All 25 Uses of

Middle Ages
in
The Magic Mountain

It was a splendid portrait, painted by a renowned artist, executed tastefully in the style—as suggested by its subject—of the old masters and awakening in the observer all sorts of images of the late Middle Ages in the Spanish Netherlands.†
Chpt 2.1 *

Middle Ages = the period of European history beginning with the fall of the Roman Empire and ending with the Modern Era (roughly 500-1500 AD)

Humanism had been accused of exaggerating the importance of form; but it cultivated beautiful form purely for the sake of the dignity of man—in brilliant antithesis to the Middle Ages, which had sunk not only into misanthropy and superstition, but also into ignominious formlessness.†
Chpt 4.9

It is sacred Latin, the dialect of monks, a chant from the Middle Ages, so to speak, a kind of muted, subterranean monotone.†
Chpt 5.8

The scholastics were sort of the scribes of the Middle Ages, the dogmatic philosophers, if you like—hmm.†
Chpt 6.2

The Middle Ages came up several times—and it reminded me how that very first day Settembrini said there was a medieval ring about a lot of things up here.†
Chpt 6.2

Yes, perfect textbook Middle Ages—I see in it, as it were, some notions about the Middle Ages that I've been working on of late myself.†
Chpt 6.3

Yes, perfect textbook Middle Ages—I see in it, as it were, some notions about the Middle Ages that I've been working on of late myself.†
Chpt 6.3

But up here the whole issue of the Middle Ages has been brought home to me in various ways.†
Chpt 6.3

It comes, of course, from the very advanced Middle Ages, the Gothic—signum mortification is.†
Chpt 6.3

But when Settembrini declared that such a neglect of nature and a refusal to study her led humankind down a false path and then began in taut words to contrast an absurd formlessness—to which the Middle Ages and epochs that imitated it were addicted—with classicism, with the Greco-Roman heritage of form, beauty, reason, and serenity born of natural piety, for classicism alone was destined to further the human enterprise, Hans Castorp interrupted him and asked how all that fitted in with Plotinus, who, as was well known, was ashamed of his own body, and with Voltaire, who in the name of reason had rebelled against the scandalous earthquake in Lisbon?†
Chpt 6.3

The Christian Middle Ages clearly saw that the secular state was inherently capitalist.†
Chpt 6.3

For it is as clear as clear can be that, just as in the Middle Ages, all private and public relationships will be bound to the soil, even—and I do not find it easy to say this—even the individual personality.†
Chpt 6.3

Indeed, until well into the late Middle Ages, the majority of people, even those in the cities, were vassals.†
Chpt 6.3

On that they were in fierce agreement—as worlds, as orders, as professions; and a child of peace found it worth his while to listen to Naphta talk about the martial monks of the Middle Ages, who, although ascetics to the point of exhaustion, were likewise filled with a spiritual lust for power and did not refrain from bloodshed in order to bring about the City of God and its transcendent world dominion; or about belligerent Knights Templar, who considered death in battle against unbelievers more meritorious than death in one's bed and for whom slaying and being slain for the sake of Christ was no crime, but the highest glory.†
Chpt 6.6

And before Settembrini could rebuke him, Naphta began to speak of pious excesses of charity witnessed in the Middle Ages, amazing examples of fanaticism and ecstasy in the care of the sick— the daughters of kings had kissed the stinking wounds of lepers, with the express purpose of becoming infected, had called the ulcerated sores to which they exposed themselves "roses," had drunk the water with which they had bathed those festering bodies, and had declared they had never drunk anything so tasty.†
Chpt 6.6

Naphta now proceeded to prove that the awe in which the Christian Middle Ages had held the suffering human body was derived from religious affirmation in the face of the afflictions of the flesh.†
Chpt 6.6

And I like you better, too, although he's almost always right when you two argue and scuffle pedagogically for my poor soul, like God and the Devil struggling over a man in the Middle Ages.†
Chpt 6.7

It was a matter of reaching back to certain religious orders of knights in the Middle Ages, to the Knights Templar in particular—you know, the ones who swore vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience before the patriarch of Jerusalem.†
Chpt 6.8

No, he does not like to recall that there was a time when his society was the object of all the antipathies that freethinkers, atheists, and rationalistic encyclopedists usually reserve for the Church, Catholicism, monks, and the Middle Ages.†
Chpt 6.8

The masses had long since learned that for the education and discipline needed in the battle against the decaying bourgeoisie they should look elsewhere than to coercive schools imposed by the authorities; and by now every idiot knew that the school system developed from the cloisters of the Middle Ages was as anachronistic and absurd as a periwig, that no one owed his real education to schools anymore, and that free, open instruction by public lectures, exhibitions, films, and so forth was far superior to that found in any schoolroom.†
Chpt 6.8

Did Herr Settembrini not recall that the greatest poet of the Middle Ages, Wolfram von Eschenbach, had been illiterate?†
Chpt 6.8

For he had been a monkey, moon, and soul god—a baboon with a crescent moon above his head and above all, under the name of Hermes, a god of death and the dead, a grabber and guide of souls, who by late antiquity had become a great sorcerer and served the cabalistic Middle Ages; as the father of hermetic alchemy.†
Chpt 6.8

The scholastics of the Middle Ages claimed to know that time is an illusion, its flow toward objective consequences due solely to our sensory apparatus, and that the true state of things is a permanent now.†
Chpt 7.1

If Herr Settembrini would bother to do a little research on the literature of the Middle Ages he would discover that fact: the people—taken in the widest sense—had always had a crude distaste for the Church and her ways, as evidenced, for example, in their regard for certain legendary monks, creations of popular fantasy, who opposed the ascetic ideal with wine, women, and song in a downright Luther-like fashion.†
Chpt 7.4

The mysticism of the late Middle Ages, however, had demonstrated its liberating tendency by acting as a forerunner of the Reformation—the Reformation, hee hee, which for its part had been a tangled snarl of freedom and medieval reaction.†
Chpt 7.9

Definition:

the period of European history beginning with the fall of the Roman Empire and followed by the Renaissance (roughly 500-1500 AD)

Often thought of as a time of instability, superstition, plagues, feudal lords, and knighthood.