Petrarch Quotes

I'm really enamored with the idea of a reformed society, and I've always been fascinated with the Dark Ages as well as the power vacuum that followed the fall of the Roman Empire.

There is something dark and wintry about the atmosphere of the later Middle Ages.

I can find my way from 500 A.D. through to 1066 pretty well as an amateur historian.

There was a time when religion ruled the world. It is known as The Dark Ages.

For us, when we think about the Middle Ages, it's sort of this rarefied, distant time that we have no connection to, especially if you grew up in America.

The 500 years following the fall of the Western Roman Empire were dubbed by the poet Petrarch 'dark.' Although the 14th-century Italian was referring to a literary decline, the term caught on to denote the seemingly backward turn the Western world took with regard to religious and technological developments.

The Middle Ages hangs over history's belt like a beer belly. It is too late now for aerobic dancing or cottage cheese lunches to reduce the Middle Ages. History will have to wear size 48 shorts forever.

There once was a time when all people believed in God and the church ruled. This time was called the Dark Ages.

No student of history can fail to see the moral interest of the Middle Ages, any more than an artist can fail to see their aesthetic interest.

When learning was monopolized by the monks in the Middle Ages, people specialized only in warfare and statecraft. And even these were not altogether free from the scholastic influence.

The institution of chivalry forms one of the most remarkable features in the history of the Middle Ages.

The crusades made great improvement in the condition of the serfs.

ON the decline of the Roman power, about five centuries after Christ, the countries of Northern Europe were left almost destitute of a national government.

It flourished with the Saracens, and suffered in the obscure and fanatical days of the Middle Ages.

I'm a bit of a history goon, and I love all that. Anything that's medieval-based up until, probably, the Tudor period and just after, I'm quite into.

The Hundred Years' War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity.

In the tenth century the old Batavian and later Roman forms have faded away.

I'd like to do a story about the medieval ages where in every scene you'd sort of feel that you were in the 12th century. That would be great to get that feeling.

Medieval learning was really advanced.

The Holy Roman Empire is neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.

I developed a passion for the Middle Ages the same way some people develop a passion for coconuts.

The Romans had been able to post their laws on boards in public places, confidant that enough literate people existed to read them; far into the Middle Ages, even kings remained illiterate.

We think of medieval England as being a place of unbelievable cruelty and darkness and superstition. We think of it as all being about fair maidens in castles, and witch-burning, and a belief that the world was flat. Yet all these things are wrong.

The world at night, for much of history, was a very dark place indeed.

Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.