"This impulse is equally at work in what seem to us their silliest pedantries and in their most sublime achievements. In the latter we see the tranquil, indefatigable, exultant energy of passionately systematic minds bringing huge masses of heterogeneous material into unity. The perfect examples are the Summa of Aquinas and Dante's Divine Comedy; as unified and ordered as the Parthenon or the Oedipus Rex, as crowded and varied as a London terminus on a bank holiday."
Thank them also for punctuation, the spaces between words, table of contents, chapters, musical notation, and the preservation of classical texts. ...but also, in the high middle ages, great imaginative flights (the dream vision poems), a passion for vernacular culture, a mystical-egalitarian vision that sought to bring heaven to earth, the last age that loved and worshipped women...all in all, not so bad. All in all, the Renaissance was a counter-revolution...duly documented/described in a book I can't remember the title of..."the Counter-Renaissance"????? By Hiram something...Hayden? (I last touched this twenty years ago.)
Joanna