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1 " Blount sat down to the table and leaned over close to Singer. " There are those who know and those who don't know. And for every ten thousand who don't know there's only one who knows. That's the miracle of all time - the fact that these millions know so much but don't know this. It's like in the fifteenth century when everybody believed the world was flat and only Columbus and a few other fellows knew the truth. But it's different in that it took talent to figure that the earth is round. While the truth is so obvious it's a miracle of all history that people don't know. "
2 " She had to quickly pop back to the fifteenth century to find a word for how beautiful he was. The boy was makeless. "
― Helen Oyeyemi , What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours
3 " One feature of the usual script for plague: the disease invariably comes from somewhere else. The names for syphilis, when it began its epidemic sweep through Europe in the last decade of the fifteenth century are an exemplary illustration of the need to make a dreaded disease foreign. It was the " French pox" to the English, morbus Germanicus to the Parisians, the Naples sickness to the Florentines, the Chinese disease to the Japanese. But what may seem like a joke about the inevitability of chauvinism reveals a more important truth: that there is a link between imagining disease and imagining foreignness. "
4 " No account of the Renaissance can be complete without some notice of the attempt made by certain Italian scholars of the fifteenth century to reconcile Christianity with the religion of ancient Greece. "
