Renaissance Term Analysis

We should add that Coppenole was of the people, just as the crowd around him was of the people. Thus the contact between him and it had been prompt, electric and, as it were, on level terms. The Flemish hosier’s haughty quip had humiliated the courtiers and aroused, in all these plebian souls, some sense of dignity as yet, in the fifteenth century, dim and uncertain. This hosier who had just answered the cardinal back was an equal: a sweet thought indeed for poor devils used to showing respect and obedience to the servants of the serjeants of the bailiff of the Abbot of Sainte-Genevive, the cardinal’s train-bearer.

Had Gringoire lived in our own day, how beautifully he would have bisected the Classics and Romantics!

And what we have said here of the facade has to be said of the church as a whole; and what we have said of the cathedral church of Paris has to be said of all the churches of medieval Christendom. Everything is of a piece in this logical, well-proportioned art, which originated in itself. To measure the toe is to measure the giant.

‘No,’ said the archdeacon, seizing Compere Tourangeau by the arm, and a spark of enthusiasm rekindling in his lifeless pupils, ‘No, I don’t deny science. I have not crawled all this time on my belly with my nails in the earth, along the countless passages of the cavern without glimpsing, far ahead of me, at the end of the unlit gallery, a light, a flame, something, doubtless the reflection from the dazzling central laboratory where the wise and the patient have taken God by surprise.’

Firstly, it was the thought of a priest. It was the alarm felt by the priesthood before a new agent: the printing-press. It was the terror and bewilderment felt by a man of the sanctuary before the luminous press of Gutenberg. It was the pulpit and the manuscript, the spoken and the written word, taking fright at the printed word; something like the stupor felt by a sparrow were it to see the angel legion unfold its six million wings. It was the cry of the prophet who already hears the restless surge of an emancipated mankind, who can see that future time when intelligence will undermine faith, opinion dethrone belief and the world shake off Rome.