In the Middle Ages, cathedrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.
...Prophecy is like a treacherous woman. She takes your member in her mouth, and you moan with the pleasure of it and think, how sweet, how fine, how good this is... and then her teeth snap shut and your moans turn to screams... Prophecy will bite your prick off everytime,
The rising influence of lay piety is particularly marked upon the Mariological controversies of the late medieval period. Two rival positions developed: the maculist position, which held that Mary was subject to original sin, in common with every other human being; and the immaculist position, which held that contrary view that Mary was in some way preserved from original sin, and was thus to be considered sinless. The maculist position was regarded as firmly established within the High Scholasticism of the thirteenth century. The veneration of the Virgin within popular piety, however, proved to have an enormously creative power that initially challenged, and subsequently triumphed over, the academic objections raised against it by university theologians.