The Autumn of the Middle Ages

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“When the world was five centuries younger, all the affairs of life had much sharper outward forms than they do now. Between grief and gladness, between calamity and good fortune, the distance seemed greater than it does to us; everything one experienced had that high degree of immediacy and absoluteness that joy and sorrow still have in the minds of children. Every event, every action was surrounded by emphatic and explicit forms, was raised to the dignity of a strict, rigidly prescribed style of life. The big things – birth, marriage, death – were endowed by the sacraments with the splendour of the divine mystery. But lesser matters too - a journey, a task, a visit – were accompanied by a thousand benedictions, ceremonies, mottos, forms of conduct.”