Germ...
The transformation was not sudden or once-for-all, but it became increasingly possible to turn away from a preoccupation with angels and demons and immaterial causes and to focus instead on things in...
The internal and external censors that keep most ordinary mortals, let alone rulers of nations, from sending irrational messages in the middle of the night or acting on every crazed impulse are absent...
The discussion itself is what most matters, the fact that we can reason together easily, with a blend of wit and seriousness, never descending into gossip or slander and always allowing room for alter...
The bookworm—one of the teeth of time, as Hooke put it—is no longer familiar to ordinary readers, but the ancients knew it very well.
John Dryden brilliantly captured Lucretius’ remarkable vision: . . . when the youthful pair more closely join, When hands in hands they lock, and thighs in thighs they twine; Just in the raging foam o...
It reflects as well something extraordinary about the mental or spiritual world they inhabited, something noted in one of his letters by the French novelist Gustave Flaubert: Just when the gods had ce...
In one of the great cultural transformations in the history of the West, the pursuit of pain triumphed over the pursuit of pleasure.
I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses,
He that died o’Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ’Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll...
He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies, and what’s his reason?—...
Between the sixth century and the middle of the eighth century, Greek and Latin classics virtually ceased to be copied at all. What had begun as an active campaign to forget—a pious attack on pagan id...
Without prizing either learning or debate, monks nonetheless became the principal readers, librarians, book preservers, and book producers of the Western world.
To make their way to the capital, where they aroused wild fears and expectations, particularly among the plebs. A handful of the elite—those more insecure or simply curious—may have attended with some...
To entertain the thought that the sun is only one star in an infinite universe; to live an ethical life without reference to postmortem rewards and punishments; to contemplate without trembling the de...
Monasteries were extremely difficult to reach—their founders had built them in deliberately remote places, in order to withdraw from the temptations, distractions, and dangers of the world.