"Oh, it's a nice day today, let's have a Renaissance!"

It didn't really happen like that, though. Not even for the 12th century one. But of course historians like to keep their history all cut and dry, separated into little cubes of people and families and facts and dates and places and things and countries and such. And professors like to have it all cut and dry, with little paragraphs in your papers about such-and-such and and then another about this-and-that. But it doesn't really work ... as exemplified by our lecturers. They would love to have it all cut and dry, but they know better. They are wise. They know that maybe, just maybe, it's all just a 'sublime meaninglessness!' They know that it's all a bunch of wibbley-wobbley, timey-wimey stuff. They know that Rome wasn't built in a day, and that Europe didn't just happen, and that the Wales-England border, known as the "March," sort of merged into a weirdly non-homogeneous mixture of Welsh-English which exists to this day. They know that courtly love was neither loving nor courtly, and that the Norman conquest wasn't really all about conquesting. They know that it's how people today think about the past that creates a national identity, eternally inseparable from that nation's history. They know. They know.

*sigh* Back to noting quotes.