Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus

Mediaeval Lore from
Bartholomew Anglicus

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Title: Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus
Author: Robert Steele
Release Date: September, 2004 [EBook #6493] [Yes, we are more than
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[Illustration: Philosophers on Mount Olympus.]

MEDIAEVAL LORE FROM BARTHOLOMEW ANGLICUS
BY ROBERT STEELE
WITH PREFACE BY WILLIAM MORRIS
"WHEN HOLY WERE THE HAUNTED FOREST BOUGHS, HOLY
THE AIR, THE WATER, AND THE FIRE." KEATS.

PREFACE
It is not long since the Middle Ages, of the literature of which this book
gives us such curious examples, were supposed to be an unaccountable
phenomenon accidentally thrust in betwixt the two periods of
civilisation, the classical and the modern, and forming a period without
growth or meaning--a period which began about the time of the decay
of the Roman Empire, and ended suddenly, and more or less
unaccountably, at the time of the Reformation. The society of this
period was supposed to be lawless and chaotic; its ethics a mere
conscious hypocrisy; its art gloomy and barbarous fanaticism only; its
literature the formless jargon of savages; and as to its science, that side
of human intelligence was supposed to be an invention of the time
when the Middle Ages had been dead two hundred years.
The light which the researches of modern historians, archaeologists,
bibliographers, and others, have let in on our view of the Middle Ages
has dispersed the cloud of ignorance on this subject which was one of

the natural defects of the qualities of the learned men and keen critics
of the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth centuries. The
Middle-class or Whig theory of life is failing us in all branches of
human intelligence. Ethics, Politics, Art, and Literature are more than
beginning to be regarded from a wider point of view than that from
which our fathers and grandfathers could see them.
For many years there has been a growing reaction against the dull
"grey" narrowness of the eighteenth century, which looked on Europe
during the last thousand years as but a riotous, hopeless, and stupid
prison. It is true that it was on the side of Art alone that this
enlightenment began, and that even on that side it progressed slowly
enough at first--_e.g._ Sir Walter Scott feels himself obliged, as in the
_Antiquary_, to apologize to pedantry for his instinctive love of Gothic
architecture. And no less true is it that follies enough were mingled
with the really useful and healthful birth of romanticism in Art and
Literature. But at last the study of facts by men who were neither
artistic nor sentimental came to the help of that first glimmer of instinct,
and gradually something like a true insight into the life of the Middle
Ages was gained; and we see that the world of Europe was no more
running round in a circle then than now, but was developing,
sometimes with stupendous speed, into something as different from
itself as the age which succeeds this will be different from that wherein
we live. The men of those times are no longer puzzles to us; we can
understand their aspirations, and sympathise with their lives, while at
the same time we have no wish (not to say hope) to put back the clock,
and start from the position which they held. For, indeed, it is
characteristic of the times in which we live, that whereas in the
beginning of the romantic reaction, its supporters were for the most part
mere _laudatores temporis acti_, at the present time those who take
pleasure in studying the life of the Middle Ages are more