Middle Ages

It seems pretty clear there were contacts between Ainu communities and the Matagi, but maybe that word Matangi and all those other terms entered the Ainu language from Japanese rather than the other way around.

This certainly seems like pretty good evidence of trade and cultural exchange between the Matagi and the Ainu during Japan's Middle Ages, but it doesn't prove some sort of common descent.

Then there are the many other theories on the origin of the name, for example that it derives from the word matagu, to cross or straddle because matagi hunters move across mountain ranges, or from yamadachi, mountain hunter or mountain worker.

A Japanese scholar in the 60s, Yanagita Kunio, suggested the name might come from a sort of walking stick made from the forked branch of a tree, mata, fork, ki, tree.

When Désissaint had studied theology, he was already sick and weary of the old monk's preachings and jeremiads, his theories on predestination and grace, his combats against the schisms.

He preferred to sum the Psychomachia of Prudentius, that first type of the allegorical poem, which was later in the Middle Ages to be used continually, and the works of Sidonius Apollinaris, whose correspondence, interlarded with flashes of wit, pungencies, archaisms, and enigmas, allured him.

He willingly reread the panegyrics in which this bishop invokes pagan deities in substantiation of his vainglorious eulogies, and in spite of everything he confessed a weakness for the affectations of these verses, fabricated, as it were, by an ingenious mechanician who operates his machine, oils his wheels, and invents intricate and useless parts.

After Sidonius he sought Merobaudes the panegyrist, Sedulius, author of the rhymed poems and abecedarian hymns, certain passages of which the Church has appropriated for its services, Marius Victorius, whose gloomy treatise on the perversity of the times is illumined here and there with verses that gleam with phosphorescence, Paulinus of Pella, poet of the shivering Eucharisticon, and Orientius, bishop of Auch, who in the distichs of his Monitories inveighs against the licentiousness of women, whose faces, he claims, corrupt the people.

Apart from several special, unclassified volumes, modern or dateless, certain works on the Cabala, medicine and botany, certain odd tomes containing undiscoverable Christian poetry, and the anthology of the minor Latin poets of Wernsdorf Apart from Meursius, the manual of classical erotology of Forberg, and the diaconals used by confessors, which he dusted at rare intervals, his Latin library ended at the beginning of the tenth century.

And in fact, the curiosity, the complicated naivete of the Christian language had also foundered.

The balderdash of philosophers and scholars, the logomachy of the Middle Ages, thenceforth held absolute sway.

The sooty mass of chronicles and historical books and cartularies accumulated, and the stammering grace, the often exquisite awkwardness of the monks placing the poetic remains of antiquity in a ragout were dead.

And it obviously works very well for a modern thriller.

And he is applying it now to this Middle Ages story, a medieval tale about the 1381 Peasants' Revolt.

I'm here to argue that I think this is a great aesthetic choice for a film like this.

I think people might sort of balk at this more modern aesthetic being used for a medieval movie.

Brief sketch of European history to 1453.

In the 4th century occurred two events which more perhaps than any others influenced the whole course of the history of Europe during the Middle Ages.

The one was the removal of the capital of the Roman Empire from Rome to Constantinople, 324.

The other was the adoption of the Christian religion as the only legal religion within the empire.

The latter began that union of church and state which was to be the most marked feature of the political life of the Middle Ages.

The former was largely responsible for the remarkable growth of the authority of the bishops of Rome.

In the early years of the 5th century, the Romans still ruled over all that part of Europe which lies west and south of the Rhine, the Main, and the Danube, as well as over Asia Minor, Syria, and the north coast of Africa.

In 1315, these peasants won a glorious victory over the feudal army of Leopold of Habsburg.

Yet surely a system which, however deformed by superstition, introduced strong moral restraints into communities previously governed only by vigour of muscle and by audacity of spirit, a system which taught the fiercest and mightiest ruler that he was, like his meanest bondsman, a responsible being, might have seemed to deserve a more respectful mention from philosophers and philanthropists.

The same observations will apply to the contempt with which in the last century it was fashionable to speak of the pilgrimages, the sanctuaries, the crusades, and the monastic institutions of the Middle Ages.

In times when men were scarcely ever induced to travel by liberal curiosity, or by the pursuit of gain, it was better that the rude inhabitant of the north should visit Italy and the east as a pilgrim, than that he should never see anything but those squalid cabins and uncleared woods amidst which he was born.

In times when life and when female honour were exposed to daily risk from tyrants and marauders, it was better that the precinct of a shrine should be regarded with an irrational awe, than that there should be no refuge inaccessible to cruelty and licentiousness.

They began to consider the Crown of France as a mere appendage to the Crown of England, and when, in violation of the ordinary law of succession, they transferred the Crown of England to the House of Lancaster, they seemed to have thought that the right of Richard II to the Crown of France passed, as of course, to that house.

The zeal and vigor which they displayed present a remarkable contrast to the torpor of the French, who were far more deeply interested in the event of the struggle.

The most splendid victories recorded in the history of the Middle Ages were gained at this time, against great odds by the English armies.

Victories indeed they were of which a nation may justly be proud.

2.

Aristotelian Botany Aristotle, Plato's pupil, concerned himself with the whole field of science, and his influence, especially during the Middle Ages, had a most profound effect on European thought.

The greater part of his botanical writings, which belong to the 4th century before Christ, are unfortunately lost, but from such fragments as remain, it is clear that his interest in plants was of an abstract nature.

He held that all living bodies, those of plants as well as of animals, are organs of the soul through which they exist.

He noticed, for instance, the distinction between centripetal and centrifugal inflorescences, a distinction which does not seem to have again attracted the attention of botanists until the 16th century.

He was interested in the germination of seeds, and was aware, though somewhat dimly, of the essential differences between the seedling of the bean and that of the wheat.

In the Middle Ages, knowledge of Aristotelian botany was brought into Western Europe at two different periods, the 9th and the 13th centuries.

In the 9th century of the Christian era, Rabanus Magnesius Maurus, a German writer, compiled an encyclopedia which contained information about plants, indirectly derived from the writings of Theophrastus.

The title of Bastard implies that he would have been a Duke d'Orleans, only that he had the misfortune to be born of the wrong mother.

There have been several famous bastards in history, and the kindly morality of the Middle Ages seems to have thought little though worse of them for their misfortune.

It is only fair to state that there is some doubt as to whether Jean was sent in command of the army or the army in command of Jean.

Indeed, all through her story, it is never easy to be certain whether she was actually in command, and Anatole France looks upon her as a sort of military mascot rather than a soldier.

But so great was the pain that he submitted his body to the knife on March 26, 1658.

Anesthetics in those days were rudimentary, relaxing rather than anesthetizing the patient.

There is some reason to believe that they were extensively used in the Middle Ages, and contemporaries of Shakespeare seem to have looked on their use as a matter of course.

But for some reason, they became less popular, and by the 17th century, most people had to undergo their operations with little assistance beyond stout hearts and sluggish nervous systems.

Wherever the arms of the Saracen penetrated, there we shall always find the Jews in close pursuit.

While the Arab fought, the Jew trafficked, and when the fighting was over, Jew and Moor and Persian joined in that cultivation of learning and philosophy, art and science which preeminently distinguished rule of the Saracen in the Middle Ages.

With the cooperation of the Jews and the terror of the Spaniard, Tariq's conquest proceeded apace.

Archidona was occupied without a struggle.

Its chilly heights rendered it distasteful to lovers of sunshine like the Moors.

And they confided cheaply to the care of the Berber tribes who had first come over with Tariq and who were always held in poor estimation by the true Arabs who reaped the fruits of the conquest.

In the two-thirds of the peninsula thus marked off by nature for their habitation, which the Arabs always called Andalus and we shall call Andalusia to distinguish it from the entire peninsula, the Moors organized that wonderful kingdom of Cordoba, which was the marvel of the Middle Ages and which, when all Europe was plunged in barbaric ignorance and strife, alone held the torch of learning and civilization bright and shining before the Western world.

It must not be supposed that the Moors, like the barbarian hordes who precede them, brought desolation and tyranny in their wake.

One of the most repeated quotes by C.S. Lewis is when he said, "...Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought the most of the next.

The apostles themselves who set foot on the conversion of the Roman Empire." The great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English evangelicals who abolished the slave trade, all left their mark on earth precisely because their minds were occupied with heaven.

In a sense, Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world.

Isn't that a great quote? The Holy Spirit facilitates our adoption.