Tyrannical power is more easily exercised when it appears that the old order continues to exist. The reassuring consensual structures may now be hollowed out and merely decorative, but they are all st...
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?—...
The printers who set the books in type still depended on accurate, readable, handwritten transcriptions, often of manuscripts that were illegible to all but a few.
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 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...
No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound?
Books were scarce and valuable. They conferred prestige on the monastery that possessed them, and the monks were not inclined to let them out of their sight,
And all for use of that which is mine own. Well then, it now appears you need my help. Go to, then. You come to me, and you say ‘Shylock, we would have moneys’—you say so, You, that di...
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...
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.
Books give delight to the very marrow of one’s bones. They speak to us, consult with us, and join with us in a living and intense intimacy. Copying,
Working with knives, brushes, and rags, monks often carefully washed away the old writings—Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Seneca, Lucretius—and wrote in their place the texts that they were instructed by their...
The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath. (4.1.179–81)
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...
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,
Human society began not in a Golden Age of tranquility and plenty, but in a primitive battle for survival. There was no original paradisal time of plenty, as some have dreamed, in which happy, peacefu...
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...
APART FROM THE charred papyrus fragments recovered in Herculaneum, there are no surviving contemporary manuscripts from the ancient Greek and Roman world.
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...