The Middle Ages They seem so far away intellectually so preposterous, spiritually so strange. Bits of them may touch our sympathy, please our taste their window-glass, their sculpture, certain of their stories, their romances, as if those straitened ages really were the time of romance, which they were not, God knows, in the sense commonly taken. Yet perhaps they were such intellectually, or at least spiritually. Their terra - not for them incognita, though full of mystery and pall and vaguer glory - was not the earth. It was the land of metaphysical construction and the land of spiritual passion. There lay their romance, thither pointed their veriest thinking, thither drew their utter yearning. Is it possible that the Middle Ages should speak to us, as through a common humanity? Their mask is by no means dumb in full voice speaks the noble beauty of Chartres Cathedral. Such mediaeval product, we hope, is of the universal human, and therefore of us as well as of the bygone craftsmen. Why it moves us, we are not certain, being ignorant, perhaps, of the building's formative and earnestly intended meaning. Do we care to get at that? There is no way save by entering the mediaeval depths, penetrating to the rationale of the Middle Ages, learning the doctrinale, or emotionale, of the modes in which they still present themselves so persuasively.
Author(s): Henry Osborn Taylor
Edition: 4
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Year: 1949
Language: English
Pages: 624
City: Cambridge, Mass.
Preface to the fourth edition vii
Contents xv
Book I. The Groundwork
Genesis of the Mediaeval Genius 3
The Latinizing of the West 23
Greek philosophy as the antecedent of the Patristic apprehension of fact 33
Intellectual interests of the Latin fathers 61
The Latin transmitters of Antique and Patristic though 88
The barbaric disruption of the empire 110
The Celtic strain in Gaul and Ireland 124
Teuton qualities : Anglo-Saxon, German, Norse 138
The bringing of Christianity and antique knowledge to the Northern peoples 169
BOOK II. The Early Middle Ages
Carolingxan period : the first stage in the appropriation of the patristic and antique 207
Mental aspects of the Eleventh Century: Italy 239
Mental aspects of the Eleventh Century: France 282
Mental aspects of the Eleventh Century: Germany ; England ; Conclusion 308
Phases of Mediaeval Growth 331
The growth of Mediaeval Emotion 346
Book III. The Ideal and the Actual: the Saints
The reforms of Monasticism 369
The Hermit Temper 384
The quality of love in Saint Bernard 408
St. Francis of Assisi 431
Mystic visions of Ascetic Women 458
The Spotted Actuality 487
The World of Salimbene 510
Book IV. The Ideal and the Actual: The Society
Feudalism and Knighthood 537
Romantic Chivalry and Courtly Love 574
