Beginning of Essay
[T]he bleding continued a while til it migt be sene with avisement. And this was so plenteous to my sight that methowte, if it had be so in kind and in substance for that tyme, it should have made the bed al on blode and a passid over aboute.1 This passage, which ....

Middle of Essay
.... in his volume of essays titled The Renaissance to describe the essential quality of art in the Middle Ages. A fairly ingenuous first-year doctoral student, I read Pater's description and recognized precisely that quality of the literature of the Middle Ages that I find so compelling. Soon enough, however, it became clear that "" was not something Pater meant as a compliment; he was giving a description of medieval artistic efforts I have since learned that many who champion the Renaissance are apt to give. What Pater was identifying was a lack—a lack of conscious aesthetics, of a "purely artistic quality."3 The Middle Ages, in his estimation ....