14th Century Quotes & Sayings

It is as though a portal in time has opened, and the Christians of the 14th century are pouring into our world. — Sam Harris

No female iniquity was more severely condemned [in the 14th century] than the habit of plucking eyebrows and the hairline to heighten the forehead. — Barbara Tuchman

No economic activity was more irrepressible [in the 14th century] than the investment and lending at interest of money; it was the basis for the rise of the Western capitalist economy and the building of private fortunes-and it was based on the sin of usury. — Barbara Tuchman

Peruzzi, secured on expected revenue from the wool tax. When this brought in too little and Edward could not repay, the drain on the Italian companies bankrupted them. The Peruzzi failed in 1343, the Bardi suspended a year later, and their crash brought down a third firm, the Acciaiuioli. Capital vanished, stores and workshops closed, wages and purchases stopped. When, by the malignant chance that seemed to hound the 14th century, economic devastation in Florence and Siena was followed first by famine in 1347 and then by plague, it could not but seem to — Barbara W. Tuchman

The Church [in the 14th century] gave ceremony and dignity to lives that had little of either. It was the source of beauty and art to which all had some access and which many helped to create. — Barbara Tuchman

I think every period - except for the 14th century, or something - has some merits. — Julian Fellowes

Woman [in the 14th century] was the Church's rival, the temptress, the distraction, the obstacle to holiness, the Devil's decoy. — Barbara Tuchman

Tell me how you wish me to deal with these enemies of yours, for they are no able to camp, and I will deliver them in your hands in whatever manner you wish.' Modern accounts invariably include the story of how dal Verme sent Hawkwood a fox in a cage, to say that he had the clever Englishman trapped. -Jacopo dal Verme to Giangaleazzo Visconti — William Caferro

That the Jews were unholy was a belief so ingrained by the Church [by the 14th century] that the most devout persons were the harshest in their antipathy, none more so than St. Louis. — Barbara Tuchman

Devout or not, all owned and carried Books of Hours, the characteristic fashionable religious possession of the 14th century noble. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Health, money. That's what people worried about in the 14th century as much as today. I find it so much more interesting than the supposed activities of kings, queens, generals. — Peter Ackroyd

With the World War II era, there's so much written material to draw on. When you go back to the 14th century, you have to imagine more. — Ken Follett

Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Jay-Z and Kanye West are to authentic rap culture what diseased rates were to 14th century Europeans — Dean Cavanagh

Tarot cards likely originated in northern Italy during the late 14th or early 15th century. The oldest surviving set, known as the Visconti-Sforza deck, was created for the Duke of Milan's family around 1440. The cards were used to play a bridge-like game known as tarocchi, popular at the time among nobles and other leisure lovers. — Brendan I. Koerner

The ills and disorders of the 14th century could not be without consequence. Times were to grow worse over the next fifty-odd years until at some imperceptible moment, by the some mysterious chemistry, energies were refreshed, ideas broke out of the mold of the Middle Ages into new realms, and humanity found itself redirected. — Barbara Tuchman

[T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death. — Barbara W. Tuchman

In Leipzig [in the 14th century], the university found it necessary to promulgate a rule against throwing stones at the professors. As late as 1495, a German statute explicitly forbade anyone associated with the university from drenching freshmen with urine. — Leonard Mlodinow

Why incentivize laziness? High-school students shouldn't be discouraged from grappling, sometimes unsuccessfully, with challenging books, pictures, and songs. A really, really good work of art doesn't bow down to you; you step up to it, and it rewards you. In the end, kids faced with what Chaucer actually wrote may still dislike him, and I'm fine with that; they will have earned that opinion rather than had it handed to them. For heaven's sake, it's easy for kids to see themselves and their peers in a rap song. When they can start to see themselves in a 14th-century poem, then they're actually learning something. — Jeff Sypeck

While husbands and lovers in the stories [of the 14th century] are of all kinds, ranging from sympathetic to disgusting, women are invariably deceivers: inconstant, unscrupulous, quarrelsome, querulous, lecherous, shameless, although not necessarily all of these at once. — Barbara Tuchman

Modern historians have suggested that in his last years he (Richard II) was overtaken by mental disease, but that is only a modern view of the malfunction common to 14th century rulers: inability to inhibit impulse. — Barbara Tuchman

The Dark Ages gradually ended six centuries ago with the Renaissance, which seeded new ideas for a different world. The Renaissance ideal dominated our culture until three centuries ago, from the 14th to the 18th century, when it was superseded by modernism. Not surprisingly, this human ideal has almost been forgotten in our culture. The Renaissance, literally "re-birth", was a revival and rediscovery of classical Greek and Roman culture following the decline of culture, trade, and technology during the Dark Ages. — Jacob Lund Fisker

I think it would be over-exaggeration to think that there are millions of viruses ready to jump on us and bring us back to the 14th century. That would be looking over a ledge that isn't there. — Anthony Fauci

To an art historian a Giotto is a 14th Century painting. To an artist it was painted yesterday. We free ourselves from the past when we see it freshly. — Walter Darby Bannard

The Cloud of Unknowing is an anonymous work of Christian mysticism written in the latter half of the 14th century. The text is a spiritual guide to contemplative prayer. "Be willing to be blind, and give up all longing to know the why and how, for knowing will be more of a hindrance than a help." This 1912 edition was edited by Evelyn Underhill, and contains her introduction. — Geerhardus Vos

Stories to read are delitabill (delightful)
Suppose that they be nocht but fable (fiction)
Then should stories that suthfast were (truthful)
- And they were said in good manner -
Have double pleasure in hearing.
The first pleasance is the carping (reading aloud)
And the tothir the suthfastness
That shows the thing richt as it was; — John Barbour

To ensure that no one gained an advantage over anyone else, commercial law [in the 14th century] prohibited innovation in tools or techniques, underselling below a fixed price, working late by artificial light, employing extra apprentices or wife and underage children, and advertising of wares or praising them to the detriment of others. — Barbara Tuchman

The social damage was not in the failure but in the undertaking, which was expensive. The cost of war was the poison running through the 14th century. — Barbara Tuchman

Last century, when the beams needed replacing, carpenters used oak trees that had been planted in 1386 when the dining hall was first built. The 14th-century builder had planted the trees in anticipation of the time, hundreds of years in the future, when the beams would need replacing. Did the carpenters plant new trees to replace the beams again a few hundred years from now? — Danny Hillis

For belligerent purposes, the 14th century, like the 20th, commanded a technology more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided its use. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Anyone who was alive during the outbreak of the bubonic plague in the 14th century experienced something terrifyingly close to the widespread death and chaos of an apocalyptic event. — Alan Huffman

In the middle Ages, Berber was written in the Maghribi style of the Arabic script, in what is to all appearances a standardized orthography. The earliest known examples of the medieval Berber spelling date from the middle of the 10th century A.D., while the youngest examples date from the 14th century.

Although there is some variation in the representation of a number of consonants, the orthography is remarkably consistent. In this respect it is quite unlike the early orthographies of the European vernaculars, where the same word is often written in different ways even within one line of text. This consistency implies that the Berber orthography was consciously designed, and that it was formally taught to berberophones.

"MEDIEVAL BERBER ORTHOGRAPHY" - MELANGES OFFERTS A KARL-G. PRASSE (pp. 357-377). — Nico Van Den Boogert

The clergy [in the 14th century] on the whole were probably no more lecherous or greedy or untrustworthy than other men, but because they were supposed to be better or nearer to God than other men, their failings attracted more attention. — Barbara Tuchman

The nastiness of women [in the 14th century] was generally perceived at the close of life when a man began to worry about hell, and his sexual desire in any case fading. — Barbara Tuchman

Fourteenth-century men seemed to have regarded their doctor in rather the same way as the twentieth-century men are apt to regard their priest, with tolerance for someone who was doing his best and the respect due to a man of learning but also with a nagging and uncomfortable conviction that he was largely irrelevant to the real and urgent problems of their lives. — Philip Ziegler

A German goldsmith covered a bit of metal with cloth in the 14th century and gave mankind its first button. It was hard to know this as politics, because it plays like the work of one person, but nothing is isolated in history
certain humans are situations. — Lyn Hejinian

14th- and 15th-century drawings are almost unheard-of - and as a result, they generate jealous desire among dealers and curators. Museums in particular value rarity and pedigree more than attractiveness. — Peter Landesman

In the case of a Gascon seigneur of the 14th century who left 100 livres to those whom I deflowered, if they can be found. — Barbara W. Tuchman