Around the mid-nineteenth century, however, the field began to professionalize. A discipline called English literature arose, founded on and formed around Shakespeare. It arose, first and foremost, as a substitute for religion. For centuries, Christianity had exerted a pacifying influence on the population, encouraging values of meekness and self-sacrifice, and unifying all classes, from the richest congregant to the pious peasant, under a single ideology. But by the Victorian period, religion was threatened by scientific discovery and social change. Church attendance among the working classes was falling. Social unrest seemed to be building. The church was losing its hold on the masses, and the Victorian ruling class worried that, without religion to encourage morality and restraint, something like the French Revolution could happen in Britain. A new religion was needed; a discourse that could provide the unifying, pacifying function formerly provided by Christianity. As the scholar Terry Eagleton writes, "If one were to provide a single explanation for the growth of English studies in the later nineteenth century, one could do worse than to reply: 'the failure of religion.'"

—Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare was a Woman and Other Heresies

The question for artists is: Are you prepared to get to know the "bass lines" of artistic tradition, and, more fundamentally, the bass lines that God uses to hold his church in the faith? As T. S. Eliot so pointedly asked, How can we be original until we've lived inside a great tradition? How can we even begin to improvise in a way that beguiles our culture until we have something profound to improvise with?

—Jeremy Begbie, "The Future," in David Taylor ed., For the Beauty of the Church

If they were fortunate enough to live in a natural-gas boomtown like Muncie in the 1890s, where it was thought that the supply of the stuff was inexhaustible, subscribers had only to pay for the installation of the fixture; there was no attempt to meter the gas and charge for the amount used. it was considered cheaper to have the gas on all the time - opening windows and doors when it became too hot - than to waste a match relighting it.

---Richard Lingeman, Small Town America: a Narrative History

As much as we complain about congestion caused by motor vehicles, the equivalent amount of traffic powered by horses would be at least twice or three times more frustrating.

—Vaclav Smil, Creating the Twentieth Century

Also in the eleventh century, according to the testimony of Thietmar of Merseberg, "The Polish princes punished those who violated the ecclesiastical laws on meat abstention by using persuasive methods like pulling out of teeth"; a lesser penalty, however, than that called for by Charlemagne in the capitulary De Partibus Saxoniae, which was no less than death.

—Massimo Montanari, The Culture of Food

The nobles of France unfortunately consider themselves rather as the countrymen of the nobles of all countries than as the fellow-citizens of Frenchmen.

—Germaine de Staël, Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution

The effect set off by a close-fitting dress suit and silk ruffled shirt of the kind that women still delight to see men wear, but men were just beginning to get tired of.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

The knights planned an imitation battle and competed together on horseback, while their womenfolk watched from the top of the city walls and aroused them to passionate excitement by their flirtatious behavior.

—Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britian

Our boundaries and theirs almost always touched in open land, save for a few places where either vast forests or mountain ridges came between the lands of both of us and established a fixed boundary.

---Einhard, The Life of Charlemagne

It was less easy to be a true mendicant in the streets of Bruges, or York, or Prague than in Southern Europe, where climate favored begging.

---Malcolm Vale, "The Civilization of Courts and Cities in the North", in The Oxford Illustrated History of Midieval Europe

It is in astronomy that [Dante] appears chiefly as a scientific specialist, though it must not be forgotten that many astronomical allusions in his great poem, which now appear to us learned, must then have been intelligible to the general reader. Dante, learning apart, appeals to a popular knowledge of the heavens, which the Italians of this day, from the mere fact that they were a nautical people, had in common with the ancients. This knowledge of the rising and setting of the constellations has been rendered superfluous to the modern world by calendars and clocks, and with it has gone whatever interest in astronomy the people may once have had. Nowadays, with our schools and handbooks, every child knows - what Dante did not know - that the earth moves around the sun; but the interest once taken in the subject itself has given place, except in the case of astronomical specialists, to the most absolute indifference.

---Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy

The rest of Europe was free either to repel or else partly or wholly to accept the mighty impulse which came forth from Italy. Where the latter was the case we may as well be spared the complaints over the early decay of midieval faith and civilization. Had these been strong enough to hold their ground, they would be alive to this day.

---Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy