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...it is perhaps worth while to noite that miniare meant to work with minium (this is, either orange lead or red sulphide of mercury), and that a person who worked with minium was called a miniator, and the things that he was to miniate were called miniatura. So miniatrues were originally the paragraph signs and versals and capitals and headings, and so on, which were to be put in red in manuscripts. The men who put these in sometimes did illustrative and decorative drawings and paintings besides, and these came to be called miniatures too. And, finally, because they were only incidental, and therefore usually rather small, the word miniature came to mean "diminutive."

— The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting by Daniel V. Thompson (Page 102)

We have no appetite for robust, rich excess. The spirit of pageantry leaves us when we look at pictures. We fear the sun, we choose the gentle shade, we like our gilding rubbed and dulled and worn, and our silver oxidized; and cowering under the topis of our sensitive aesthetic consciousness, we prefer not to believe in the stark brilliance, the garish, gaudy sunshine that the Middle Ages revelled in. We care more for subtle harmony than for triumphant, gorgeous brightness; but we forget that there are harmonies of midday as well as harmonies of dawn and dusk.

— The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting by Daniel V. Thompson (Page 100)

In modern practice the solutions [used for oxidizing black ink] used are so pure that when the liquids are first combined no black colour is formed. Indeed, a modern fountain-pen ink would be colourless when new if dye were not added to it to provide some visibility.

— The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting by Daniel V. Thompson (Page 81)

We have no certain paintings by Cennino, and I have always supposed that he must have been quite a bad painter. (There are two reasons for thinking so: first, that he was a third-generation follower of Giotto, and second that he was so much interested in technique that he wrote a book about it.)

— The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting by Daniel V. Thompson (Page 54)

Of course, there are ten thousand other elements in this wild journey of the inward eye; but it is wise not to forget viscosity.

— The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting by Daniel V. Thompson (Page 45)

If a bit of rather poor, lean cheese is soaked in water, and crumbled up and ground with lime and a little water, it makes a sticky, treacly mixture which dries as hard as stone and which, when it is once dry, is not affected by moisture. (Very much the same sort of glue is used now for putting together the wooden parts of aeroplanes.) Among the many troubles which beset medieval paintings in our time, one of the rarest is for the glued joints of the wood to separate; and their strength is largely due to the use of this strange, homely adhesive.

— The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting by Daniel V. Thompson (Page 31)

Natural pumice was an imported product in England, and English workers often used instead a material which is described as "better than twenty other pumices": a sort of bread largely composed of powdered glass. Powdered glass and flour and brewers' yeast were mixed and allowed to rise like bread, and make into loaves, and baked in the oven.

— The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting by Daniel V. Thompson (Page 29)

...Margery Kempe was so intensely attracted to Christ's maleness that she wept whenever she saw a male baby; in her visions she cuddled with Christ in bed and was bold enough to caress his toes.

— Holy Feast and Holy Fast by Caroline Walker Bynum (The new historicism : studies in cultural poetics) (Page 246)

Wives as well as daughters used fasting, charity, and ecstacy as a means to escape the role of food preparer or nurturer. Dorothy of Montau, like Margery Kempe, made elementary mistakes in cookery (such as failing to scale the fish before frying them) or forgot entirely to cook and shop while she was in mystic trances.

— Holy Feast and Holy Fast by Caroline Walker Bynum (The new historicism : studies in cultural poetics) (Page 221)