The Medieval Mind, Vol. 1

Book excerpt: THE Middle Ages! They seem so far away; intellectually so preposterous, spiritually so strange. Bits of them may touch our sympathy, please our taste; 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. Now if the pageant of those centuries charm our eyes with forms that seem so full of meaning, why should we stand indifferent to the harnessed processes of mediaeval thinking and the passion surging through the thought? Thought marshaled the great mediaeval procession, which moved to measures of pulsating and glorifying emotion. Let the reader be mindful of his purpose, to follow through the Middle Ages the development of intellectual energy and the growth of emotion. Holding this end in view, we, students all, shall not stray from our quest after those human qualities which impelled the strivings of mediaeval men and women, informed their imaginations, and moved them to love and tears and pity.