Manners, Customs, and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance

The Manners and Customs of the Middle Ages:--this subject is of the greatest interest, not only to the man of science, but to the man of the world also. In it, too, "we retrace not only one single period, but two periods quite distinct one from the other." In the first, the public and private customs offer a curious mixture of barbarism and civilisation. We find barbarian, Roman, and Christian customs and character in presence of each other, mixed up in the same society, and very often in the same individuals.

Everywhere the most adverse and opposite tendencies display themselves. What an ardent struggle during that long period! and how full, too, of emotion is its picture! Society tends to reconstitute itself in every aspect. She wants to create, so to say, from every side, property, authority, justice, &c., &c., in a word, everything which can establish the basis of public life; and this new order of things must be established by means of the elements supplied at once by the barbarian, Roman, and Christian world--a prodigious creation, the working of which occupied the whole of the Middle Ages.